Engineering video
1:10 · 9 August 2025
In the speaker’s explanation, take-home assignments signal a one-way street where companies dictate requirements and arbitrary time estimates without accounting for scope and nuances. This reflects a top-down management mentality and a lazy interviewing approach with zero investment in proper evaluation.
Hear it at 0:00 →take-home task assignments are a red flag because it signals a poor engineering culture. Signals the fact that they frame software dev as a one-way street. They come up with the requirements and you implement whatever. Not only that, but they also gave you a time estimate. They said, "No, this should take two hours." When in reality, every professional software engineer knows that how much time something takes depends on the scope, on the quality they want, on all the nuances that you need to figure out. That's why we have refining sessions when we do a sprint.
It it also reflects top down management. So it's kind of like hey you know do this in two hours that's the mentality and don't think it will change like a lot of people think well this is only the interview. Most of times when the interview is like that the company is like that and there's also no commitment or respect for your time. So, usually it's the lazy way of interviewing from the company side because one of the most easy things you can do is draft a word document with a bunch of requirements and send it over. It takes zero cost on their side, zero investment into thinking, okay, how do you want to
evaluate people? What do they need to know? How are we going to make sure we grade them? So there's a clear definition of okay who's like mid senior, senior and so
