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Ask HN: What are some of the best take-home coding tasks you've gotten?

10 points n2d4 | 5 comments | 19 Nov 24 11:40 UTC | HN request time: 1.034s | source

As an applicant, I've personally had a mixed experience with take-homes. We're designing the technical interviews right now, and I thought I'd ask for some stories on exciting take-home tasks. We're looking for something that resembles the actual job, so we'll allow any tool (including AI and debuggers).

Also curious to hear about any bad ones you've done.

1. JohnFen ◴[19 Nov 24 15:00 UTC] No.42184129[source]▶
I never had a good one, although that's probably because I started refusing to do them years ago.

The worst one was about 15 years ago. The task was to design and implement an ML system to solve a complex network optimization problem. It was so complex that I was given three months to do it. My estimation was that I could do it in three months if I worked on it full time, which was clearly a ridiculous ask.

replies(2): >>42186341 #>>42208075 #
2. solardev ◴[19 Nov 24 17:59 UTC] No.42186341[source]▶
> The task was to design and implement an ML system to solve a complex network optimization problem. It was so complex that I was given three months to do it.

Lol! That's quite ridiculous.

replies(1): >>42190506 #
3. hehehheh ◴[20 Nov 24 03:09 UTC] No.42190506[source]▶
Sounds like spec work
replies(1): >>42194523 #
4. JohnFen ◴[20 Nov 24 15:07 UTC] No.42194523{3}[source]▶
That's what I thought. I refused to do it and dropped out of the application process because it really sounded like they were trying to get free labor.
5. didgetmaster ◴[21 Nov 24 20:07 UTC] No.42208075[source]▶
I had a similar experience many years ago. I spent several hours writing some pseudocode to show how I would solve a particular problem.

The interviewer rejected it and said he wanted working and tested code, which I estimated would take nearly 100 hours to do.

I told him I wasn't interested in working for free, but I would gladly do it for my normal consulting fee that I was charging at the time.

Didn't hear back from him. Dodged a bullet there.