It's wordy and excessive but really just two pages and a button. I think it comes off as a little pompous, but it shouldn't really be all that much work.
Stuff like "a list with the favourites at the top" is like all those todo apps.
If they can write this document they can code it themselves. The extra overhead in the document seems to be for ease of testing on their part
I would never put this much effort into an interview test.
If you're going to do it, just submit all the requirements into chatgpt and submit whatever it spits out. To hell with them.
You're just wasting your time doing that, just like they're wasting your time asking for it. ChatGPT is going to give you broken BS and take your time, so you might as well not respond at all.
Normally they hide them in the package.json make you run some random file
I was thinking of doing the same to them. What security bugs can I put in here that would be funny. that's probably why I work in info security.
Something that would cause someone to REALLY notice if it were added as a redirect into some bullshit free-labor take home project. They'd never forget it, and would be frantically searching for some eye bleach.
Probably safe to Google for an explanation of it, just don't do an image search unless you're in a masochistic mood.
Discussion from wayback: https://www.reddit.com/r/internetclassics/comments/bfnlw/the_goatse_nsfw/
Curious someone looking to get into info security, what did you focus on or thing helps get into that field (certs?)? Ive done courses in web development and security
Yes Please Explain. I am interested in Info security and cybersecurity, just a quick run down of certain classes a new person would need, pls and thankyou. I have experience in web3
Free work. Don't do it.
There's nothing specific here to test your skills on anything. Implement "a" token on the client side? Use ssg and ssr? Show performance "with graphs"?
They're not testing anything specific here, they just want free work. If they wanted to test someone on any of the above, a 1hr technical interview with a much smaller scope can prove your knowledge in all of the things here. Either they're bad enough technically to not know that, or they do and just want to get as much code out of you as possible; either way, run.
I disagree totally. The lack of detail means nothing meaningful will come from this - whatever OP kicks out would be unusable in a business setting, because there’s not enough detail to address customer problems
No, waste their time like they want to waste yours.
Tell them you'll do it. At the end, give them a repo with one commit in main and an assortment of other branches. Insist that you finished the work and pushed it up there. Keep the ruse up as long as possible. Clone a similar, open-source software with the same dependencies and push it up there and tell them you somehow forgot to push up code and to review your "work".
I feel like they would just respond to this with no. We aren't in a market right now where they're desperate to hire anyone, most jobs get a lot of applicants
And you would have just wasted your own time more than theirs effectively.
OP is doing good by just ignoring this company, chances are if this is their interview, the job itself might be worse.
I've passed these kind of interviews and everytime rejected the company's offers, some let me peak their code bases under a NDA. It was all dogshit.
The best companies, always have the most straightforward interviews in my experience.
it's actually a lot of specific direction and it seems geared towards testing someone's knowledge of NextJS setup and configuration, as well as utilizing a github workflow
i don't think that they're going to take whatever is submitted and profit off of it, most of the criteria are just general ways around different ways of building NextJS apps
i mean, half the assignment would be done by running \`npx create-next-app\` and fetching some data from an endpoint
I agree that it might be free work so you just shouldn't do it, or perhaps do it but with lots of TODOs so it won't be worth it for them to use it.
But this, I disagree with:
>They're not testing anything specific here
They are testing the ability to create a system. This is way more relevant than testing whether the candidate knows useState or whatever. It also can't be tested in a 1-hour interview.
A system can be tested in 1hr. System design is sufficient.
As well, a next.js app that calls an API and stores a token is not a system, that's really a regular ticket on any board that any dev should be able to grab.
>A system can be tested in 1hr. System design is sufficient.
From personal experience this is wrong. There are plenty of people who can talk about how to do, and then when they are actually asked to do it they just can't.
>As well, a next.js app that stores a token is not a system,
Is it deployed separately? Yes. In that case it is a system (by my definition).
>that's really a regular ticket
Your tickets are of a different size from those at any place I have ever been (or even heard of). That's not bad, but uncommon.
> on any board that any dev should be able to grab.
Yes, they should. But most people who apply for dev jobs are not able to do that, which makes the test meaningful.
Not trying to sound rude - - have you ever done a system design interview? They're quite standard, especially in places like FAANG. And they typically contain resiliency, caching, storage, read and write patterns, load balancing etc. aspects. You can YouTube system design practice interviews and you'll see that you can indeed get a grasp of someone's system design skills in 1hr.
I would not at all classify the above as a system. It's the front end _of_ a system.
No, I have not done a system design interview. Nor do I think that an interview of that kind is necessary for this kind of work.
Systems come in different sizes, this is a small one. But still, I have seen way too many people who would be able to explain how to create something like this, but not actually do it. Unfortunately.
I agree it's not necessary for this kind of work, just as I agree this isn't really a system. Not trying to argue, just reinforcing that a single next.js app would never classify as a system to me, or any company I've worked at, in the same way that a MySQL server is not a system just because it's decoupled.
And sure, to your point about devs being able to talk but not walk. I think we can both agree that a smaller scoped version of this ask could be tested in 1hr to the same affect. Call an API, store a token, determine performance implications (although this point is a little sus). If a dev can't do that in 1hr, even at a high level, that's fair.
Nitpicking words is unnecessary. s/system/service or whatever you want to call it.
We both know what is being tested, and we seem to agree on the point. How long something takes depends on how fast the candidate is, and honestly I think a quick dev could probably do the task in the OP in an hour.
It's not a nitpick, they're 2 very different things. You said
> They are testing the ability to create a system.
Service design is not a thing. System design is. You claimed this was a system, and it's not.
As I said, s/system/service (or microservice or deployable unit, or whatever you want to call it). The meaning of the word "system" should be apparent from the context.
I once spent 15h+ implementing an end to end solution which took into account localisation and one/two other features.
The issue is that spinning up a .Net/react app from scratch and making it all work takes an enormous amount of boilerplate.
Calculate the boilerplate required and if it takes longer than 2h: don't do it.
I now tell recruiters "I'm happy to show my best work, for 3h, and stop working at the 3h mark, finished or not."
The role was CMC markets for anyone interested, and I'm grateful to them for teaching me the valuable lesson.
I don’t agree with take home assignments, but in relation to other ones this seems fine to me. IE, no I don’t think they’re going to use this for their own product for free. I think it’s actually just a technical test.
It’s a couple hours work and would demonstrate basic understanding of Next.js and Git. Nothing crazy here at all imo.
My bigger concern is it's just a lot of stuff to cover, but nothing particularly involved. So it doesn't really demonstrate any real knowledge.
It's surface deep at best.
And with lots of opportunity for time sinks that can easily make it take a lot longer, even if a basic implementation is just a few hours.
My issue with a “couple of hours” of take home exercises is that I’m applying to multiple positions and I already have a full time job. I’m happy to do a technical interview in person. But don’t waste my time.
I don't think this is free work; its result is nowhere a useful marketable product, and the questions they ask seem to be reasonable for assessing the experience of a developer. But it is quite a lot of work they expect from you here; and the fact that they want you to act both as a developer and as a designer doesn't bode well.
Oh, sorry, I edited this question out of my comment, because I noticed that you mentioned that in your original post.
5-7 days probably sounds right for what they describe; but that's a big time investment. Many would refuse.
Working an unpaid 40 hour week to complete an assignment that doesn’t even guarantee you the job is ludicrous. How is this not illegal? I’d understand a day or 2 but for a whole week?
Right? Like, imagine that the candidate you're trying to hire is a 30 something parent who's already employed.
They've got 8 hours committed to work plus parental responsibilities until 8 or 9pm at the earliest most.
A 2 hour commitment burns a full day worth of free time. And that's assuming you actually limit yourself to two hours.
If it's not a timed assignment you're leaving the actual work time up to the applicant. Applicants without kids are going to be able to devote more time to the task, perform better, and thus gain advantage.
I am not a lawyer, but that sounds like it might not be a great idea.
If I were responsible for a take-home, I would time box it. Like, I would give the candidate the test and 4 hours, and then we go through the result.
I'm not interested in how good your work can be if you get inifinity time. I'm interested in what you can produce in a specific timeframe.
>5-7 days 😅😅
This is an 8-hour assignment at best, when good at coding AND good at using AI tooling for one's advantage. But probably no more than 4 hours.
There's no way unless you're slapping this together willy nilly. If you actually want to do good work with proper architecture, which is what you should showcase in an interview I think 5-7 is reasonable - do you even write tests my man?
I agree. I don't think this is a product as much as a test of knowledge and supporting tools which could be more easily conducted on site or via a whiteboard exercise in Zoom. Some companies pair you with a potential co-worker and ask for collaborative development.
All of this would be far better than a take-home assignment that a person could farm out to someone else or get help. Note - not saying OP is not capable just pointing out that that's a possibility.
I once helped someone with a take-home on a Data Science assignment and it was stuff that chatGPT could knock out though with less than optimal code and logic. I told me friend to simply ask for an in person or Zoom tech interview since conceptually he knew the right answers and was just a little rusty with some of the technologies.
Turns out that the company had given the same take home to enough candidates that answers were already out there on the internet rendering the test even more meaningless.
It doesn’t seem like free work. It’s a bit much, but not uncommon. They don’t always expect you to finish everything; it’s more about showing you can follow instructions. An experienced developer could complete this in less than a day.
Depends on what hiring stage they are at. If I am assigning someone any type of "test" project that takes time, they are a finalist and I am paying them for their trouble. If this is an earlier stage of hiring, it is a waste of time on both sides.
I’ve read this several times over, read the comments, and my personal opinion is: No this isn’t free labor.
In essence it sounds like:
- Create basic home page that displays a list of tokens from an API call
- Show items that have been favorited at the top or in a separate list
- Create basic detail page when a token is clicked
- Handle favorite logic in local storage
That’s all it really is. The hardest part would be getting familiar with Next.js’s approach to SSR/SSG/ISR if you haven’t used them before.
I think a lot of this could be boilerplate code that chatGPT could help speed up development time on.
I’m not trying to be insensitive but this is like a 3-4 hour task if you’re focused. Probably less if you’re more familiar with the Nextjs ecosystem.
For me, it would start to look like free labor if they expected you to make/design the API, standup and implement a DB, do everything they listed in your attached images, add auth, and finally setup a way to easily make changes and deploy to aws or some other hosting service. Basically if they had you cover everything from front to back with ci/cd and hosting configured.
This assignment is pretty much strictly a frontend assignment in a specific environment.
