The task itself is straightforward, but I think the amount of time it would take to reasonably deliver with quality on everything outlined in the criteria is inappropriately long for a take-home assignment.
Yep. Plus I ran into a node versioning issue that took me a hot minute to solve and counted against me. The whole idea of take home assessments with time limits is crazy to me.
that's one of the bigger problems that i have w/ takehome assignments - when it's something like this that is seemingly relevant to the actual work performed - i feel like it's assumed that we aren't starting projects fresh, that we all have our own custom bootstrap. We might, but we don't know anything about the take home until it's given to us.
It's much nicer when the candidate can choose the stack and the prompt is super general, open for discussion. "Build me a small app that makes an api call and displays cards, make it look good" 4 hr for this is appropriate (frontend) cause you can really tighten it up, feel good about it when you turn it in.
Yeah, this would be easy but would take a _lot_ of time to put together. It seems generic enough that I wouldn't consider it anything that a company could use as "free labor".
Maybe it's long for the BS reason of filtering out candidates who aren't "committed" to the opportunity.
Yeah, it's an easy assignment, but think how long it would take you.
Honestly, if an interview task would take me an hour or more to complete, I'm not doing it.
The whole completing tasks to even qualify for a job is stupid to me. You can see my portfolio and previous work experience, why am I solving tasks in an interview?
Okay? So I'm supposed to be punished for the actions of a handful of other individuals in no way connected to me?
In any case, even if people lied, you find that out on the job, no need for such rigorous interviews. No other industry, that I know of, has these kinds of "tests" for potential employees.
Stop making potential employees take pointless tests that show nothing about their knowledge and expertise, and instead allocate those resources into finding and paying actual experts who will want to work with you because they don't have to spend 5 hours a day completing tests for 3 companies they applied to.
I guarantee you the latter is more profitable for a business.
"into finding and paying actual experts" - okay but how? Are you going to take an "expert" at their word or ... test that in some way? Lots of people have impressive paper resumes, speak well interviews, but are weak in practice. If you have worked, I'm sure you have seen your share of people who have failed upwards.
The same way that practically every other industry handles this. Also in other industries that do test knowledge, it's typically only for entry level positions and after that your experience and work you produced in the past are what speaks to your capability...again...like virtually every other industry.
Anyone who thinks this is necessary beyond entry level is just adopting a "I had to do it, so you have to do it too" style mindset. It's just a colossal waste of time.
In other professions (many of which are licensed) work can be (independently verifiable) traced back to individuals. Not really the case with software. You are acting like you’ve “solved” software interviews, when in reality it is a very complex topic with many compromises.
It is solved. They're basically worthless, most academic work in this domain shows that. They're rituals, not repeatable measures of talent.
And again...many other professions have similar characteristics(law, finance, other types of engineering), that require extensive amounts of knowledge and experience...
And yet, Software is consistently the only one that does these skill assessments on people with 5...10...15...20...years of experience.
It's nonsense.
Also how is it not the case with software? it's more the case with software than any other field, we're the only field that routinely has a historical record of people's contributions down to the character, time, project...etc.
Artists, Engineers, Architects, etc build portfolios of their work they can share, many developers do some version of the same.
But there's no amount of experience that makes you not have to jump through the dumb talent evaluation part of interviews. That's mostly unique to software.
It's just held over rituals from early software engineering, nothing else.
If you think those other fields don’t have extensive interviews, you’re very mistaken. And again, those other professions you listed are licensed. Software (in most countries) has no such licensing.
The private git history of past employers is not exactly accessible to your interviewers, so that history is irrelevant.
Compliance efforts at most companies will have a policy that standardizes skill assessments. Whether or not they are effective at determining some future level of contribution is not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that it isn’t as simple as “they don’t work therefore they shouldn’t be used”.
If you were the CTO / CIO / CISO implementing policy you would NOT want to have to explain why you didn’t conduct skill assessment following a breach when you get subpoenaed.
Yep, that's how everything else in the world works too. TSA at the airport, locks on car doors, giving your credit card to the hotel at check-in, etc. A few bad actors ruin things.
Firing someone can take months. Not only are you paying a useless employees wages, but you are losing out on the work that could have been done if you had hired someone competent.
Plenty of industries have tests. If you are in a speaking role, they will ask you to give a presentation.
