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

9 points n2d4 | 3 comments | 19 Nov 24 11:40 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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.

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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.

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1. 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.

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2. hehehheh ◴[20 Nov 24 03:09 UTC] No.42190506[source]▶
Sounds like spec work
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3. JohnFen ◴[20 Nov 24 15:07 UTC] No.42194523[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.