"if you’re more familiar with the Nextjs ecosystem"
And I think that's the point. If a candidate thinks it is too much work, then likely this company does not want to hire that candidate. They want to find candidates who either can do this in half a day, or can do it in a whole day but is willing to go the mile. They're trying to filter out people who can do it in any longer time.
I think it’s the req’s fault it looks complicated as this can be summarized in like 5 bulletpoints.
Documentation could be a readme, design is solved with tailwind.
Likely they will make you print marketing/landing pages so if you are experienced with these kind of sites it’s pretty easy.
honestly i’ve only developed in nextjs for the past year and this seems really simple like maybe an hour of work unless the “tokens” you’re displaying are complex and require you to do a ton of design work or css to make the data look right.
- Create Next App
- take main page and remove everything.
- add a provider wrapping root layout with a useeffect hook that runs a fetch request to the api endpoint and adds the response to the provider’s state.
- add a hook to use the tokens in the state.
- add a for loop to the root page that displays each token in a simple display flex container. You could make token a component or don’t i’m not your dad.
- now that you already have a provider, you can add a “favoritedTokens” state item to it
- Add methods on your main page to add or remove favoritedTokens
- update your token component to show a ❤️ next to it if it’s favorited.
at that point you’ve covered the base reqs. run a lighthouse test and screenshot it. have chatgpt jsdoc your code. wham bam thank ya maam.
Am i missing something?
EDIT: re-read it and missed cookie-saving/checking but that’s like two lines. They’re not even having you do anything with middleware or server actions or form actions. Pretty chill work imo.
> like maybe an hour of work
Well, not like anyone accused devs of being good at giving time estimates.
It's all simple and basic, but it's still just a lot to do, especially if you want it to not be literal ass.
It's not a lot. You're in this thread challenging people quite a bit, are you familiar with Next? This is not a "lot" for anyone who knows the framework
I am.
I mean it's a LOT in the sense that its just wide coverage.
A lot of stuff that isn't particularly demonstrative, is just boilerplate.
That's what I mean by "a lot".
The work takes time, not knowledge or skill.
It's definitely a lot. It will take more than 2-4h
You will do a silly mistake/bug that will cost you an hour. You might even spend a couple hours on adjusting CSS.
And it's way worse than that, because you're not just doing this stupid assignment bare bones. You're competing against others that might have no problem putting in 2 days of work on this.
By the looks of it, if a candidate does what you mentioned, they'd get a quick no, because the company would find it lacking, and they would "prefer to go with other candidates".
There's no objective way of knowing what's "good enough", so candidates try to "go the extra mile", spending way too much time and consequently inflating the idea of what's reasonable for an interview.
It's a problem.
I've got 15 years in the industry, and the older I get and more senior the positions, the less inclined I am to spend time on assignments. Maybe these are good to filter out newly grads or whatever, but if you're hiring a senior, a 1 on 1 with an engineer discussing past projects is far more valuable. You can also just have HR reach out to former employers and colleagues that would verify a candidate is qualified.
This kind of test based interviews are a scourge.
For anyone who claims that this is free dev work. I'd like to hear what your experience in the industry is. There is nothing usable that would be produced here.
This should be a day's work for someone who's only ever built bootcamp projects
For a mid level Dev it should be 2-4 hours, including all the polish and making up the nice logical commit flow - that would be the hardest part for me, I'd just bang this out in a couple of hours and add it to git as 'first commit' in a real-world scenario. Maybe three commits. Server setup and feature 1, feature 2.
I think the 5-7 days the op mentioned is the delivery date. Most recruiters understand that you may have a full time job. May need to do some research and can't devote 4-8 hours on this in one sitting, hence they give you a week to do it.
I'ma gonna steal this for my next recruiting round.
People will post a code test that says something like "make an api that adds two numbers together and returns the sum" and commenters will claim it was some kind of free work scam to build a finance app.
And they will be heavily upvoted to the top, just like the current top comment and a bunch of others all over this post.
Yeah I don't know what everyone is getting so excited about. It's asking for just a generic page that is using React `useState`.
Honestly the whole "free work" thing is complete bullshit and doesn't happen. For design, perhaps, but for web dev. No way.
the part that sticks out to me is the user experience and design part. actual ux design is way too involved for it to be a take home test on its own, free labor or otherwise. most ux sprints are a week long, and thats assuming you have an existing persona to work off of. also when you do contextual inquiries or user interviews you have to incentivize the user, which usually involves like a coffee or a gift card. so $10-20 per user and you’re usually using 2-3 across all your tests so that’s about $200ish
and yeah i get it, a lot of small companies have a really poor understanding of ux design and they are realistically expecting a design based on “intuition”. but that’s all the more reason to raise an eyebrow. when shit hits the fan because of poor design choices, you’re to blame.
I dont think there is any implication that you need to go out and do user interviews for this task. they dont even mention anything about target audiences. this is not a UX designer role.
I read that requirement as - we would like you to make the page look nice - center the table, add some borders and padding to the cells, use a outlined/filled star icon for the favourite button, use a font other than the default times new roman just to show that you can put together a page that doenst look s\*\*t.
it's not a ux designer role, but it's not a graphic designer role either. there is no relevance of making the deliverable pretty... unless they want to shoehorn the applicant into a "unicorn" role. in which case, it's partially a ux designer role, or at least it is considering the mention of user experience explicitly.
so it's either:
a) they don't know what they're talking about, but make requests like they do and are therefore going to be bad employers
b) they do know what they're talking about but aren't clear about what they want and are therefore going to be bad employers
there is no winning here.
Or its a role working on a small team developing internal web apps for backoffice use, where you are lucky if you have a graphic dewsigner available to choose fonts and colors let alone a dedicated UX designer doing persona stories.
As a frontend/fullstack developer you are expected to layout html forms and datagrids in a logical and clean way based on a product managers specs and maybe a rough sketch. No fancy transitions or effects. Just plain grids of form fields.
I've spent most of my career working in these roles, and most of the companies were quite successful and not bad employers.
internal tools still need a ux designer. either way, if user experience wasn’t important, it wouldn’t have been mentioned, but it was, so clearly they think it is important
Any frontend developer worth their salt will undrstand the basics of UX. it's really not that hard. i would expect it of anyone but the most junior hires.
the basics of ux is applied knowledge not learned knowledge. my experience is that most front end developers (and graphic designers) do not understand that difference, and therefore, no, don't understand the basics of ux.
I'd like to think that most experienced devs are fairly prolific users of web applications from companies that do actively practice concious UX, and therefore assimilate the basics of what a functional design is.
You really dont need much. Align all your fields in orderly columns, add a bit of padding here, a bit of margin there, group like things together. Use active colors for active stuff and passive colors for labels.
Most of these sort of jobs dont require much more than that. 80% of your work will be adding new fields and forms to some exisitng layout. Sure you want someone with some design skills to create the basic layout for a new app, but that happens once in a blue moon, and you'll ususally just base it off one of the other apps you already have.
In the context of job applications like this one, UX is a buzzword people put on their CVs and their job adds.
I dont think anyone is expecting to hire the next allan cooper for this role.
you're definitely running off the assumption that it's for an internal tooling team role, even though **nothing** in the op makes that distinction. but either way you still need ux designers for your internal tools. proper affordances optimize and increase efficiency of workers. there is no reason to skimp out on the design of internal tools.
a functional design is not a usability focused design. it's just a design... that functions. if you don't know why certain design decisions are made, it's impossible to infer how design elements are more/less usable.
making a design pretty is a different story, and yes, that's something that you can gain a rough understanding of and incorporate. ux is different, you don't learn "the basics" and incorporate it into the design, you observe and involve users, and use the insights from that to create the design.
as for ux being a buzzword for some companies and people. yes, i totally agree that it happens, but it implies certain expectations and responsibilities, which again, a software engineer should not be responsible for or expect to do.
This is actually a good assessment.
1) They want you to touch on all the Next.js-specific features, without needing to go extremely deep into any of them. It's usually a good sign when the assessment requires good framework-specific knowledge because it means their team didn't just blindly pick it due to hype
2) I don't think it's free labor; auth is the hardest part of building a Nextjs app and they're letting you skip it, which is another green flag for me
A lot of it sounds tedious, but it's more of a "wide" test than a "deep" test if that makes sense. They want to see how well you can write idiosyncratic code in this particular framework.
However: if you have bad vibes or get a bad feeling about them, don't do it. I'm only offering my subjective opinion based on the images you shared.
> his is actually a good assessment.
Its 95% boilerplate
> idiosyncratic
You mean idiomatic.
Idiosyncratic code is exactly NOT what you want to be doing.
I mean boilerplate for "stuff that is just kind of necessary for getting the thing done, but is just checking boxes, not actually doing the unique work."
Hey just for fun. Upload these screenshots to Claude 3.5 and tell it to read it and build out the entire project and provide all the code. See what it does.
once i gave an interview for a small company in gurgaon. they asked me to make a oAuth system using code-igniter. at first i tried to make it but after 1-2 days i got the idea that they might be just looking for free work. so i submitted a non working half built code. after 1 month their senior software engineer called me and said you have put so much effort in it, so why not just finish it. i told him i can't.
This is totally normal and people that say "5-7 days lul" probably never had to do one of these while working 40 hours and having other responsibilities.
The way i see it. This is awesome. Look how thorough they are. Whoever wrote that wants to make sure you have good understanding of Next.
And serioulsy having to integrate your code into their project (and lets be real this is a very simple task) would be more of an headache than to write it on their own.
And they did not specify which version of next so you might even go for RC and show your understanding of caching.
i don't know man. sounds like a great opportunity and i would not consider them moving the salary towards your expectations a red flag. Just my 2 cents
usually when they say 5-7 days they mean about 5-7 hours so you can work on it after work. Starting the day you received it unless they explicity state a start date
Not really, this is a real life example of something you would probably do regularly in the job. This is a few hours of work, less if you’re familiar with the latest next version and even less if you can use a UI library you’re familiar with.
If I wanted or needed this job I’d be pretty jazzed they didn’t come up with some bullshit I had to study for.
> before devoting myself to a test (they wrote 5-7 days).
that's enough that it needs to be paid.
4 hours is probably the absolute MAX someone should possibly accept for unpaid, and that really depends on the persons existing skills and negotiating power. Should be much lower.
I had a similar coding challenge for my current job. This job has proven to be the best job I've had by far. It has easily been worth the multi-day coding challenge, and I'm so glad I did it.
