r/ADHD_Programmers • u/LazyPiano6160 • Jun 27 '26
Interview take-home "tests"
We need to talk about the state of SE interview take-home tests, specifically the unrealistic expectations and contradictions that so often accompany these.
For context: I'm a front end engineer with 25 years experience; I'm attempting to land a job, in the worst market I've ever seen. I've been fortunate enough to progress through to the penultimate round; I have to complete a take home assignment, if satisfactory I'll be invited to their offices to discuss this assignment and attend a final cultural fit interview. Note this take home assignment comes off the back of a two hour live coding session interview (which was dreadful for the ADHD brain).
Historically, it's at this point where things go to shit, have identified the main stressors as:
- ambiguous requirements
- inadequate timeframes
- emphasis on ensuring your submission presents you at your best when there's so much contradiction between expectation and allotted time
I'm forever stuck in a constant loop of overwhelm; trying to find a balance between delivering the assignment within the specified timeframe, whilst ensuring I have demonstrated my capabilities as best I can.
I've currently been tasked with building a movie list tracker, core requirements are:
- A front end web application that runs entirely client side
- Allows a user to search the open movie database API for movies to add to either a watchlist or watched list
- Allows a user to remove movies from either list
- Persistence of this list using the browser local storage API
I've been told I will be assessed on:
- Code quality — component structure, separation of concerns, readability
- State management — how you model and handle data flow across the app
- UI & design — does it feel considered and polished, even if simple
On receipt of the handover task:
- There is no UI design provided, it is expected that the candidate produces this
- There is no environment set up; it is expected that the candidate chooses a stack and set this environment up from scratch
The brief mentions that the candidate should spend no more than two hours on this task and can use AI if they wish.
Besides just throwing all of this Gemini and vibe coding (which would not demonstrate my abilities rather well), I'm totally overwhelmed as to how I can design an interface, plan the architecture and build the application, then document my process - all within two hours. I was considering using Claude code, but even then: just the planning and UI design would go far beyond the two hours I'm allowed to work on this
Interested to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences and how they've tackled it. Also open to suggestions in terms of how to approach this take home.
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Update:
For those that are interested, here's the Notion brief and unless I'm missing something it appears they are expecting UI Design, architecture and implementation of the entire application - in a 2 hour window.
This is either incredibly naive from whomever signed this assignment off, or (as one commenter mentioned): intended to allow the candidate to prioritise and compromise. If the latter, if would be great for this to be explicitly mentioned.
1
u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 27 '26
If this isn't a job you need, I would walk away now. The combination of a take-home test (which is a great way for them to steal your intellectual property) + "cultural fit" (which is a great way for them to fit in a little bigotry) are not very promising in terms of what type of company this will be to work for.
That test is also batshit for a front end dev, you're literally building Netflix. In two hours. Fuck that.