What makes a good take-home coding assignment?

Question

We have a take-home assignment in our hiring process as we prefer that over any leetcode questions to assess the craftsmanship skills of a candidate.It should be challenging, fair, and appropriately time boxed (e.g. 5 hours). What are some good expamples of reasonable take-home assignments you've seen?Roles we're using this for are backend and frontend.

al3rez · Accepted Answer

I had an interview a while back that I really liked:

    A pair programming session on a home assignment (it was a Java banking app) with 2–3 bugs and missing features. This allows the interviewer to see the candidate’s problem-solving skills and how quickly they can find, fix, and add features.

    A take-home assignment with a static JSON file containing products, where the developer is asked to build both a front end and a back end around it. This lets you assess their systems thinking — do they overcomplicate things, chase the latest tech, or make wise, pragmatic decisions? During the interview, you can also expand the scope of the assignment, e.g., What if this needs to be production-ready? What would you add?

Anything else usually ends up being a waste of time for both the interviewer and the developer.

I’ve done over 100 of these in the last 10 years.

antman · Answer

Not sure, but it should reflect what you are paying for those five hours.

fidotron · Answer

It really depends if you are talking front end/back end/mobile etc.But the best I've ever seen was to review an actual PR (from the company doing the interviewing) and discuss what is good and bad about it.

andy99 · Answer

What information are you trying to get about the candidate? And what do you want them to learn? Ideally it would be about something your product does or a problem you have, like say setting up some test harness related to your development workflow, making some changes or implementing something. But without knowing what your company does, it's hard to know.