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Discussion on: How do you feel about take home exercises for job interview?

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xngwng profile image
Xing Wang • Edited

Are there good open ended questions that only takes 1 or 2 hours?

I found there are two extreme: short technical/programming problems questions usually have solutions or code ready to be found quickly with google. And because it is so short, it is hard to tell if it is copied or original. Since if problem scope is small, most solutions are very similar. And in computer science, we use many naming conventions, different people could even named variables exactly same by accident.

longer form questions, can be more open ended, so if someone copied the solution it is pretty noticeable. but downside, of it would by default would take longer than 1 or 2 hours.

I am curious, are you willing to share some of the 1 or 2 hours problem you find that work well?

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molly profile image
Molly Struve (she/her)

Would be happy to share!

The one I did when I interviewed(we no longer use this) was to make a simple ruby script to handle restaurant reservations. It should have a starting number of tables that seat a set number of people and when someone asks for a table for x amount of people it should pick a table for them or tell them the restaurant is booked. I think I might have had other instructions but that was the gist of it. Here is the solution I came up with almost 4 years ago. Dug that one out of my email πŸ˜‰

Currently, we use this problem for our more Jr. candidates.