Since being hired, I've participated in interviewing other candidates. We've simplified our interview process in the last few years so we no longer require a coding challenge. I wish we hadn't because the quality of the candidates we talk to is generally very low. (People claiming several years of relevant experience and can't answer basic questions about Typescript et cetera.)
tl;dr this isn't free work. The company isn't going to take your weekend repo and try to monetize it. They are trying to raise the bar and hire competent candidates. If the salary is good and you want the job, you should do the challenge.
Appreciate the straightforwardness. My primary gripe is the fact that I’ve only had a 30min interview, with their HR. No inteoductions, og even chemistry check with someone id be working with.
I’m “for” code assignments, but I’ve experienced more concise and simple assignments, that would cover enough to give the companies an idea of the level. And if the assignments are larger, I’d expect them to come at a later stage in the process.
Throwing a 30min chat, and then a multi-day assignment straight away, just feels disrespectful to a candidates time :)
If you sort of want the job but sort of don't want to do free labor just tell them, "Hey, I will do this, but I want to go over it together to explain my thought process instead of just submitting it somewhere; that way we can have a back and forth and you can understand my thought process better instead of trying to figure it out yourself, and if they say no to THAT, then that is a red flag my friend and do not waste anymore time communicating with them.
They gonna find a better candidate as soon as you hand that in.
Program in a deadman switch. If you get hired, remove it. if you get told to fuck off, well well, bye bye future feature.
I agree that this is bs and not worth doing but I think it's much more likely that they just have an incompetent hiring manager or whatever. It would be much more work to run this as a real scam than to just build the thing...
A company this lazy or inept is going to find 50 bytes embedded in a feature this size? You absolutely overestimate their aptitude or code linting / scanning prowess.
I don’t see what’s actually commercially useable about the product of the test though. This doesn’t seem particularly complex nor particularly useful to anyone. If it’s so minimal ChatGPT could probably do most of it I hardly think it’s worth farming out to applicants.
> Is this free labor?
Are you worried you're doing someone's job for free? If so, then no, it's not free labor, because the result is commercially useless.
Whether you should spend your time on it is another story. If you feel they're legit, and you have a good chance at landing this position, you should do it. If you feel there's a red flag, or too many yellow flags, don't do it. But if the only red flag you see is them trying to get "free labor" out of you, I guarantee this ain't it.
It's much harder to land a job in tech today than it was 2 years ago. There's fewer vacancies, ans those that have them are pickier. And I had to complete similar assignments in the past - even when the VC money in tech was at its highest.
At all the enterprise-level jobs I;ve worked in the apst, a project like this was ALWAYS a part of the hiring process.
And if you think this is software they're going to reuse or sell again, you are delusional plain and simple. This sounds so far from a finished, deliverable product that it's laughable.
Bruh i just finished codemonk assessment for backend engineering, u won't believe they asked to create rest api, Django server framework and jwt authentication, with setup with postgres database in docker ☠️, i atleast had to create and use 4 or 5 emails to use chat gpt 4 o version because it's limited for querying for my questions. I put a two days whole night i didn't slept and I created postman documentation and put it on GitHub and submitted to their email and i haven't received any response. I have full filled all the requirements and and also working properly as they asked me to they haven't responded anything. 💀 My two days damn time wasted.
Sure to god you can put this whole document in gpt4 with some tech stack and your prefrences, it will give you a whole alomost working code spend like a day to fix it and ship it. Obviously if you want to but that's how I sometimes respond to these type of assignments
Is it for a junior role? This is a shit load of work for an interview. But if you’re desperate to find a job just do it. Maybe you’ll get feedback. the practice will definitely help you improve and you can put it on your GitHub.
It’s a senior role. I have interviews with 5+ companies, in the closing rounds. I just feel this assignment is rather large, given I’ve only had one intro call with their HR person so far.
I’m not opposed to assignments, but they shouldn’t throw large assignments after candidates after a 30min introduction call. It should be after you get a chance to speak to the CTO/similar as well - IMO. With multiple interviews and multiple tests, this really adds up and eats all free time
If I really liked the company and I was in at least the second round of interviews I might do it. But as just an initial screening? I'm not going to waste my time on random shots in the dark. The application process already wastes too much time.
A senior dev can crank this out in less than 2 hours. Not free work. It’s literally a list view and a detail view with a favorite button. You don’t even need to make it pretty, implement authentication, or any backend code.
This doesn't seem specific in a useful to a business way, I'm no expert on hiring scams I could just see this being a result of people not understanding the point but still needing to create an engineering test that say demonstrates an applicant has the qualities found on the job posting.
Not saying it is worth your time, or that they lack an ulterior motive, I just don't quite see profit as that motive.
Pass on it. If they are getting free labour like this, they are possibly also going to exploit you when you work there.
Alternatively they should pay you for a days work as a test “work day”.
Worst case they avoided hiring someone who wasn’t a good fit - cheaper than paying for a day’s work.
Best case they have an engineer to hire and they wrote good code they can use.
Best case for you - you got paid and landed a job. Worst case you got paid to write code they might use.
A coding test should be clearly a non production application or website. With specific goals and built in challenges to assess your skill level. Not complete a full project.
It also shouldn't take realistically more than 4 hours. Your time is valuable and if it's 40 hours of work it's easily a scam.
All the legitimate coding challenges I've taken are more, fix an almost complete codebase and deploy. This shows you can assess what isn't complete, fix any "gotchas" put in there to see if you can identify bugs or know how to test your code, and evaluate your ability to deploy it and problem solve.
Senior dev who hires sometimes here.
The task in the document, in isolation, is not typical of a company looking for free work. It's written like a test. If I'm understanding it, it's just a very wordy outline of a little project where you make a small 2 page site that reads some simple data out of a database, displays it, and mutates it. It's very simple, and not excessive at all for a test. I'd estimate this to take someone not more than 3-4 hours, including database creation and a few back end endpoints, if not provided (I think they might be though). 3 hours is my personal limit when I've written technical tests to give to potential hires. I think it's important to respect people's time.
Not requiring auth is a positive sign, because it likely would require some modification to be used with customer data. Not 100% but does bode well.
There are some slightly excessive things in there, like documentation. I generally just expect a README that tells me a bit about how to build and run the app. Maybe this is what they mean because I can't see anything more being reasonable. Certainly not diagrams. We can talk about how it works at a technical interview if need be.
You are 100% correct on aligning on salary expectations before spending time on things. Any legit opportunity would understand this. This works to their benefit too. Why waste time on candidates who aren't able to accept your best offer?
Documenting performance with graphs? Smells a bit funny. No reason I can think of to make this a test requirement. Same with upping the offer, but I've had that happen before.
Is 5-7 days the deadline for the submission? Or do you mean they want you to do a 5-7 day work trial? If the second, run for the hills! That would be highly irregular and totally unnecessary.
Overall I'd probably skip if you aren't getting good vibes. I've never felt the need to ask this for any job I've been seriously considering. There's probably a reason you're suspicious.
To be fair, I think the diagram thing is just put in there if that’s your preferred way of describing how it works. It didn’t come across as mandatory. The rest of the stuff I agree with.
I think you're right. I don't think no diagram would affect your application. I think someone just likes writing technical test specs :)
It seems reasonable to me in terms of the amount of work required. No idea what they plan to do with that work once you turn it over...
It’s pretty simple. It might take longer if you know none of the tech or languages, but you can get there following a quick start guide for parts like next.js. If you need to learn everything like JS, css, next, db setup, git, etc., might not be well suited for the job.
If you are good at learning on the fly you could fake your way into the job, assuming this were an actual job and not the scam it actually is. I have zero knowledge of BSD but I'm sure I could fake it until I made it.
I just wrote what I thought it would take me if I wanted to do the bare minimum on it.
1. Spin up a database container via docker-compose.
2. Some CREATE TABLEs (probably one) for a simple table of tokens and whatever else it mentions. Throw them in an SQL file and include in repo.
3. Next.js app with database driver lib. A few endpoints for create, update and search on those entities. We don't need to carefully craft or scope any of these, I'd do them directly in SQL, but query builder would be fine too. Quick Dockerfile based on Node for docker-compose.
4. The 2 page UI. Throw down some pre made CSS (whatever lib you prefer) and just focus on the markup. A default look is fine for a test app. The rest is a few simple React components. E.g. wrapping a table with rows rendered for tokens, or similar. Favourite doesn't do anything on the back end, apparently, so just stick it in localstorage. Next.js gives you ISR if you know how to use it.
5. Run history and pick out the commands needed to spin up from fresh check out. Put them in the README file.
(Be committing for some history whilst doing these things...)
I'm ignoring anything about performance graphs because I think that's silly.
Am I missing something? I've made tens of versions of this app over the years in a handful of frameworks. This is bread and butter web dev. The doc is well written but does make it seem like more work than it is. E.g. performance and UX considerations? I'd be surprised if anyone could mess up either of those for a list of entities on a page!
Edit: I'm including creating the database schema and API too. I'm not clear on whether they provide these and this is simply a front end task. If so, I'd pay a bit more attention to the look of the UI, but not much tbh.
If you do it, add a Proprietary License. This is not a standard open-source license but a custom license that you draft yourself, stating that the code is for personal use only and cannot be copied, distributed, or used without explicit permission.
Or you can use a standardized license, the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is the most restrictive open-source license. It requires that any software that uses your code, even over a network, must be open-sourced under the same license. However, it still allows usage under the terms of the license.
For the strictest control, a custom proprietary license is the way to go. This ensures that any unauthorized use can be directly addressed.
The assignment in written unnecessary detailed, but the deliverable is relatively simple:
- list view from external api
- search feature (basic list filtering based on html input)
- detail view
- favorite button (react context)
You could do this task in a 6-8 hour period. I doubt this is exploiting you for free labor. If you like the salary, I think it’s worth trying out. Like someone else said, be weary of any “starter” repo they give you or you find online.
Just draw up a simple IP contract stating that the assignment you complete is your IP and by completing the assignment for them to assess, you are not transferring ownership of the IP.
You can add that if they offer you the job, with a minimum term, you can transfer the IP ownership. Alternatively if they don't want to offer you the job but want the IP, you can agree on a fixed fee
I'd also say red flags would be dependent on the salary and scope of the job. For example if this is a job interview for a blue chip company offering $200,000 annual salary, it would definitely raise less red flags than a $20,000 job for a new company
I mean I wouldn’t do it cause I know I’d spend like a day making this and then get ghosted, but I don’t think this is free labour? Seems like a pretty simple nextjs app maybe they just wanna see if you know TS and can get around a next app
I received a similar test but in laravel and vuejs
There is a test for laravel which has a dashboard and CRUD
then a different test on front end.