A waste of everybodies time. The potential employee is losing time writing meaningless code for countless of positions he is applying for. The employer is losing time and resources by not hiring a person based on their interview and resume.
You're acting like these tests eliminate bad hires.. As you said, people lie, and on these kind of "take home" tests, you can also lie by having someone else solve it for you, for example. These tests are redundant and serve zero purpose. They do not prove you have knowledge in a field, they do not eliminate bad hires nor do they actually show you how good someone actually is.
Also, FYI, bad hires are a cost of running a company, you are gonna have them from time to time, just like every other industry.
Not a great analogy, not even a good analogy to be honest.
The cost/reward ratio on these 2 things are wildly different.
One is gonna cost you a bit of money (maybe, probably not since if you have half a brain you can see who is lying in an interview), the other, you die.
The company could instead ask the candidate how they’d approach each step and you’d quickly find out if they know what they’re talking about or not based on their answers.
If you can’t figure out if someone is bullshitting on technical responses in a face-to-face interview, you have bigger issues than someone “lying” about their work experience to get a job. These projects are a waste of everyone’s time, especially whomever is getting tasked with code-reviewing reviewing 18,000 job-application submissions, probably with different dependencies, patterns, linting rules etc..
Either give the candidates a repo to branch off of (still a waste of everyone’s time, but at least it’s more organized) or just interview them in real time like every other job and pick a candidate who can think on their feet. Which, as it happens, is a far more accurate window into their skill-level than anything this project can give you.
It's strarightforward but it's definitely not going to take an hour to complete.
This looks like it's been setup for a junior, and I like that they're testing practical knowledge not algorithms. However, most of the time I don't even think it's worth actually doing a formal technical with a junior.
When I was interviewing for junior positions I had everything from horrible graph problems, 2 hour written exams, In depth tests on frameworks I'd never worked with (was for angular), Practical assessments (Add some sort of feature to a react app/next app/C# backend). Most were awful (Except some of the practicals), and felt more like gotchas rather than actually assessing where I am technically (I outright refused a couple even though I passed as I thought their process was moronic, especially the written exam).
The ones I respected the most were the 30-60 minute interviews where we discussed my technical knowledge. In those interviews we generally cover: projects I've worked on and how I built them, what the team are working on and what sort of experience I have with their tech stack, how would I approach certain problems (i.e how would I scaffold out a CRUD app or something basic). It was a breath of fresh air and I was honestly shocked at how easy it was to breeze through compared to algo questions.
I asked the guy who interviewed me why they didn't do a rigorous technical for juniors, and he said he generally hires juniors on basic knowledge of web dev (which he argued can be gleaned pretty easily on questions alone), passion to learn, and whether he likes them. I then asked how often he gets bad candidates through, and he said very rarely and that the resulting candidate is generally better than when he was forced to do algorithm questions.
Bearing in mind this guy has interviewed juniors where there are hundreds of candidates and he still didn't need some arbitrary filter (CV was generally enough). He was all about making the interview process as smooth as possible for the candidate. I bloody loved him and became solid mates with him through work. Hopefully, when I'm in the hiring seat I'd like to do the same style of interviews for juniors.
Most of the knowledge required to evaluate here could be sorted out in a 30-45min interview.
All the git questions, SSR, Dynamic generation, etc. could be asked as interview questions and would be better since that knowledge should be something you understand and not just implement.
I'd leave this task as the main feature, and that should be a nice, small enough task. Also mention styles not been important and just make it "usable".
What is the employer trying to learn from this? My issues with the “take home” approach is that you lose the thought process and only get the output. And in my experience, engineers are valuable due to their thought process because their output can always be perfected to fit the business.
I do live versions of this where I would reduce the task down to a 30min version of this. I get immediate feedback on whether I can work with them, and they also come out feeling like they learned something about our culture and understand if I am a person they wish to work with.
If an employer is doing these takehomes, it’s because they’re trying to mass interview people which I have seen yields worse conversions.
I usually have a more rigorous phone screening so that I only sit down with engineers that I am already 70% in favor of already.
Like others have said, it's pretty straightforward if you have NextJS experience with ISR and SSG. However, have they asked if you should use the new App Router or Pages Router? If you were to use the App Router then you could simplify a lot of these tasks with RSC. E.g. store (JSON serialize) and fetch favorite tokens on a file in your system. If there was not an requirement to have the favorite tokens accessible between session (across browsers?) then I would have chosen localStorage.
