> One thing I've been wondering lately about take-home tasks is how everybody complains about time estimates, and yet here's a bunch of "small projects" which someone pretends to have very precisely estimated.
When I interviewed people and gave them a take home assignment I was very confident in my estimate for one simple reason: I completed the tasks myself. We had 4 tasks for this for the 4 different types of jobs we hired for. The "estimate" was just double the time I needed to do the task myself. We got feedback from some of the candidates that our estimate was very good.
If I could always estimate the time AFTER I complete the task instead of before then estimation would not be hard at all.
- Junior developers should be able to finish this within a work day (8 hours)
- If you are already familiar with all technologies involved then it should take about 2 hours even with all optional tasks completed.
As an example our backend dev task was to parse a CSV file (supplied with the task) and provide 2 API endpoints (return format and url defined in the task) that access this data (free choice in language and libraries). The optional tasks for this was to include unittests and to use docker.
That really isn't much work. We did get some good feedback about this estimate both from junior developers and seniors after they were hired or rejected. Most seniors seem to complete this task in about 1.5h to 3h and juniors do seem to be able to complete this in about 6h.
When I interviewed people and gave them a take home assignment I was very confident in my estimate for one simple reason: I completed the tasks myself. We had 4 tasks for this for the 4 different types of jobs we hired for. The "estimate" was just double the time I needed to do the task myself. We got feedback from some of the candidates that our estimate was very good.
If I could always estimate the time AFTER I complete the task instead of before then estimation would not be hard at all.