How long do you think developer assignments usually take

Question

Almost every company gives you take home assignments to determine how you program etc. as part of the job search, these assignments are usually described as taking 3-4 hours. In my experience then tend to take longer than that.How long in your experience do developer assignments take, and how do long do the people handing out the assignments say they take?

quanticle · Accepted Answer

In my experience, if they say the assignment should take 3-4 hours to do, you should set aside 8 hours.The expected lengths for assignments always seem to assume that you won't run into any setup or configuration issues and that you've memorized the documentation for whatever programming language and libraries they're having you use. That might be a fair assumption for the developer drafting the assignment. After all, they already have their workstation set up just so, and the libraries they're asking about are the ones they're using in their day-to-day. But that's not the case with your machine and your brain, so it's going to take you longer.

raxxorraxor · Answer

I was never asked to do them but I like to solve these contained problems very much. You certainly get much faster if you already did some of these assignments as they are often similar but I believe it is not on the mind of those putting forward these tasks if they evaluate the time a developer would need. So don't take it too hard if you need longer but it probably shouldn't be much longer than double the suggested time. You also don't want to work for free.It is like IQ tests. The more you take the smarter you get. But then again not really...

livinglist · Answer

as a mobile dev, it&rsquo;s been 5-6 for me