I dont know why laravel has its own dashboard. When i can just create it in vuejs and tailwind
For the next part, i have to host it as well.
Then and only then they will consider my application ahhaha
The salary? Around 50k to 60k. Haha tf?
Stuff like that is far too specific to be a simple coding challenge for hiring. To give you an example of what a coding challenge may be, I recently applied to a large company here in Germany and their task was to simply code a TicTacToe game using the language of my choice. It could have a GUI or it could simply run on console. It's a short challenge to exercise your ability to complete tasks on-time and within a timeframe, however it also shows your competency in figuring out something.
In my opinion, I'd walk away from something like that - clearly if they want you to work for free then their working conditions and salary expectations are never going to benefit you as an employee.
I don't see anything complicated in this task but they over complicated the requirements. This could just be "You have an api of paginated tokens. Create a list page and a details page with each token. Apply best practices". I think this is more of a "attention to detail" kind of test.
It is simple to make but they want to see that you can read the requirements with care (some developers struggle to throughly read the requirements, myself included); setup a project and the quality of setup (some developers don't know how to setup a project, your own custom eslint, prettier, additional tools that don't come with nextjs; this proves that you take great care in your personal development also); explain in human terms (for managers) what is going on and what you have done proving your ability that you have good communication skills with non technical people and that you can work with clients.
I would say do the assignment. I don't see more than 2 days work on the technical side and 2 (or more) days on the documentation side. I personally like companies that have assignments like this. It shows that they are mature (no "rockstar developer wanted" kind of garbage) and that grown-ups are in charge.
4 was extremely generous. If you were doing this as your own personal project, its a couple of hours (on a side note, to quote a former collegue of mine: "nothing takes a couple of yours. It means that every task should be taken seriously).
But since I think they are actually testing your attention to detail and communication skills, I gave it 4 days, just to be safe. I think they want you to deliver a product as you would if they were your (non technical) client and that requires people skills (ability to explain technical things to non technical people). But I might be wrong. Give it two days, if you think it is actually too much work for you, refuse them. It's your decision. I would personally do the assignment in 2 days (I would include docker setup also just for fun so they can run it "everywhere", bonus points). If in additional stages it turns out they are a bad company, I would say thank you and goodbye. Tests are not just for companies to fuck with you but also a clue for you to know that you will be working with serious developers and serious managers that know their craft. In additional stages, ask them about work culture, how do they approach problems, do they put emphasis on fast development no matter the code quality, what are their processes, how do they communicate problems, do they have some kind of in-house learning program to further your development, do they have a blog and do they like to share knowledge, will they send you on conferences to improve on your skills, are they contributing to open source etc...
On a personal note, no offence, but try to see it on their side. They probably had a couple of people that were just bad at their job but passed all the tests or vise-versa. Software development is a responsible job and there are a lot of childish and spoiled people on the market, hence ping-pong tables, fusbal tables and playstation, xbox and who know what else (I know of company that actually has a roller coaster between floors, I shit you not). I see this test as a way to filter out responsible people. But again, I might be wrong and am overcomplicating it and it really is a dogshit company.
At the end of the day, It's your choice.
People in this sub complain about getting whiteboard interviews and then complain when they get actually interviewed on what they’d be doing if hired.
This feels like a pretty good display of ability.
Still if it feels shady don’t do it.
The stuff they are asking for is far beyond what should happen in an interview. If they want stuff like that, along with the docs, that will take you longer than an hour to write the code, fix it where it will fit in, give performance test results in a full set of docs for the code probably bringing in the performance charts.
One method I sawnfor an interview was to use your phone to project on the wall that would contain things an app you had written. You could then tailor it for about an hour.
Can someone please explain why this is bad? I've been practicing making projects for years for free to fill up my CV hoping for a chance to get into the web dev market, what's one more project that finally lands you a job? I'm genuinely curious. If I had that assignment asked of me to get a job, I would do it in a heartbeat.
so i can’t comment on whether this type of exercise is generally bad, but this specific one is definitely suspicious to me.
the part that’s suspicious is the user experience and design evaluation criteria. if this was a take home test for a ux designer with no actual software engineering and just a handoff of wireframes, they’re already asking for too much. it takes 5 days to get there working 9-5 and likely there are expenses you have to pay for out of pocket.
so, clearly, they don’t mean “user experience” when they say “user experience”. this is a type of employer that is very opinionated on what a design should be, does not tell you what that design is they expect you to make, and expect a software engineer to create the design.
if a product fails due to the design, you know who is blamed? the software engineer that is also for some reason doing the design work.
If they're giving you this much work now, think of how it's going to be actually working there. In a normal market, I'd say hard pass, but things are so screwy right now that I'd probably do it just to get an offer so I can use it for leverage in another job.
If they actually use the code without them paying for it, sue them.
Be sure to not release the project under an open source license if you do end up going through this.
You can put in backdoors, threaten legal action, etc, of course. But at the end of the day, the simple question is: does their reputation afford them such a demand? If they have a trustworthy and prestigious reputation, then this is actually ok. Otherwise, if you’re just going off the salary they promised you or whatnot, probably not a good idea to do this. I’ve done stuff of the same magnitude (but which unlike this was clearly a fictitious assignment) for a very well-known company with an excellent reputation.
You should explain your concerns to them. If they’re dismissive probably not a good place to work at anyway, if not, well, you’ll sleep better.
I honestly don’t like the criteria im reading.
Not only do you need to code the backend and use both SSR and SSG as well as make it performant (premature optimization or spend more time benchmarking, testing and adjusting), plus create a front end that is functional as well as looks good. So you need to be a full stack dev, probably part devops too, and a UI designer as well. I’m not sure if its free labor but it’s definitely on the unethical side.
What happened to a probationary period?? You work and if you don’t fit within 3 months then they let you go. These ridiculously long code challenges waste lots of time, are unpaid and if you’re rejected, you’ve now lost time you could have spent on other companies.
They should start paying people for the code challenge time.
Yeah this is the part that’s a problem. If they just asked one to do the features then that’s fine, but to suddenly optimize a thing that shouldn’t need that at this point and making things pretty etc hint that it’s “you’ll do all design, planning, coding, optimizing, server…” position.
Then again, if it’s related to crypto then most of these places are like that and don’t want to pay multiple people.
yeah, its an easy time sink.
Making the pages with the buttons? easy, quick.
Making it something that you're comfortable representing yourself with? that will take a lot more work.
Especially when it's for a job that you might want to get. You'd want to put a "little extra" and it suddenly is this LONG thing.
While open ended is nice, it should also be very clear as to the actual goal and expectation, not leave this massive area that wastes time.
Since then you can't tell the difference between someone that made something that works efficiently in the time, or someone that spent a whole week trying to make it perfect.
Bruh what kind of side projects are you making lists with a favorite button?
This is a normal everyday task for any frontend developer. Fetch data make a list add a button make the button do something. I don't understand everyone here being so angry over a task like this, they just wanna clear out the recruits that can't do anything. If you make tasks like this to simple nowadays they will just copy paste it into chatgpt
I had done something similar and got call for interview just for them to tell me that they don’t pay high salary because they’re government entity. Then why TF you wasted my time on your stupid assignment?!
My own experience with doing one of this assignment includes extra unit test, integration test and e2e test in cyprus with CI/CD and a detail commit message. Took me full 1 week on grinding to complete.
One thing I can tell you from my experience is that even this is a legit one you better stay away from this kind of company that deploy these kind of practice. Imagine how rotting their management is to have people implementing this system in the first place.
Choosing the right company is everything. You can clearly define how shtty a company is by just looking at their JD and the way they put this kind of test for you to complete.
This seems like the hiring process equivalent of Amazon shipping one snack-size candy bar in a refrigerator box. Lots of infrastructure & process, very little content.
Therefore, this seems like it was written by someone who doesn't fully understand the scam. The company is supposed to get something *tangible* and *usable* from the candidate.
Skills evaluation should never take more than a few hours. Certainly not long enough that anyone could expect payment for it.
It's wordy and excessive but really just two pages and a button. I think it comes off as a little pompous, but it shouldn't really be all that much work. Stuff like "a list with the favourites at the top" is like all those todo apps. If they can write this document they can code it themselves. The extra overhead in the document seems to be for ease of testing on their part
The best possible conclusion you could draw from this is still 'this is not the job you're looking for'
Probably yeah :)
I would never put this much effort into an interview test. If you're going to do it, just submit all the requirements into chatgpt and submit whatever it spits out. To hell with them.
If someone gives you crap like this, they're just wasting your time. Don't bother.
You're just wasting your time doing that, just like they're wasting your time asking for it. ChatGPT is going to give you broken BS and take your time, so you might as well not respond at all.
Be careful using any prebuilt repos for code tests, especially in the web3 space, a friend of mine has found a hidden malicious code.
Normally they hide them in the package.json make you run some random file I was thinking of doing the same to them. What security bugs can I put in here that would be funny. that's probably why I work in info security.
> What security bugs can I put in here that would be funny. Remember Goatse receiver?
No what is it
Google if you dare
I don’t dare that’s why I ask
Something that would cause someone to REALLY notice if it were added as a redirect into some bullshit free-labor take home project. They'd never forget it, and would be frantically searching for some eye bleach. Probably safe to Google for an explanation of it, just don't do an image search unless you're in a masochistic mood. Discussion from wayback: https://www.reddit.com/r/internetclassics/comments/bfnlw/the_goatse_nsfw/
Oh I see (reading from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx)). Basically a NSFW image of a guy showing his bum hole
yep :) you can't unsee it once seen, fair warning
Is it the image they briefly showed in the show “The Boys”? (If you’ve seen that show)
Curious someone looking to get into info security, what did you focus on or thing helps get into that field (certs?)? Ive done courses in web development and security
Yes Please Explain. I am interested in Info security and cybersecurity, just a quick run down of certain classes a new person would need, pls and thankyou. I have experience in web3
The courses I took were part of my college curriculum. They covered pentesting, networking, and programming
Free work. Don't do it. There's nothing specific here to test your skills on anything. Implement "a" token on the client side? Use ssg and ssr? Show performance "with graphs"? They're not testing anything specific here, they just want free work. If they wanted to test someone on any of the above, a 1hr technical interview with a much smaller scope can prove your knowledge in all of the things here. Either they're bad enough technically to not know that, or they do and just want to get as much code out of you as possible; either way, run.
