There is a YC company that wanted a 4 hour recorded session of me coding up a problem they had given, with me explaining what I am doing for the entire 4 hours.
I’m pretty sure I did that exact take home project. It was interesting and I felt I did a good job, but it was excessive. I really wanted the job though (rejected due to getting vetoed on the last interview I think).
"We don't want you to spend more than 3-4 hours on this", where "this" was:
Build a log parser for streaming Apache CLF. The parser should:
Keep a rolling monitor of the top 10 requests, displaying their velocity in req/sec as a rolling average.
Display aggregates of visitor counts over the last hour and day.
Have high watermark alerts when ingress traffic as a whole, or to hotspot URLs hit thresholds, and then be able to de-alert when traffic dropped.
Scaffolding to deploy same.
Unit tests and documentation for same.
Ability to ensure URLs were safe, stripped of any GET parameters.
> Often we’ll get people complaining about excessive interview loops, but when they describe the process it adds up to around 4-5 hours total.
One non-FAANG (not even close) well-known on HN's interview loop:
- recruiter screen - 30m
- hiring manager screen - 60m
- networking meeting - 30m
- resume deep dive - 60m
- peer interview - 45m
- cross-functional team collaboration interview - 60m
- leadership interview - 45m
- values interview - 30m
- department specific interview (picking on 'product') - 60m
- discuss take home writing project - 60m
- engineering collaboration - 30m
Things like that? Ridiculous. Oh, fun fact, they ask you to tell your references to expect a 30 minute call from them.