Out of curiosity, what company is this?
Just personal opinion, but I prefer this over leetcode interviews any day. I can probably finish this in a couple of hours or at my own pace while also getting to flex as much as possible compared to my usual nervous train wreck that is a coding interview where I feel like I did 20% of my full potential.
The work itself wouldn’t be too difficult but there’s a lot of it. This could easily take an entire day to do between coding and documenting to the standard they want, which is way too long.
An interview based around this task wouldn’t be bad however, if the interview consisted of them asking you about each one of these and then you explained how you’d approach each step. That could give them good insight as to if you know what you’re doing or not. Requiring a fully polished codebase with commit history and documentation etc etc however is just way too much of an ask for an interview
Yea I'm not doing all that. Even if I had no job. That screams to me this place is insufferable to work for. If every place I went to get hired at did this...I would leave the field immediately. In fact as a Sr dev I've told some places I'm not doing an assignment or assessment, ans they have waived it. I also think it's irrational to require that for a Sr position. You should be able to tell I'm good at what I do by how I talk about it.
This is reasonable. They want to see you fetch and present data. Then use state and local storage to persist data. Both VERY common tasks day-to-day for frontend engineering. Really shouldn’t take too long. Probably an hour or two.
Looks like something I can do in 2-3 hrs only to realize 1 hr in and be like nope, would take more and I just overestimated how much work this is even if I understood the entire thing at a read. Straightforward yes, also time consuming.
If you use chatgpt to summarise the doc, it actually is very straightforward. Git workflow, list page, detail page, favourite button, client side sorting, basic layout and styles. Its definitely an all nighter for me. I would obviously use NextJS for built in routing, zustand and react query for state, shadcn, auto animate for ui. My advice is if you want the job, finish the assignment regardless of the hours spent.
Too time consuming imo. Should be straight forward to test the candidate knowledge. That whole GitHub branching is straight garbage. Would avoid this company and test.
I'm so over this industry, dude. The audacity of employers to even ask you to do this. A race to the bottom for the fastest, smartest developer at the cheapest price, but first we have to prove ourselves.. the industry is in a weird place right now.
I'm seeing them everywhere now for senior and staff level positions. I think they are just a pre-screen to whittle down the applicant numbers. Half the ones I've completed have barely been looked at before interview.
I’d never shame them. They haven’t done anything wrong. The assignment is 100% voluntary, and you have a choice to just not do it and move on elsewhere.
I don’t agree to accepting the extend of the time it’s gonna take building this, which is where my alarm bells rang. It’s now less a question of scam (which I 100% doubt it is) and more a question of assuming all candidates has got the time, to do a multitude of tests this time demanding. They could easily provide tests that were shorter and would say more about a candidate, than this.
I’d never shame them tho - that’s also why I removed their name from all screenshots.
OP here. The question of it being an attempt of free labour has definitely clarified itself to me, and I’m now positive they’re not out to get free work done.
But my gripe is that this is not a task that can be done in a reasonable amount of time (some people claim they could do it in 1-3 hours, but besides possible trolling that doesn’t compute to me).
Some companies tend to forget, that candidates are likely to apply for multiple jobs at once. If you apply to 4 companies and all 4 of them throw an assignment like this after you (and it’s not that you can share the assignments between companies), your family life will probably tip.
And a final remark is the fact that this assignment was given after a an initial interview with the HR correspondent. It’s a lot to ask when you haven’t even touched base with anyone from the team at all, not even knowing if the chemistry will match.
Assignments are not necessarily a bad thing, but the scope of them tend to forget and disrespect the time of the recipients. I’ve seen many tests that can sort juniors from seniors, that doesn’t involve building a full platform.
Hey thanks for clarifying some details! What level of role is this for if you don’t mind me asking?
I think it’s out of line for them to ask you to do this before anything communication with the company. As a matter of policy I would expect a practical task to be the final part of an application process following interview(s) out of respect for the candidate and the employees that have to review the work
As I read it I don’t believe this is asking you to build a full platform either (not sure if that’s what you implied). I think it’s quite a neat task that touches on a good range of areas without going too deep into any of them
I would disagree about the time to complete though. I think I could manage what they’re asking for in a few hours. 1.1 is mostly app router fundamentals that the framework does for you. You could get pretty far by copying and pasting the docs
Good luck on your job search!
