How to politely decline a take-home test task
When I read the title, I thought this was going to be a story about one of those ridiculous take-home tests that requires multiple days of work to complete. Reading the post (and some of the crucial follow up comments), it appears the author spent 2 hours with the environment they provided and gave up:<p>&gt; Currently, I&#x27;m about 2 and a half hours in, trying to get my virtual environment to run the baseline code they provided.<p>Reading between the lines (and from the comments&#x2F;follow ups) I think the take-home challenge might be working as designed: Filtering out candidates who are not yet experienced enough to handle the type of work the company does.<p>The author’s desire to substitute some of their own, different, code samples as evidence of qualification is likely missing the point: Quickly getting the code to run in the provided environment <i>was</i> part of the challenge.<p>We had a similar problem at a past company where we cast too broad of a net for candidates: When we did no-prep trials of the take-home challenge among team members who hadn’t seen it yet, completion times were all under one hour. When we gave it to loosely-screened candidates, we got several complaints from people who said they were on hour 8 and still couldn’t make a lot of progress.<p>Tightening up our pre-screening mostly fixed that problem. It’s not good to waste candidate’s time if they’re not going to be qualified.