I agree. My alarms are ringing for sure on this one.☝🏻
I disagree totally. The lack of detail means nothing meaningful will come from this - whatever OP kicks out would be unusable in a business setting, because there’s not enough detail to address customer problems
No, waste their time like they want to waste yours. Tell them you'll do it. At the end, give them a repo with one commit in main and an assortment of other branches. Insist that you finished the work and pushed it up there. Keep the ruse up as long as possible. Clone a similar, open-source software with the same dependencies and push it up there and tell them you somehow forgot to push up code and to review your "work".
I feel like they would just respond to this with no. We aren't in a market right now where they're desperate to hire anyone, most jobs get a lot of applicants
> I feel like they would just respond to this with no. and?
And you would have just wasted your own time more than theirs effectively. OP is doing good by just ignoring this company, chances are if this is their interview, the job itself might be worse. I've passed these kind of interviews and everytime rejected the company's offers, some let me peak their code bases under a NDA. It was all dogshit. The best companies, always have the most straightforward interviews in my experience.
it's actually a lot of specific direction and it seems geared towards testing someone's knowledge of NextJS setup and configuration, as well as utilizing a github workflow i don't think that they're going to take whatever is submitted and profit off of it, most of the criteria are just general ways around different ways of building NextJS apps i mean, half the assignment would be done by running \`npx create-next-app\` and fetching some data from an endpoint
I agree that it might be free work so you just shouldn't do it, or perhaps do it but with lots of TODOs so it won't be worth it for them to use it. But this, I disagree with: >They're not testing anything specific here They are testing the ability to create a system. This is way more relevant than testing whether the candidate knows useState or whatever. It also can't be tested in a 1-hour interview.
A system can be tested in 1hr. System design is sufficient. As well, a next.js app that calls an API and stores a token is not a system, that's really a regular ticket on any board that any dev should be able to grab.
>A system can be tested in 1hr. System design is sufficient. From personal experience this is wrong. There are plenty of people who can talk about how to do, and then when they are actually asked to do it they just can't. >As well, a next.js app that stores a token is not a system, Is it deployed separately? Yes. In that case it is a system (by my definition). >that's really a regular ticket Your tickets are of a different size from those at any place I have ever been (or even heard of). That's not bad, but uncommon. > on any board that any dev should be able to grab. Yes, they should. But most people who apply for dev jobs are not able to do that, which makes the test meaningful.
Not trying to sound rude - - have you ever done a system design interview? They're quite standard, especially in places like FAANG. And they typically contain resiliency, caching, storage, read and write patterns, load balancing etc. aspects. You can YouTube system design practice interviews and you'll see that you can indeed get a grasp of someone's system design skills in 1hr. I would not at all classify the above as a system. It's the front end _of_ a system.
No, I have not done a system design interview. Nor do I think that an interview of that kind is necessary for this kind of work. Systems come in different sizes, this is a small one. But still, I have seen way too many people who would be able to explain how to create something like this, but not actually do it. Unfortunately.
I agree it's not necessary for this kind of work, just as I agree this isn't really a system. Not trying to argue, just reinforcing that a single next.js app would never classify as a system to me, or any company I've worked at, in the same way that a MySQL server is not a system just because it's decoupled. And sure, to your point about devs being able to talk but not walk. I think we can both agree that a smaller scoped version of this ask could be tested in 1hr to the same affect. Call an API, store a token, determine performance implications (although this point is a little sus). If a dev can't do that in 1hr, even at a high level, that's fair.
Nitpicking words is unnecessary. s/system/service or whatever you want to call it. We both know what is being tested, and we seem to agree on the point. How long something takes depends on how fast the candidate is, and honestly I think a quick dev could probably do the task in the OP in an hour.
It's not a nitpick, they're 2 very different things. You said > They are testing the ability to create a system. Service design is not a thing. System design is. You claimed this was a system, and it's not.
As I said, s/system/service (or microservice or deployable unit, or whatever you want to call it). The meaning of the word "system" should be apparent from the context.
An hour my ass.
I once spent 15h+ implementing an end to end solution which took into account localisation and one/two other features. The issue is that spinning up a .Net/react app from scratch and making it all work takes an enormous amount of boilerplate. Calculate the boilerplate required and if it takes longer than 2h: don't do it. I now tell recruiters "I'm happy to show my best work, for 3h, and stop working at the 3h mark, finished or not." The role was CMC markets for anyone interested, and I'm grateful to them for teaching me the valuable lesson.
If they're knowledgeable, then acquiring code in this manor wouldn't appeal to them.
I don’t agree with take home assignments, but in relation to other ones this seems fine to me. IE, no I don’t think they’re going to use this for their own product for free. I think it’s actually just a technical test. It’s a couple hours work and would demonstrate basic understanding of Next.js and Git. Nothing crazy here at all imo.
My bigger concern is it's just a lot of stuff to cover, but nothing particularly involved. So it doesn't really demonstrate any real knowledge. It's surface deep at best. And with lots of opportunity for time sinks that can easily make it take a lot longer, even if a basic implementation is just a few hours.
My issue with a “couple of hours” of take home exercises is that I’m applying to multiple positions and I already have a full time job. I’m happy to do a technical interview in person. But don’t waste my time.
I don't think this is free work; its result is nowhere a useful marketable product, and the questions they ask seem to be reasonable for assessing the experience of a developer. But it is quite a lot of work they expect from you here; and the fact that they want you to act both as a developer and as a designer doesn't bode well.
as a hiring manager for frontend/web dev this comment is 100% spot on. should be less work and provide more details/mocks
5-7 days 😅😅
Oh, sorry, I edited this question out of my comment, because I noticed that you mentioned that in your original post. 5-7 days probably sounds right for what they describe; but that's a big time investment. Many would refuse.
Working an unpaid 40 hour week to complete an assignment that doesn’t even guarantee you the job is ludicrous. How is this not illegal? I’d understand a day or 2 but for a whole week?
A take home “project” should take no longer than 2 hours, maximum. Fuck everyone else asking for more.
Right? Like, imagine that the candidate you're trying to hire is a 30 something parent who's already employed. They've got 8 hours committed to work plus parental responsibilities until 8 or 9pm at the earliest most. A 2 hour commitment burns a full day worth of free time. And that's assuming you actually limit yourself to two hours. If it's not a timed assignment you're leaving the actual work time up to the applicant. Applicants without kids are going to be able to devote more time to the task, perform better, and thus gain advantage. I am not a lawyer, but that sounds like it might not be a great idea.
If I were responsible for a take-home, I would time box it. Like, I would give the candidate the test and 4 hours, and then we go through the result. I'm not interested in how good your work can be if you get inifinity time. I'm interested in what you can produce in a specific timeframe.
I'm guessing it's not illegal because you aren't compelled to do it. You can just end the interview process and not bother with them.
No problem! Yeah I think they ask too much, given we’ve only had a short first interview. Haven’t spoken to any devs or the like.
>5-7 days 😅😅 This is an 8-hour assignment at best, when good at coding AND good at using AI tooling for one's advantage. But probably no more than 4 hours.
There's no way unless you're slapping this together willy nilly. If you actually want to do good work with proper architecture, which is what you should showcase in an interview I think 5-7 is reasonable - do you even write tests my man?
Anyone experienced with Next.js will complete it in a day. Sure, this assignment would exclude you, but it may be the point of this assignment.
I agree. I don't think this is a product as much as a test of knowledge and supporting tools which could be more easily conducted on site or via a whiteboard exercise in Zoom. Some companies pair you with a potential co-worker and ask for collaborative development. All of this would be far better than a take-home assignment that a person could farm out to someone else or get help. Note - not saying OP is not capable just pointing out that that's a possibility. I once helped someone with a take-home on a Data Science assignment and it was stuff that chatGPT could knock out though with less than optimal code and logic. I told me friend to simply ask for an in person or Zoom tech interview since conceptually he knew the right answers and was just a little rusty with some of the technologies. Turns out that the company had given the same take home to enough candidates that answers were already out there on the internet rendering the test even more meaningless.
It doesn’t seem like free work. It’s a bit much, but not uncommon. They don’t always expect you to finish everything; it’s more about showing you can follow instructions. An experienced developer could complete this in less than a day.
The very first evaluation criteria is completeness.
That's why I said not always, because many people here assume any normal assessment is free work.
Depends on what hiring stage they are at. If I am assigning someone any type of "test" project that takes time, they are a finalist and I am paying them for their trouble. If this is an earlier stage of hiring, it is a waste of time on both sides.
I’ve read this several times over, read the comments, and my personal opinion is: No this isn’t free labor. In essence it sounds like: - Create basic home page that displays a list of tokens from an API call - Show items that have been favorited at the top or in a separate list - Create basic detail page when a token is clicked - Handle favorite logic in local storage That’s all it really is. The hardest part would be getting familiar with Next.js’s approach to SSR/SSG/ISR if you haven’t used them before. I think a lot of this could be boilerplate code that chatGPT could help speed up development time on. I’m not trying to be insensitive but this is like a 3-4 hour task if you’re focused. Probably less if you’re more familiar with the Nextjs ecosystem. For me, it would start to look like free labor if they expected you to make/design the API, standup and implement a DB, do everything they listed in your attached images, add auth, and finally setup a way to easily make changes and deploy to aws or some other hosting service. Basically if they had you cover everything from front to back with ci/cd and hosting configured. This assignment is pretty much strictly a frontend assignment in a specific environment.
"if you’re more familiar with the Nextjs ecosystem" And I think that's the point. If a candidate thinks it is too much work, then likely this company does not want to hire that candidate. They want to find candidates who either can do this in half a day, or can do it in a whole day but is willing to go the mile. They're trying to filter out people who can do it in any longer time.
I think it’s the req’s fault it looks complicated as this can be summarized in like 5 bulletpoints. Documentation could be a readme, design is solved with tailwind. Likely they will make you print marketing/landing pages so if you are experienced with these kind of sites it’s pretty easy.
honestly i’ve only developed in nextjs for the past year and this seems really simple like maybe an hour of work unless the “tokens” you’re displaying are complex and require you to do a ton of design work or css to make the data look right. - Create Next App - take main page and remove everything. - add a provider wrapping root layout with a useeffect hook that runs a fetch request to the api endpoint and adds the response to the provider’s state. - add a hook to use the tokens in the state. - add a for loop to the root page that displays each token in a simple display flex container. You could make token a component or don’t i’m not your dad. - now that you already have a provider, you can add a “favoritedTokens” state item to it - Add methods on your main page to add or remove favoritedTokens - update your token component to show a ❤️ next to it if it’s favorited. at that point you’ve covered the base reqs. run a lighthouse test and screenshot it. have chatgpt jsdoc your code. wham bam thank ya maam. Am i missing something? EDIT: re-read it and missed cookie-saving/checking but that’s like two lines. They’re not even having you do anything with middleware or server actions or form actions. Pretty chill work imo.
