Advice for at-home programming challenges
- Cynthia Mattingly
- Jan 30, 2023
- 1 min read
Assigning job candidates a programming task to complete at home, despite having some problems, isn’t going away anytime soon. So how about some advice?
Usually you’ll have a set deadline. Good companies will indicate roughly how much time they think the task will take and not expect you to spend more than a few hours working on it. What the people on the company side often don’t account for is time to set up your system. I don’t use my private laptop for programming, and getting PHPStorm, Docker, xdebug, etc. installed last time I did one of these easily took two hours. These two hours shouldn’t count for the time allotted to the task, so if the deadline is tight or you know you will have to squeeze this in next to other responsibilities, you may want to ask for a longer deadline before starting.
Aside: If you are matter-of-fact about asking early and cheerfully assume that of course a reasonable company will want to set you up for success, that goes over better than realizing at the end of the deadline that you need an extension. "I don't have a working set-up on my private laptop and will have to install everything fresh, could we extend the deadline by one day to account for that?"...
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this is a very practical point about setup time. i've also found that configuring the local environment for a take-home challenge can easily add a couple of hours that aren't accounted for in the estimated task duration. it's good advice to proactively communicate this and ask for a buffer if the deadline seems tight. thanks for sharing this realistic perspective. Image to Image AI
75bd kept getting mentioned here and there, so I poked around mostly out of curiosity about the layout, not really to dive into anything deep. The first thing that stood out was how easy it is to move around—everything feels like it’s placed where you’d expect, so you’re not clicking in circles trying to find stuff. I’m also a sucker for clean info displays, and the tables rows didn’t feel cramped or messy when I skimmed them. It’s not trying to be flashy, just kind of practical in a nice way. The menu is easy to spot and the category blocks stay in the same spots as you bounce between pages, which makes the interface feel really consistent.
xoilac dạo này thấy nhiều người nhắc nên mình cũng ghé thử cho biết, kiểu vào lướt vài phút thôi chứ chưa xem kỹ gì. Cảm giác đầu tiên là giao diện nhìn thoáng, các phần nội dung được chia thành từng khối rõ ràng nên kéo xuống không bị lạc. Mình thích nhất chỗ họ trình bày thông tin theo dạng bảng cột, chữ không bị dính vào nhau nên đọc nhanh vẫn ổn. Thanh menu cũng đặt khá dễ thấy, bấm qua lại giữa mấy mục không phải mò lâu. Nói chung nhìn nhẹ nhàng, không bị rối mắt, nhất là cách họ tách các block nội dung và để menu điều hướng ngay trên giao diện.
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