This is making me think that maybe I’ve been doing these wrong.
If someone says “don’t spend more than a few hours on it” then I assume that’s part of the task requirements. I’ll get as much done as I can in a few hours and put a TODO section in the readme. I assumed that the reviewer will go through the commit history and it’s a red flag if something that should have taken a few hours takes you significantly longer.
Perhaps this is the wrong approach as the last one I did I didn’t even get a response to my submission.
Of course, this all assumes that the interviewer has an accurate idea of how long it should reasonably take.
What I've found is they're actually looking for the candidate that goes above and beyond. That "should only take 3 hours" might be true for the basic ask, but you'll never get called back. It's especially common for startups because they're looking for someone who is going to generally have longer hours and lower pay. It's smart for them because it puts most of the work on you, just a very bad experience for the prospective candidate.
I figured out it's code for: build me the assignment, plus other functionality you can think of, polish it nicely, write unit tests and integration tests, and deploy it so I don't have to pull down your github repo.
I'm not against take home, I just don't want to spend my entire weekend just to get to the phone screen. These kinds of assignments are usually step 1 of the funnel and it was very frustrating get rejected without any feedback.
Now I just screen for any companies that require it because it's better for my quality of life.
I have only had one such assignment (every other timed problem set I have received has had a hard deadline), but I was unceremoniously rejected after doing what you describe. To make it worse, it was "don't spend more than 8 hours". They basically gave me a weekend project.
I had one which was "this is trivial, and shouldn't take you more than an hour." Which after looking at their very unclean data set they wanted to perform analytics on (lots of missing/incorrect/... data), and the effectively random set of formats that I had to deal with (some mysql dumps, some CSV, some weird IBM mainframe DB txt dumps, etc.).
I had started on this on the Friday afternoon they gave it to me, hoping that I could work on it Saturday. That was blown, along with much of Sunday, for family obligations. Sunday night I continued, and made great/rapid progress.
Went to sleep with the idea that I'd get up early and finish it.
Though at 10pm, my mother-in-law had to go to the hospital for a severe flu, so I took her, and waited with her, with my laptop, and worked until 5am when they released her. Drove back home after dropping her off, and caught a few hours of sleep.
Company sent an email asking for my solution Monday afternoon, and I said "almost done." Had some formatting/testing I wanted to do.
They said, "no, we're done."
I was more than a little pissed. But, upon reflection, this gave me a great signal as to the nature and quality of the company and its environment. I sent a nice letter to the CTO thanking him for the opportunity, noting what I had left to do. He said "hold on, lets talk."
I said, "no, we are done."
I had several real offers by then, and didn't need any more.
Excellent response, if true. Companies treating candidates like garbage are the scourge of our industry. You should name and shame but I understand why you don't.
If someone says “don’t spend more than a few hours on it” then I assume that’s part of the task requirements. I’ll get as much done as I can in a few hours and put a TODO section in the readme. I assumed that the reviewer will go through the commit history and it’s a red flag if something that should have taken a few hours takes you significantly longer.
Perhaps this is the wrong approach as the last one I did I didn’t even get a response to my submission.
Of course, this all assumes that the interviewer has an accurate idea of how long it should reasonably take.