The role is a senior role, and I don’t necessarily have any complexity issues with the assignment. But building this from scratch, having to vitalise all performance optimisations for a dataset that is multiple megabytes large, thinking about instant delivery, all while making a pretty design, to finalise with a detailed analysis of the project delivered - *breather* - feels rather excessive this early in the process for me. And bonus fact, the api is rate limited.
Had I spoken to the CTO and/or some team members, knowing that the test would be the last step, I wouldn’t mind spending the time needed, at all. But at this point, all I knew was:
- The HR person was niceness itself ✅
- We were aligned on salary ✅
- There were 6 other concurrent candidates, most of whom already delivered by the time I received ⏱️
- I had no idea whether or not I’d even connect with the person who would be in charge of me
I stood with a feeling of not knowing what I was really fighting for. I also have 3 other interview processes going, so for me it’s also a matter of prioritising those who try to keep a lean and informal process.
- One of the companies simply sent me a UI component asking me to make a code review of it. The component was busted, but in a way most juniors wouldn’t ever think about.
- Another had a technical 1h interview, where we could discuss back and forth, completely down the earth. They learn about what I can do, they learn about me and I learn about them
- The third one gave me a very simple assignment to make a CRUD with validation, and optimised state management
The chemistry is vital to me, as I’ve previously had interviews without meeting my direct leader until the last step, where we simply weren’t aligned personally. I would never take a job where gut feeling isn’t 100% there. Point being that I’d hate to have spent several hours on this, just to find out e.g. the CTO wasn’t a nice person. Makes sense?
Long one - apologies - but that sums up some of my head 😄
Yeah totally get you now! I’d also be put off by all the extra details you’ve added. Probably not worth your time and I’d worry about what it says about the company
When I interview people I prioritise culture fit / personality first over technical ability so I’d never give someone a task to do before I was confident we could get on working together on a personal level. Likewise if I interviewed I wouldn’t want to do work for them before *I* wanted to work there on a personal level
The fact they’re shooting straight into tasks tells me everything I’d need to know about deciding to work there
As others have said - easy task. Page for the list of tokens and page for an individual token. Additionally, featuring client-side sorting for favorites. Nothing complicated for a junior unless complete beginner imo.
I don't 100% agree. ISR and SSG can be complicated topic for juniors since they are still learning about web dev, unless they learned NextJS specifically.
Storing something client-side that should live between sessions/browsers is also not straightforward unless you understand RSC which is a fairly new topic.
If the requirement was to use the new App Router, then it might take time to learn how the fetch API has been modified by the NextJS team to support ISR/SSG, instead of doing it per page like in the Pages Router.
Okay, but... This is not an excuse when applying for a position which has Next.js as one of main requirements? There was no mention but I am pretty sure this was the case.
Take someone who applies for a junior "react" position without Next.js. You ask them about hooks. They go on you like "is this really a junior-type question"? What will be your reaction? In this case, the question will be what do you know as junior then which already puts the candidate off.
You have a point about RSC but again, apply for Next.js - expect Next.js. Moreover, why would I hire a junior who would rather spend 10 mins writing skeptic post on reddit rather than spending 10 mins on documentation?
The task itself is straightforward, but I think the amount of time it would take to reasonably deliver with quality on everything outlined in the criteria is inappropriately long for a take-home assignment.
Lemme guess, they said it should only take about 4 hours
4 hours?! The last take home assignment I had gave me a 2 hour time limit. And dinged me because the project felt rushed >.<
I'm not even truly focused til at least 2.5 hr!
Yep. Plus I ran into a node versioning issue that took me a hot minute to solve and counted against me. The whole idea of take home assessments with time limits is crazy to me.
that's one of the bigger problems that i have w/ takehome assignments - when it's something like this that is seemingly relevant to the actual work performed - i feel like it's assumed that we aren't starting projects fresh, that we all have our own custom bootstrap. We might, but we don't know anything about the take home until it's given to us. It's much nicer when the candidate can choose the stack and the prompt is super general, open for discussion. "Build me a small app that makes an api call and displays cards, make it look good" 4 hr for this is appropriate (frontend) cause you can really tighten it up, feel good about it when you turn it in.
