HACKER Q&A
📣 vinnyglennon

Good samples of take-home coding tests to give to candidates?


Good samples of take-home coding tests to give to candidates?


  👤 sethammons Accepted Answer ✓
I recommend taking a problem you or someone on your team recently solved and distill out any internal-specific parts of the problem. Expect a candidate to take 3x the time it takes you to complete the assignment. If you want an assignment that should take them around 2 hours, give yourself 40 minutes to complete it. If you can't complete it in time, you need to cut the scope of the problem.

This works really well for in-person technical questions (live coding or design). I've vetted this over hundreds of candidates at this point.

It has been years since I've given a take-home assignment, but the same basic rules apply.


👤 sergiotapia
At Papa, this is the take home assignment we used to scale our team.

https://github.com/joinpapa/foobar-takehome

You may think, "it's trivial" and you would be right. But believe it or not a ton of people couldn't complete it.

I think it's a good take home because it'll show you what the candidate values when writing code. It's also respectful of the candidates time.