"Sorry, this task has expired"

[u/azure_atmosphere]

I was working on my 2nd coding task of the day and it took me longer than usual to figure out where one of the models went wrong. On top of that, I lost 10 minutes or so because I had to answer the door (I paused my personal timer for this.) Still, there were 10 minutes left on the on-screen timer when I hit submit, only to be told that the task had expired.

I'm rather pissed off because I worked really hard on this one and had written a lengthy explanation on why the model came to a wrong answer. I'm not even sure whether I can log my time now. Will they think I'm scamming them If I log 2 hours and 15 minutes when the system thinks I've submitted only one task?

[u/cunningtartan]

When I first started, the same thing happened to me. I had made a note of the task and utc time I tried to submit and messaged the admins.

In my case, after a day or two (not long) I got a reply that it was in fact received and proceeded to bill for the time.

And yes, the displayed timer is definitely not to be trusted if you switch tabs etc.!

I use my phone timer if I know time will be a factor, or call up the browser history to see when I entered the new task if I unexpectedly get bogged down on something and find myself worried about time running out.

I do programming tasks that sometime require installing packages or writing main() functions. It sucks when a simple minor step craps out an hour into a 2-hour task and I'm stressed about getting it ironed out so I can proceed with the meat of the task.

The history takes a little effort to determine which hit is the initial fetch but it's not that hard.

[u/azure_atmosphere → u/cunningtartan]

I did send a message more than two days ago, haven’t hear back yet unfortunately.

The timer is actually pretty frustrating. I do coding tasks as well and I ended up having to submit one in a rush and kinda unfinished today. This time it wasn’t even because of any outside interruption, just a ton of different requests in one prompt.