My concern would not necessarily be that some candidates will gild the lily, but that you will get poor performers taking an entire week to turn out a reasonable “four hour effort”. Some people simply work too slowly to be productive.
I’m also not sure you don’t introduce hidden biases. I don’t comment throwaway code. For that matter, I comment production code very sparingly. Will I be penalized for not including a full docbook manual with my code? If you ask me about comments, I can explain my preference, or even explain that I’m happy to write as many comments as local standards dictate, but that’s not something you’ll see in a fake work sample.
Exactly. A few jobs ago we gave a take-home problem, and it was timed – you get the problem, do it right away, turn in your solution. We told them we expected it to take at most 3 hours. Even then there were people that thought they’d please us by turning in a solution 8 to 24 hours late. I can guarantee that if you give a week, there’s people that will take the whole week. And then you bring them for an in-person, they fail, and you just wasted a week of their time.
My concern would not necessarily be that some candidates will gild the lily, but that you will get poor performers taking an entire week to turn out a reasonable “four hour effort”. Some people simply work too slowly to be productive.
I’m also not sure you don’t introduce hidden biases. I don’t comment throwaway code. For that matter, I comment production code very sparingly. Will I be penalized for not including a full docbook manual with my code? If you ask me about comments, I can explain my preference, or even explain that I’m happy to write as many comments as local standards dictate, but that’s not something you’ll see in a fake work sample.
Exactly. A few jobs ago we gave a take-home problem, and it was timed – you get the problem, do it right away, turn in your solution. We told them we expected it to take at most 3 hours. Even then there were people that thought they’d please us by turning in a solution 8 to 24 hours late. I can guarantee that if you give a week, there’s people that will take the whole week. And then you bring them for an in-person, they fail, and you just wasted a week of their time.