Yeah, this would be easy but would take a _lot_ of time to put together. It seems generic enough that I wouldn't consider it anything that a company could use as "free labor". Maybe it's long for the BS reason of filtering out candidates who aren't "committed" to the opportunity.
Yeah, it's an easy assignment, but think how long it would take you. Honestly, if an interview task would take me an hour or more to complete, I'm not doing it. The whole completing tasks to even qualify for a job is stupid to me. You can see my portfolio and previous work experience, why am I solving tasks in an interview?
Because people lie.
Okay? So I'm supposed to be punished for the actions of a handful of other individuals in no way connected to me? In any case, even if people lied, you find that out on the job, no need for such rigorous interviews. No other industry, that I know of, has these kinds of "tests" for potential employees.
Yes but in many companies firing is tough. And It’s a big opportunity cost regardless bc you stop interviewing for the role they took.
Stop making potential employees take pointless tests that show nothing about their knowledge and expertise, and instead allocate those resources into finding and paying actual experts who will want to work with you because they don't have to spend 5 hours a day completing tests for 3 companies they applied to. I guarantee you the latter is more profitable for a business.
"into finding and paying actual experts" - okay but how? Are you going to take an "expert" at their word or ... test that in some way? Lots of people have impressive paper resumes, speak well interviews, but are weak in practice. If you have worked, I'm sure you have seen your share of people who have failed upwards.
The same way that practically every other industry handles this. Also in other industries that do test knowledge, it's typically only for entry level positions and after that your experience and work you produced in the past are what speaks to your capability...again...like virtually every other industry. Anyone who thinks this is necessary beyond entry level is just adopting a "I had to do it, so you have to do it too" style mindset. It's just a colossal waste of time.
In other professions (many of which are licensed) work can be (independently verifiable) traced back to individuals. Not really the case with software. You are acting like you’ve “solved” software interviews, when in reality it is a very complex topic with many compromises.
It is solved. They're basically worthless, most academic work in this domain shows that. They're rituals, not repeatable measures of talent. And again...many other professions have similar characteristics(law, finance, other types of engineering), that require extensive amounts of knowledge and experience... And yet, Software is consistently the only one that does these skill assessments on people with 5...10...15...20...years of experience. It's nonsense. Also how is it not the case with software? it's more the case with software than any other field, we're the only field that routinely has a historical record of people's contributions down to the character, time, project...etc. Artists, Engineers, Architects, etc build portfolios of their work they can share, many developers do some version of the same. But there's no amount of experience that makes you not have to jump through the dumb talent evaluation part of interviews. That's mostly unique to software. It's just held over rituals from early software engineering, nothing else.
If you think those other fields don’t have extensive interviews, you’re very mistaken. And again, those other professions you listed are licensed. Software (in most countries) has no such licensing. The private git history of past employers is not exactly accessible to your interviewers, so that history is irrelevant. Compliance efforts at most companies will have a policy that standardizes skill assessments. Whether or not they are effective at determining some future level of contribution is not what I’m arguing. I’m arguing that it isn’t as simple as “they don’t work therefore they shouldn’t be used”. If you were the CTO / CIO / CISO implementing policy you would NOT want to have to explain why you didn’t conduct skill assessment following a breach when you get subpoenaed.
So you want to have to go get a bunch of certifications and licenses, like in other industries?
Yep, that's how everything else in the world works too. TSA at the airport, locks on car doors, giving your credit card to the hotel at check-in, etc. A few bad actors ruin things. Firing someone can take months. Not only are you paying a useless employees wages, but you are losing out on the work that could have been done if you had hired someone competent. Plenty of industries have tests. If you are in a speaking role, they will ask you to give a presentation.
What a waste of time and resources.
Whose? A bad hire is the ultimate waste of time and resources. One day you will be on a hiring committee.
A waste of everybodies time. The potential employee is losing time writing meaningless code for countless of positions he is applying for. The employer is losing time and resources by not hiring a person based on their interview and resume. You're acting like these tests eliminate bad hires.. As you said, people lie, and on these kind of "take home" tests, you can also lie by having someone else solve it for you, for example. These tests are redundant and serve zero purpose. They do not prove you have knowledge in a field, they do not eliminate bad hires nor do they actually show you how good someone actually is. Also, FYI, bad hires are a cost of running a company, you are gonna have them from time to time, just like every other industry.
