It Shouldn’t Take That Long

In my opinion, a coding exercise (if there is one) shouldn’t take longer than an hour. The longer the task is, the more bias you introduce to the hiring process.

The most obvious reason is that some people may simply not have the time, for legitimate reasons. Some candidate might still have a full-time job elsewhere and other obligations when they get home.

The ethics of requiring people to use so much of their free time to work on a coding exercise without any pay seems highly questionable to me.

But even if we set the ethics aside, long coding tasks not only create bias when selecting candidates — as some of them drop out of the race when presented with the task — but also after the exercise is complete. People with more time will spend more time on it. For example, you might reject one candidate in favour of another because the first didn’t write tests but the second did. What is that really telling you, though? That the first candidate doesn’t know about testing? Unlikely. It may simply mean that the second candidate had more time to spare.

So no, sorry, I won’t waste a whole day during the weekend working on a coding task for a job that I might not even get!