I’m curious to know, as it’s a hot topic right now, what has been the best and worst take-home task you’ve encountered during a job application or hiring process?
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I had a coding challenge + 30 multiple choice questions staring in my face with a timer ticking right after I applied to a QA engineer job.
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Yikes, no thank you. But maybe great insight into the company?
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Great question!
One of the best take-home tasks I had was a scenario where I had to analyse a buggy feature, suggest improvements and write test cases, it felt practical and gave me a sense of what working there would actually be like.
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Are take home tasks (as part of the recruitment) a “thing”? I’ve never done one and wouldn’t expect anyone to have to do one either? What sorts of roles have you done this on? What sort of companies?
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Because employers get swamped by dozens of applications, take home homework is a filter. It’s easy to say that anyone giving homework is taking a short cut, and probably not the kind of company you want to work for if short cuts is their starting and default mode of operation.
Once you have more experience on your CV, take home homework will not be in your way. To be honest nothing stops you actually doing the take-home homework properly, just as some practice and then sending it in and telling the contact you already found something more interesting. I have done this once myself. Much later I did find work.
Most applicants worth their salt are already doing about 4 hours of homework just finding out if a company is worth applying to work for. Up to 2 hours homework is thus fine in my opinion, but lots of homework is a bit of a stretch if there are so many other jobs to also apply for. By giving me time consuming homework that I have to prioritise against other job applications, a company is excluding themselves unless the homework is a very useful chance to do some skills revision. So it can be good.
given an API , identify the risks associated with it