You missed the 2 days spent on documentation ;-) ;-)
> like maybe an hour of work Well, not like anyone accused devs of being good at giving time estimates. It's all simple and basic, but it's still just a lot to do, especially if you want it to not be literal ass.
It's not a lot. You're in this thread challenging people quite a bit, are you familiar with Next? This is not a "lot" for anyone who knows the framework
I am. I mean it's a LOT in the sense that its just wide coverage. A lot of stuff that isn't particularly demonstrative, is just boilerplate. That's what I mean by "a lot". The work takes time, not knowledge or skill.
It's definitely a lot. It will take more than 2-4h You will do a silly mistake/bug that will cost you an hour. You might even spend a couple hours on adjusting CSS. And it's way worse than that, because you're not just doing this stupid assignment bare bones. You're competing against others that might have no problem putting in 2 days of work on this. By the looks of it, if a candidate does what you mentioned, they'd get a quick no, because the company would find it lacking, and they would "prefer to go with other candidates". There's no objective way of knowing what's "good enough", so candidates try to "go the extra mile", spending way too much time and consequently inflating the idea of what's reasonable for an interview. It's a problem. I've got 15 years in the industry, and the older I get and more senior the positions, the less inclined I am to spend time on assignments. Maybe these are good to filter out newly grads or whatever, but if you're hiring a senior, a 1 on 1 with an engineer discussing past projects is far more valuable. You can also just have HR reach out to former employers and colleagues that would verify a candidate is qualified. This kind of test based interviews are a scourge.
yeah, doesn't seem really functional at the end. But it is just a LOT to do, that doesn't test much. Like it's tons of just basic boilerplate.
Bruh these jobs are fucking scams. ONLY A SUCKER WORKS FOR FREE
Surely feels like it!
For anyone who claims that this is free dev work. I'd like to hear what your experience in the industry is. There is nothing usable that would be produced here. This should be a day's work for someone who's only ever built bootcamp projects For a mid level Dev it should be 2-4 hours, including all the polish and making up the nice logical commit flow - that would be the hardest part for me, I'd just bang this out in a couple of hours and add it to git as 'first commit' in a real-world scenario. Maybe three commits. Server setup and feature 1, feature 2. I think the 5-7 days the op mentioned is the delivery date. Most recruiters understand that you may have a full time job. May need to do some research and can't devote 4-8 hours on this in one sitting, hence they give you a week to do it. I'ma gonna steal this for my next recruiting round.
People will post a code test that says something like "make an api that adds two numbers together and returns the sum" and commenters will claim it was some kind of free work scam to build a finance app. And they will be heavily upvoted to the top, just like the current top comment and a bunch of others all over this post.
I completely agree with this; it doesn't strike me as unusual or unfair.
Yeah I don't know what everyone is getting so excited about. It's asking for just a generic page that is using React `useState`. Honestly the whole "free work" thing is complete bullshit and doesn't happen. For design, perhaps, but for web dev. No way.
the part that sticks out to me is the user experience and design part. actual ux design is way too involved for it to be a take home test on its own, free labor or otherwise. most ux sprints are a week long, and thats assuming you have an existing persona to work off of. also when you do contextual inquiries or user interviews you have to incentivize the user, which usually involves like a coffee or a gift card. so $10-20 per user and you’re usually using 2-3 across all your tests so that’s about $200ish and yeah i get it, a lot of small companies have a really poor understanding of ux design and they are realistically expecting a design based on “intuition”. but that’s all the more reason to raise an eyebrow. when shit hits the fan because of poor design choices, you’re to blame.
I dont think there is any implication that you need to go out and do user interviews for this task. they dont even mention anything about target audiences. this is not a UX designer role. I read that requirement as - we would like you to make the page look nice - center the table, add some borders and padding to the cells, use a outlined/filled star icon for the favourite button, use a font other than the default times new roman just to show that you can put together a page that doenst look s\*\*t.
it's not a ux designer role, but it's not a graphic designer role either. there is no relevance of making the deliverable pretty... unless they want to shoehorn the applicant into a "unicorn" role. in which case, it's partially a ux designer role, or at least it is considering the mention of user experience explicitly. so it's either: a) they don't know what they're talking about, but make requests like they do and are therefore going to be bad employers b) they do know what they're talking about but aren't clear about what they want and are therefore going to be bad employers there is no winning here.
Or its a role working on a small team developing internal web apps for backoffice use, where you are lucky if you have a graphic dewsigner available to choose fonts and colors let alone a dedicated UX designer doing persona stories. As a frontend/fullstack developer you are expected to layout html forms and datagrids in a logical and clean way based on a product managers specs and maybe a rough sketch. No fancy transitions or effects. Just plain grids of form fields. I've spent most of my career working in these roles, and most of the companies were quite successful and not bad employers.
internal tools still need a ux designer. either way, if user experience wasn’t important, it wouldn’t have been mentioned, but it was, so clearly they think it is important
Any frontend developer worth their salt will undrstand the basics of UX. it's really not that hard. i would expect it of anyone but the most junior hires.
the basics of ux is applied knowledge not learned knowledge. my experience is that most front end developers (and graphic designers) do not understand that difference, and therefore, no, don't understand the basics of ux.
I'd like to think that most experienced devs are fairly prolific users of web applications from companies that do actively practice concious UX, and therefore assimilate the basics of what a functional design is. You really dont need much. Align all your fields in orderly columns, add a bit of padding here, a bit of margin there, group like things together. Use active colors for active stuff and passive colors for labels. Most of these sort of jobs dont require much more than that. 80% of your work will be adding new fields and forms to some exisitng layout. Sure you want someone with some design skills to create the basic layout for a new app, but that happens once in a blue moon, and you'll ususally just base it off one of the other apps you already have. In the context of job applications like this one, UX is a buzzword people put on their CVs and their job adds. I dont think anyone is expecting to hire the next allan cooper for this role.
you're definitely running off the assumption that it's for an internal tooling team role, even though **nothing** in the op makes that distinction. but either way you still need ux designers for your internal tools. proper affordances optimize and increase efficiency of workers. there is no reason to skimp out on the design of internal tools. a functional design is not a usability focused design. it's just a design... that functions. if you don't know why certain design decisions are made, it's impossible to infer how design elements are more/less usable. making a design pretty is a different story, and yes, that's something that you can gain a rough understanding of and incorporate. ux is different, you don't learn "the basics" and incorporate it into the design, you observe and involve users, and use the insights from that to create the design. as for ux being a buzzword for some companies and people. yes, i totally agree that it happens, but it implies certain expectations and responsibilities, which again, a software engineer should not be responsible for or expect to do.
> This should be a day's work unpaid > For a mid level Dev it should be 2-4 hours unpaid
This is actually a good assessment. 1) They want you to touch on all the Next.js-specific features, without needing to go extremely deep into any of them. It's usually a good sign when the assessment requires good framework-specific knowledge because it means their team didn't just blindly pick it due to hype 2) I don't think it's free labor; auth is the hardest part of building a Nextjs app and they're letting you skip it, which is another green flag for me A lot of it sounds tedious, but it's more of a "wide" test than a "deep" test if that makes sense. They want to see how well you can write idiosyncratic code in this particular framework. However: if you have bad vibes or get a bad feeling about them, don't do it. I'm only offering my subjective opinion based on the images you shared.
> his is actually a good assessment. Its 95% boilerplate > idiosyncratic You mean idiomatic. Idiosyncratic code is exactly NOT what you want to be doing.
We have different definitions of boilerplate & yep, that's what I meant lol
I mean boilerplate for "stuff that is just kind of necessary for getting the thing done, but is just checking boxes, not actually doing the unique work."
Hey just for fun. Upload these screenshots to Claude 3.5 and tell it to read it and build out the entire project and provide all the code. See what it does.
once i gave an interview for a small company in gurgaon. they asked me to make a oAuth system using code-igniter. at first i tried to make it but after 1-2 days i got the idea that they might be just looking for free work. so i submitted a non working half built code. after 1 month their senior software engineer called me and said you have put so much effort in it, so why not just finish it. i told him i can't.
This is totally normal and people that say "5-7 days lul" probably never had to do one of these while working 40 hours and having other responsibilities. The way i see it. This is awesome. Look how thorough they are. Whoever wrote that wants to make sure you have good understanding of Next. And serioulsy having to integrate your code into their project (and lets be real this is a very simple task) would be more of an headache than to write it on their own. And they did not specify which version of next so you might even go for RC and show your understanding of caching. i don't know man. sounds like a great opportunity and i would not consider them moving the salary towards your expectations a red flag. Just my 2 cents
I'm guessing maybe the 5-7 days was a "we want the result in 5-7 days" not a "this is 5-7 days of work".
usually when they say 5-7 days they mean about 5-7 hours so you can work on it after work. Starting the day you received it unless they explicity state a start date
Not really, this is a real life example of something you would probably do regularly in the job. This is a few hours of work, less if you’re familiar with the latest next version and even less if you can use a UI library you’re familiar with. If I wanted or needed this job I’d be pretty jazzed they didn’t come up with some bullshit I had to study for.
> before devoting myself to a test (they wrote 5-7 days). that's enough that it needs to be paid. 4 hours is probably the absolute MAX someone should possibly accept for unpaid, and that really depends on the persons existing skills and negotiating power. Should be much lower.
I had a similar coding challenge for my current job. This job has proven to be the best job I've had by far. It has easily been worth the multi-day coding challenge, and I'm so glad I did it. Since being hired, I've participated in interviewing other candidates. We've simplified our interview process in the last few years so we no longer require a coding challenge. I wish we hadn't because the quality of the candidates we talk to is generally very low. (People claiming several years of relevant experience and can't answer basic questions about Typescript et cetera.) tl;dr this isn't free work. The company isn't going to take your weekend repo and try to monetize it. They are trying to raise the bar and hire competent candidates. If the salary is good and you want the job, you should do the challenge.