Accidents happen in skydiving therefore don't bother packing a parachute.
Not a great analogy, not even a good analogy to be honest. The cost/reward ratio on these 2 things are wildly different. One is gonna cost you a bit of money (maybe, probably not since if you have half a brain you can see who is lying in an interview), the other, you die.
That's because the analogy wasn't in the cost. The analogy was about doing the bare minimum.
You pass through interview rounds that tests your knowledge. They ask you questions about the fundamentals, general things and specific things
The company could instead ask the candidate how they’d approach each step and you’d quickly find out if they know what they’re talking about or not based on their answers.
I've got news for you .. they'll cheat on this too... and far more easily too...
If you can’t figure out if someone is bullshitting on technical responses in a face-to-face interview, you have bigger issues than someone “lying” about their work experience to get a job. These projects are a waste of everyone’s time, especially whomever is getting tasked with code-reviewing reviewing 18,000 job-application submissions, probably with different dependencies, patterns, linting rules etc.. Either give the candidates a repo to branch off of (still a waste of everyone’s time, but at least it’s more organized) or just interview them in real time like every other job and pick a candidate who can think on their feet. Which, as it happens, is a far more accurate window into their skill-level than anything this project can give you.
It's strarightforward but it's definitely not going to take an hour to complete. This looks like it's been setup for a junior, and I like that they're testing practical knowledge not algorithms. However, most of the time I don't even think it's worth actually doing a formal technical with a junior. When I was interviewing for junior positions I had everything from horrible graph problems, 2 hour written exams, In depth tests on frameworks I'd never worked with (was for angular), Practical assessments (Add some sort of feature to a react app/next app/C# backend). Most were awful (Except some of the practicals), and felt more like gotchas rather than actually assessing where I am technically (I outright refused a couple even though I passed as I thought their process was moronic, especially the written exam). The ones I respected the most were the 30-60 minute interviews where we discussed my technical knowledge. In those interviews we generally cover: projects I've worked on and how I built them, what the team are working on and what sort of experience I have with their tech stack, how would I approach certain problems (i.e how would I scaffold out a CRUD app or something basic). It was a breath of fresh air and I was honestly shocked at how easy it was to breeze through compared to algo questions. I asked the guy who interviewed me why they didn't do a rigorous technical for juniors, and he said he generally hires juniors on basic knowledge of web dev (which he argued can be gleaned pretty easily on questions alone), passion to learn, and whether he likes them. I then asked how often he gets bad candidates through, and he said very rarely and that the resulting candidate is generally better than when he was forced to do algorithm questions. Bearing in mind this guy has interviewed juniors where there are hundreds of candidates and he still didn't need some arbitrary filter (CV was generally enough). He was all about making the interview process as smooth as possible for the candidate. I bloody loved him and became solid mates with him through work. Hopefully, when I'm in the hiring seat I'd like to do the same style of interviews for juniors.
This is a lot of work for an interview. It’s not difficult to do, but it is time consuming
Most of the knowledge required to evaluate here could be sorted out in a 30-45min interview. All the git questions, SSR, Dynamic generation, etc. could be asked as interview questions and would be better since that knowledge should be something you understand and not just implement. I'd leave this task as the main feature, and that should be a nice, small enough task. Also mention styles not been important and just make it "usable".
What is the employer trying to learn from this? My issues with the “take home” approach is that you lose the thought process and only get the output. And in my experience, engineers are valuable due to their thought process because their output can always be perfected to fit the business. I do live versions of this where I would reduce the task down to a 30min version of this. I get immediate feedback on whether I can work with them, and they also come out feeling like they learned something about our culture and understand if I am a person they wish to work with. If an employer is doing these takehomes, it’s because they’re trying to mass interview people which I have seen yields worse conversions. I usually have a more rigorous phone screening so that I only sit down with engineers that I am already 70% in favor of already.
Like others have said, it's pretty straightforward if you have NextJS experience with ISR and SSG. However, have they asked if you should use the new App Router or Pages Router? If you were to use the App Router then you could simplify a lot of these tasks with RSC. E.g. store (JSON serialize) and fetch favorite tokens on a file in your system. If there was not an requirement to have the favorite tokens accessible between session (across browsers?) then I would have chosen localStorage. Out of curiosity, what company is this?
