Take at home assignments

Hiring mangers usually don’t know how to get the best person for the job. They must assume that that the person applying for the job is trying to oversell. It is really hard to trust the stranger who says he has the skills. That is the main reason why we have technical challenge as part of the hiring process.

It feels a bit weird to have it, especially if you are also doing a references check. If you do references check you can assume person has the required coding skills. On top of that, there are plenty of product skills, as well as soft skills that are usually expected from software engineer, but on the other hand are rarely tested. At the same time, it is not uncommon to have multiple people fitting the role. Coding challenge is one way to further narrow down candidate selection. To find the best candidate for the job.

However, at the end of the day, if we have to be tested we prefer for test to closely resemble our future day to day work. We don’t believe testing abstract concepts provides much value. We know our skills. And we can show them if we have to. But don’t make it a huge task, make it something simple enough. Something that can be done over the weekend. Make it so the test provides value, and make it a paid project. Test it only once you’ve narrowed down the candidate selection. Our time is just as valuable as yours.

Common coding challenges

Whether it is building a stripped version of battleship game that github uses for their recruitment process for enterprise applications engineer role, whether it is building a simple chat application, whether it is a url shortener. There are countless of common, real world coding challenges circulating in the wild.

What engineering managers and team leads mostly check for in take at home assignments is do you know how to structure the project according to standard practice. Do you know how to write clean code, do you know how to input validation in order to avoid crashes and generally do you know the language/framework required for the role.

You can often help yourself by searching for similar projects on github. There might be some open source solutions that can inspire you. Just be careful not to copy somebody’s bad practices.

About Illustration

When doing real world coding challenge we often feel as if we are programming robots in a factory. We’re often solving simple automation tasks. That is the reason why we went with robot as hero for this developer tee.

Our robot also has various assembly arms. They are helping him to do the tasks at hand. With any take at home assignment, we often use various libraries to help us keep our code clean. To help us speed up building of our solution. Our robot hands symbolize exactly that, using external packages to help us.

We’ve intentionally made our robot cute. He must have the same look and feel as those coding challenges. Cute but extremely powerful. They must have that feeling… If you know how to do that, you can probably do anything.