Appreciate the straightforwardness. My primary gripe is the fact that I’ve only had a 30min interview, with their HR. No inteoductions, og even chemistry check with someone id be working with. I’m “for” code assignments, but I’ve experienced more concise and simple assignments, that would cover enough to give the companies an idea of the level. And if the assignments are larger, I’d expect them to come at a later stage in the process. Throwing a 30min chat, and then a multi-day assignment straight away, just feels disrespectful to a candidates time :)
All this requirements sound weirdly specific. A simple TODO list app can prove your knowledge better than this.
If you sort of want the job but sort of don't want to do free labor just tell them, "Hey, I will do this, but I want to go over it together to explain my thought process instead of just submitting it somewhere; that way we can have a back and forth and you can understand my thought process better instead of trying to figure it out yourself, and if they say no to THAT, then that is a red flag my friend and do not waste anymore time communicating with them.
They gonna find a better candidate as soon as you hand that in. Program in a deadman switch. If you get hired, remove it. if you get told to fuck off, well well, bye bye future feature.
Sounds nice on paper but they can always reverse engineer the deadman switch. They have the code anyway.
I agree that this is bs and not worth doing but I think it's much more likely that they just have an incompetent hiring manager or whatever. It would be much more work to run this as a real scam than to just build the thing...
The company is going to remove any back doors and switches because they have the source code
A company this lazy or inept is going to find 50 bytes embedded in a feature this size? You absolutely overestimate their aptitude or code linting / scanning prowess.
Sketchy for sure 😅 But would rather not do it at all then
Don't commit any code in their repo. Only show the result via Teams. 5 - 7 days of work without a proper contract is insane.
Better to just walk away. If you're good enough to pimp a pimp, you might as well just be freelancing.
I don’t see what’s actually commercially useable about the product of the test though. This doesn’t seem particularly complex nor particularly useful to anyone. If it’s so minimal ChatGPT could probably do most of it I hardly think it’s worth farming out to applicants.
Not trying to dishearten but this is a really simple project maybe a day's work.
> Is this free labor? Are you worried you're doing someone's job for free? If so, then no, it's not free labor, because the result is commercially useless. Whether you should spend your time on it is another story. If you feel they're legit, and you have a good chance at landing this position, you should do it. If you feel there's a red flag, or too many yellow flags, don't do it. But if the only red flag you see is them trying to get "free labor" out of you, I guarantee this ain't it. It's much harder to land a job in tech today than it was 2 years ago. There's fewer vacancies, ans those that have them are pickier. And I had to complete similar assignments in the past - even when the VC money in tech was at its highest.
At all the enterprise-level jobs I;ve worked in the apst, a project like this was ALWAYS a part of the hiring process. And if you think this is software they're going to reuse or sell again, you are delusional plain and simple. This sounds so far from a finished, deliverable product that it's laughable.
Jesus, fuck that.
Unless they will be paying you for your time, this is outrageous and smells like a scam.
As much as I hate take home assignments, I believe when they say 5-7 days, its like 1 hour per day. Not a full 40 hour week to do this.
Bruh i just finished codemonk assessment for backend engineering, u won't believe they asked to create rest api, Django server framework and jwt authentication, with setup with postgres database in docker ☠️, i atleast had to create and use 4 or 5 emails to use chat gpt 4 o version because it's limited for querying for my questions. I put a two days whole night i didn't slept and I created postman documentation and put it on GitHub and submitted to their email and i haven't received any response. I have full filled all the requirements and and also working properly as they asked me to they haven't responded anything. 💀 My two days damn time wasted.
Sure to god you can put this whole document in gpt4 with some tech stack and your prefrences, it will give you a whole alomost working code spend like a day to fix it and ship it. Obviously if you want to but that's how I sometimes respond to these type of assignments
Its best to chat gpt it
Is it for a junior role? This is a shit load of work for an interview. But if you’re desperate to find a job just do it. Maybe you’ll get feedback. the practice will definitely help you improve and you can put it on your GitHub.
It’s a senior role. I have interviews with 5+ companies, in the closing rounds. I just feel this assignment is rather large, given I’ve only had one intro call with their HR person so far. I’m not opposed to assignments, but they shouldn’t throw large assignments after candidates after a 30min introduction call. It should be after you get a chance to speak to the CTO/similar as well - IMO. With multiple interviews and multiple tests, this really adds up and eats all free time
If an employer can't determine your fit after a few interviews and a 2 hour practical test of skills, then they're probably a shitty place to work.
If I really liked the company and I was in at least the second round of interviews I might do it. But as just an initial screening? I'm not going to waste my time on random shots in the dark. The application process already wastes too much time.
I agree
A senior dev can crank this out in less than 2 hours. Not free work. It’s literally a list view and a detail view with a favorite button. You don’t even need to make it pretty, implement authentication, or any backend code.
This doesn't seem specific in a useful to a business way, I'm no expert on hiring scams I could just see this being a result of people not understanding the point but still needing to create an engineering test that say demonstrates an applicant has the qualities found on the job posting. Not saying it is worth your time, or that they lack an ulterior motive, I just don't quite see profit as that motive.
It’s not really asking for much. It’s verbose because ChatGPT wrote it, but it’s just two pages.
Pass on it. If they are getting free labour like this, they are possibly also going to exploit you when you work there. Alternatively they should pay you for a days work as a test “work day”. Worst case they avoided hiring someone who wasn’t a good fit - cheaper than paying for a day’s work. Best case they have an engineer to hire and they wrote good code they can use. Best case for you - you got paid and landed a job. Worst case you got paid to write code they might use.
Hard pass
A coding test should be clearly a non production application or website. With specific goals and built in challenges to assess your skill level. Not complete a full project. It also shouldn't take realistically more than 4 hours. Your time is valuable and if it's 40 hours of work it's easily a scam. All the legitimate coding challenges I've taken are more, fix an almost complete codebase and deploy. This shows you can assess what isn't complete, fix any "gotchas" put in there to see if you can identify bugs or know how to test your code, and evaluate your ability to deploy it and problem solve.
Senior dev who hires sometimes here. The task in the document, in isolation, is not typical of a company looking for free work. It's written like a test. If I'm understanding it, it's just a very wordy outline of a little project where you make a small 2 page site that reads some simple data out of a database, displays it, and mutates it. It's very simple, and not excessive at all for a test. I'd estimate this to take someone not more than 3-4 hours, including database creation and a few back end endpoints, if not provided (I think they might be though). 3 hours is my personal limit when I've written technical tests to give to potential hires. I think it's important to respect people's time. Not requiring auth is a positive sign, because it likely would require some modification to be used with customer data. Not 100% but does bode well. There are some slightly excessive things in there, like documentation. I generally just expect a README that tells me a bit about how to build and run the app. Maybe this is what they mean because I can't see anything more being reasonable. Certainly not diagrams. We can talk about how it works at a technical interview if need be. You are 100% correct on aligning on salary expectations before spending time on things. Any legit opportunity would understand this. This works to their benefit too. Why waste time on candidates who aren't able to accept your best offer? Documenting performance with graphs? Smells a bit funny. No reason I can think of to make this a test requirement. Same with upping the offer, but I've had that happen before. Is 5-7 days the deadline for the submission? Or do you mean they want you to do a 5-7 day work trial? If the second, run for the hills! That would be highly irregular and totally unnecessary. Overall I'd probably skip if you aren't getting good vibes. I've never felt the need to ask this for any job I've been seriously considering. There's probably a reason you're suspicious.
To be fair, I think the diagram thing is just put in there if that’s your preferred way of describing how it works. It didn’t come across as mandatory. The rest of the stuff I agree with.
I think you're right. I don't think no diagram would affect your application. I think someone just likes writing technical test specs :) It seems reasonable to me in terms of the amount of work required. No idea what they plan to do with that work once you turn it over...
\> 3-4 hours You got good jokes, man.
You call the api, store the data, manipulate it, allow the user to save their favourites and search. Not sure how this is complicated lol
It’s pretty simple. It might take longer if you know none of the tech or languages, but you can get there following a quick start guide for parts like next.js. If you need to learn everything like JS, css, next, db setup, git, etc., might not be well suited for the job.
If you are good at learning on the fly you could fake your way into the job, assuming this were an actual job and not the scam it actually is. I have zero knowledge of BSD but I'm sure I could fake it until I made it.
I was even going to say 2-3 hours. It’s not a long task.
I just wrote what I thought it would take me if I wanted to do the bare minimum on it. 1. Spin up a database container via docker-compose. 2. Some CREATE TABLEs (probably one) for a simple table of tokens and whatever else it mentions. Throw them in an SQL file and include in repo. 3. Next.js app with database driver lib. A few endpoints for create, update and search on those entities. We don't need to carefully craft or scope any of these, I'd do them directly in SQL, but query builder would be fine too. Quick Dockerfile based on Node for docker-compose. 4. The 2 page UI. Throw down some pre made CSS (whatever lib you prefer) and just focus on the markup. A default look is fine for a test app. The rest is a few simple React components. E.g. wrapping a table with rows rendered for tokens, or similar. Favourite doesn't do anything on the back end, apparently, so just stick it in localstorage. Next.js gives you ISR if you know how to use it. 5. Run history and pick out the commands needed to spin up from fresh check out. Put them in the README file. (Be committing for some history whilst doing these things...) I'm ignoring anything about performance graphs because I think that's silly. Am I missing something? I've made tens of versions of this app over the years in a handful of frameworks. This is bread and butter web dev. The doc is well written but does make it seem like more work than it is. E.g. performance and UX considerations? I'd be surprised if anyone could mess up either of those for a list of entities on a page! Edit: I'm including creating the database schema and API too. I'm not clear on whether they provide these and this is simply a front end task. If so, I'd pay a bit more attention to the look of the UI, but not much tbh.
Seems sketchy; however, it looks like a fun problem to tackle.
If you do it, add a Proprietary License. This is not a standard open-source license but a custom license that you draft yourself, stating that the code is for personal use only and cannot be copied, distributed, or used without explicit permission. Or you can use a standardized license, the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) is the most restrictive open-source license. It requires that any software that uses your code, even over a network, must be open-sourced under the same license. However, it still allows usage under the terms of the license. For the strictest control, a custom proprietary license is the way to go. This ensures that any unauthorized use can be directly addressed.
The assignment in written unnecessary detailed, but the deliverable is relatively simple: - list view from external api - search feature (basic list filtering based on html input) - detail view - favorite button (react context)
Im a bit confused by the first part, would the user use the site to keep track of their own personal tokens or does it means something else?