Just personal opinion, but I prefer this over leetcode interviews any day. I can probably finish this in a couple of hours or at my own pace while also getting to flex as much as possible compared to my usual nervous train wreck that is a coding interview where I feel like I did 20% of my full potential.
The work itself wouldn’t be too difficult but there’s a lot of it. This could easily take an entire day to do between coding and documenting to the standard they want, which is way too long. An interview based around this task wouldn’t be bad however, if the interview consisted of them asking you about each one of these and then you explained how you’d approach each step. That could give them good insight as to if you know what you’re doing or not. Requiring a fully polished codebase with commit history and documentation etc etc however is just way too much of an ask for an interview
This can be done in an hour but it won’t look that nice.
Yea I'm not doing all that. Even if I had no job. That screams to me this place is insufferable to work for. If every place I went to get hired at did this...I would leave the field immediately. In fact as a Sr dev I've told some places I'm not doing an assignment or assessment, ans they have waived it. I also think it's irrational to require that for a Sr position. You should be able to tell I'm good at what I do by how I talk about it.
The hiring managers needs a pet project to apply for grants on new blockchains, you just happened to be available
This is reasonable. They want to see you fetch and present data. Then use state and local storage to persist data. Both VERY common tasks day-to-day for frontend engineering. Really shouldn’t take too long. Probably an hour or two.
Looks like something I can do in 2-3 hrs only to realize 1 hr in and be like nope, would take more and I just overestimated how much work this is even if I understood the entire thing at a read. Straightforward yes, also time consuming.
If you use chatgpt to summarise the doc, it actually is very straightforward. Git workflow, list page, detail page, favourite button, client side sorting, basic layout and styles. Its definitely an all nighter for me. I would obviously use NextJS for built in routing, zustand and react query for state, shadcn, auto animate for ui. My advice is if you want the job, finish the assignment regardless of the hours spent.
Wouldn't do it, since when do interviews have take home assignments.
Pretty common in my experience
IDK, but it's way too much for a task LOL Who would ever bother?
I don’t think this is free labor, but it’s definitely unreasonable to ask all of that for a take home
Too time consuming imo. Should be straight forward to test the candidate knowledge. That whole GitHub branching is straight garbage. Would avoid this company and test.
I'd tell them to fuck off
I'm so over this industry, dude. The audacity of employers to even ask you to do this. A race to the bottom for the fastest, smartest developer at the cheapest price, but first we have to prove ourselves.. the industry is in a weird place right now.
Really tells you the average skill level of r/webdev lol. It's a really easy assignment if you are competent with the framework.
From my experience, higher paid roles have less of these jumping hoops.
I'm seeing them everywhere now for senior and staff level positions. I think they are just a pre-screen to whittle down the applicant numbers. Half the ones I've completed have barely been looked at before interview.
It's not about difficulty, it's just annoyingly lengthy for a task that you are not getting paid for
Yep! Still crazy to be so inexperienced and confident enough to be calling for OP to name and shame the company
I’d never shame them. They haven’t done anything wrong. The assignment is 100% voluntary, and you have a choice to just not do it and move on elsewhere. I don’t agree to accepting the extend of the time it’s gonna take building this, which is where my alarm bells rang. It’s now less a question of scam (which I 100% doubt it is) and more a question of assuming all candidates has got the time, to do a multitude of tests this time demanding. They could easily provide tests that were shorter and would say more about a candidate, than this. I’d never shame them tho - that’s also why I removed their name from all screenshots.
I get you. Was talking about the replies to your post that I thought were over the top
Yeah some of it is really 0-100kmh, just like that 😂
Just Reddit things 😆 I worry I might have made things worse by posting this.. Clearly missed the mark with that downvoted comment too haha
Don’t worry about it 😄
Bro I've got a take home to make chatgpt clone for intern job.
OP here. The question of it being an attempt of free labour has definitely clarified itself to me, and I’m now positive they’re not out to get free work done. But my gripe is that this is not a task that can be done in a reasonable amount of time (some people claim they could do it in 1-3 hours, but besides possible trolling that doesn’t compute to me). Some companies tend to forget, that candidates are likely to apply for multiple jobs at once. If you apply to 4 companies and all 4 of them throw an assignment like this after you (and it’s not that you can share the assignments between companies), your family life will probably tip. And a final remark is the fact that this assignment was given after a an initial interview with the HR correspondent. It’s a lot to ask when you haven’t even touched base with anyone from the team at all, not even knowing if the chemistry will match. Assignments are not necessarily a bad thing, but the scope of them tend to forget and disrespect the time of the recipients. I’ve seen many tests that can sort juniors from seniors, that doesn’t involve building a full platform.
Hey thanks for clarifying some details! What level of role is this for if you don’t mind me asking? I think it’s out of line for them to ask you to do this before anything communication with the company. As a matter of policy I would expect a practical task to be the final part of an application process following interview(s) out of respect for the candidate and the employees that have to review the work As I read it I don’t believe this is asking you to build a full platform either (not sure if that’s what you implied). I think it’s quite a neat task that touches on a good range of areas without going too deep into any of them I would disagree about the time to complete though. I think I could manage what they’re asking for in a few hours. 1.1 is mostly app router fundamentals that the framework does for you. You could get pretty far by copying and pasting the docs Good luck on your job search!
The role is a senior role, and I don’t necessarily have any complexity issues with the assignment. But building this from scratch, having to vitalise all performance optimisations for a dataset that is multiple megabytes large, thinking about instant delivery, all while making a pretty design, to finalise with a detailed analysis of the project delivered - *breather* - feels rather excessive this early in the process for me. And bonus fact, the api is rate limited. Had I spoken to the CTO and/or some team members, knowing that the test would be the last step, I wouldn’t mind spending the time needed, at all. But at this point, all I knew was: - The HR person was niceness itself ✅ - We were aligned on salary ✅ - There were 6 other concurrent candidates, most of whom already delivered by the time I received ⏱️ - I had no idea whether or not I’d even connect with the person who would be in charge of me I stood with a feeling of not knowing what I was really fighting for. I also have 3 other interview processes going, so for me it’s also a matter of prioritising those who try to keep a lean and informal process. - One of the companies simply sent me a UI component asking me to make a code review of it. The component was busted, but in a way most juniors wouldn’t ever think about. - Another had a technical 1h interview, where we could discuss back and forth, completely down the earth. They learn about what I can do, they learn about me and I learn about them - The third one gave me a very simple assignment to make a CRUD with validation, and optimised state management The chemistry is vital to me, as I’ve previously had interviews without meeting my direct leader until the last step, where we simply weren’t aligned personally. I would never take a job where gut feeling isn’t 100% there. Point being that I’d hate to have spent several hours on this, just to find out e.g. the CTO wasn’t a nice person. Makes sense? Long one - apologies - but that sums up some of my head 😄
Yeah totally get you now! I’d also be put off by all the extra details you’ve added. Probably not worth your time and I’d worry about what it says about the company When I interview people I prioritise culture fit / personality first over technical ability so I’d never give someone a task to do before I was confident we could get on working together on a personal level. Likewise if I interviewed I wouldn’t want to do work for them before *I* wanted to work there on a personal level The fact they’re shooting straight into tasks tells me everything I’d need to know about deciding to work there
Fully aligned here 😄
As others have said - easy task. Page for the list of tokens and page for an individual token. Additionally, featuring client-side sorting for favorites. Nothing complicated for a junior unless complete beginner imo.
I don't 100% agree. ISR and SSG can be complicated topic for juniors since they are still learning about web dev, unless they learned NextJS specifically. Storing something client-side that should live between sessions/browsers is also not straightforward unless you understand RSC which is a fairly new topic. If the requirement was to use the new App Router, then it might take time to learn how the fetch API has been modified by the NextJS team to support ISR/SSG, instead of doing it per page like in the Pages Router.
Okay, but... This is not an excuse when applying for a position which has Next.js as one of main requirements? There was no mention but I am pretty sure this was the case. Take someone who applies for a junior "react" position without Next.js. You ask them about hooks. They go on you like "is this really a junior-type question"? What will be your reaction? In this case, the question will be what do you know as junior then which already puts the candidate off. You have a point about RSC but again, apply for Next.js - expect Next.js. Moreover, why would I hire a junior who would rather spend 10 mins writing skeptic post on reddit rather than spending 10 mins on documentation?
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