Reads like a book assignment to me. More work than I'd do for free. I'd give them a quote.
i thought this thing happens only in India
You could do this task in a 6-8 hour period. I doubt this is exploiting you for free labor. If you like the salary, I think it’s worth trying out. Like someone else said, be weary of any “starter” repo they give you or you find online.
Tldr usually it’s not free labour but clear sign of terrible company culture
Just draw up a simple IP contract stating that the assignment you complete is your IP and by completing the assignment for them to assess, you are not transferring ownership of the IP. You can add that if they offer you the job, with a minimum term, you can transfer the IP ownership. Alternatively if they don't want to offer you the job but want the IP, you can agree on a fixed fee
I'd also say red flags would be dependent on the salary and scope of the job. For example if this is a job interview for a blue chip company offering $200,000 annual salary, it would definitely raise less red flags than a $20,000 job for a new company
I mean I wouldn’t do it cause I know I’d spend like a day making this and then get ghosted, but I don’t think this is free labour? Seems like a pretty simple nextjs app maybe they just wanna see if you know TS and can get around a next app
I received a similar test but in laravel and vuejs There is a test for laravel which has a dashboard and CRUD then a different test on front end. I dont know why laravel has its own dashboard. When i can just create it in vuejs and tailwind For the next part, i have to host it as well. Then and only then they will consider my application ahhaha The salary? Around 50k to 60k. Haha tf?
I think this is fine tbh
if you're worried about it you can put a license that prevents commercial/non commercial usage without your written direct approval
This assignment looks legit. They just used a lot of words to describe it which makes it look like a huge task, but ultimately is simple.
Stuff like that is far too specific to be a simple coding challenge for hiring. To give you an example of what a coding challenge may be, I recently applied to a large company here in Germany and their task was to simply code a TicTacToe game using the language of my choice. It could have a GUI or it could simply run on console. It's a short challenge to exercise your ability to complete tasks on-time and within a timeframe, however it also shows your competency in figuring out something. In my opinion, I'd walk away from something like that - clearly if they want you to work for free then their working conditions and salary expectations are never going to benefit you as an employee.
I'm gonna start applying again soon, and this is giving me some confidence. I feel like I could do this in an afternoon
Send them a quote at time and a half your normal hourly rate. That’s absolutely a company trying to sucker desperate developers into doing free work.
I don't see anything complicated in this task but they over complicated the requirements. This could just be "You have an api of paginated tokens. Create a list page and a details page with each token. Apply best practices". I think this is more of a "attention to detail" kind of test. It is simple to make but they want to see that you can read the requirements with care (some developers struggle to throughly read the requirements, myself included); setup a project and the quality of setup (some developers don't know how to setup a project, your own custom eslint, prettier, additional tools that don't come with nextjs; this proves that you take great care in your personal development also); explain in human terms (for managers) what is going on and what you have done proving your ability that you have good communication skills with non technical people and that you can work with clients. I would say do the assignment. I don't see more than 2 days work on the technical side and 2 (or more) days on the documentation side. I personally like companies that have assignments like this. It shows that they are mature (no "rockstar developer wanted" kind of garbage) and that grown-ups are in charge.
But that’s 4 days of work, after only a 30min introduction call. Just feels a lot like a blind shot
4 was extremely generous. If you were doing this as your own personal project, its a couple of hours (on a side note, to quote a former collegue of mine: "nothing takes a couple of yours. It means that every task should be taken seriously). But since I think they are actually testing your attention to detail and communication skills, I gave it 4 days, just to be safe. I think they want you to deliver a product as you would if they were your (non technical) client and that requires people skills (ability to explain technical things to non technical people). But I might be wrong. Give it two days, if you think it is actually too much work for you, refuse them. It's your decision. I would personally do the assignment in 2 days (I would include docker setup also just for fun so they can run it "everywhere", bonus points). If in additional stages it turns out they are a bad company, I would say thank you and goodbye. Tests are not just for companies to fuck with you but also a clue for you to know that you will be working with serious developers and serious managers that know their craft. In additional stages, ask them about work culture, how do they approach problems, do they put emphasis on fast development no matter the code quality, what are their processes, how do they communicate problems, do they have some kind of in-house learning program to further your development, do they have a blog and do they like to share knowledge, will they send you on conferences to improve on your skills, are they contributing to open source etc... On a personal note, no offence, but try to see it on their side. They probably had a couple of people that were just bad at their job but passed all the tests or vise-versa. Software development is a responsible job and there are a lot of childish and spoiled people on the market, hence ping-pong tables, fusbal tables and playstation, xbox and who know what else (I know of company that actually has a roller coaster between floors, I shit you not). I see this test as a way to filter out responsible people. But again, I might be wrong and am overcomplicating it and it really is a dogshit company. At the end of the day, It's your choice.
People in this sub complain about getting whiteboard interviews and then complain when they get actually interviewed on what they’d be doing if hired. This feels like a pretty good display of ability. Still if it feels shady don’t do it.
The stuff they are asking for is far beyond what should happen in an interview. If they want stuff like that, along with the docs, that will take you longer than an hour to write the code, fix it where it will fit in, give performance test results in a full set of docs for the code probably bringing in the performance charts. One method I sawnfor an interview was to use your phone to project on the wall that would contain things an app you had written. You could then tailor it for about an hour.
This is a Todo list just with some syntactic sugar on top of it to make it look cool.
Can someone please explain why this is bad? I've been practicing making projects for years for free to fill up my CV hoping for a chance to get into the web dev market, what's one more project that finally lands you a job? I'm genuinely curious. If I had that assignment asked of me to get a job, I would do it in a heartbeat.
so i can’t comment on whether this type of exercise is generally bad, but this specific one is definitely suspicious to me. the part that’s suspicious is the user experience and design evaluation criteria. if this was a take home test for a ux designer with no actual software engineering and just a handoff of wireframes, they’re already asking for too much. it takes 5 days to get there working 9-5 and likely there are expenses you have to pay for out of pocket. so, clearly, they don’t mean “user experience” when they say “user experience”. this is a type of employer that is very opinionated on what a design should be, does not tell you what that design is they expect you to make, and expect a software engineer to create the design. if a product fails due to the design, you know who is blamed? the software engineer that is also for some reason doing the design work.
This is what GPT is for
If they're giving you this much work now, think of how it's going to be actually working there. In a normal market, I'd say hard pass, but things are so screwy right now that I'd probably do it just to get an offer so I can use it for leverage in another job.
If they actually use the code without them paying for it, sue them. Be sure to not release the project under an open source license if you do end up going through this.
SSG for a take home test? here's my PR with 1000 static files
even thou valid idea but we will not make like this . 😅 . Explain is the task of sa not code monkey .
5-7 days for a interview test? That is NUTS. They are playing you. Tell them "Sorry, I dont work for free"
I'd take this over in person coding interviews doing leetcode bs any day of the week.
Why?
Because this would actually be fun, instead of blood pressure raising.
Name and shame them
You can put in backdoors, threaten legal action, etc, of course. But at the end of the day, the simple question is: does their reputation afford them such a demand? If they have a trustworthy and prestigious reputation, then this is actually ok. Otherwise, if you’re just going off the salary they promised you or whatnot, probably not a good idea to do this. I’ve done stuff of the same magnitude (but which unlike this was clearly a fictitious assignment) for a very well-known company with an excellent reputation. You should explain your concerns to them. If they’re dismissive probably not a good place to work at anyway, if not, well, you’ll sleep better.
I honestly don’t like the criteria im reading. Not only do you need to code the backend and use both SSR and SSG as well as make it performant (premature optimization or spend more time benchmarking, testing and adjusting), plus create a front end that is functional as well as looks good. So you need to be a full stack dev, probably part devops too, and a UI designer as well. I’m not sure if its free labor but it’s definitely on the unethical side. What happened to a probationary period?? You work and if you don’t fit within 3 months then they let you go. These ridiculously long code challenges waste lots of time, are unpaid and if you’re rejected, you’ve now lost time you could have spent on other companies. They should start paying people for the code challenge time.
Yeah this is the part that’s a problem. If they just asked one to do the features then that’s fine, but to suddenly optimize a thing that shouldn’t need that at this point and making things pretty etc hint that it’s “you’ll do all design, planning, coding, optimizing, server…” position. Then again, if it’s related to crypto then most of these places are like that and don’t want to pay multiple people.
yeah, its an easy time sink. Making the pages with the buttons? easy, quick. Making it something that you're comfortable representing yourself with? that will take a lot more work. Especially when it's for a job that you might want to get. You'd want to put a "little extra" and it suddenly is this LONG thing. While open ended is nice, it should also be very clear as to the actual goal and expectation, not leave this massive area that wastes time. Since then you can't tell the difference between someone that made something that works efficiently in the time, or someone that spent a whole week trying to make it perfect.
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You got a free side project, you can add your own features to it and host the project, in your free time that is. Screw this company.
This isn’t even a side project… this is akin to a musician playing a few scales to demonstrate extremely basic competency.
I don't need some sketchy corp to give me software dev ideas.
Bruh what kind of side projects are you making lists with a favorite button? This is a normal everyday task for any frontend developer. Fetch data make a list add a button make the button do something. I don't understand everyone here being so angry over a task like this, they just wanna clear out the recruits that can't do anything. If you make tasks like this to simple nowadays they will just copy paste it into chatgpt
I mean in a way it is clearing out the recruits that can't or won't do anything... see this entire thread
Name and shame?
I had done something similar and got call for interview just for them to tell me that they don’t pay high salary because they’re government entity. Then why TF you wasted my time on your stupid assignment?! My own experience with doing one of this assignment includes extra unit test, integration test and e2e test in cyprus with CI/CD and a detail commit message. Took me full 1 week on grinding to complete. One thing I can tell you from my experience is that even this is a legit one you better stay away from this kind of company that deploy these kind of practice. Imagine how rotting their management is to have people implementing this system in the first place. Choosing the right company is everything. You can clearly define how shtty a company is by just looking at their JD and the way they put this kind of test for you to complete.
If you think this is free work you either don't know how to read a requirements doc and/or the job is to senior for you.
This seems like the hiring process equivalent of Amazon shipping one snack-size candy bar in a refrigerator box. Lots of infrastructure & process, very little content. Therefore, this seems like it was written by someone who doesn't fully understand the scam. The company is supposed to get something *tangible* and *usable* from the candidate. Skills evaluation should never take more than a few hours. Certainly not long enough that anyone could expect payment for it.
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YES
yes lmfao