1. Reasons for Doing Take-Home Challenges
Developers accept take-home assignments primarily because it is the only company that called them back, often stemming from resumes that fail to generate enough calls.
Hear it at 0:13 →Engineering video
1:20 · 8 August 2025
Developers accept take-home assignments primarily because it is the only company that called them back, often stemming from resumes that fail to generate enough calls.
Hear it at 0:13 →Many engineers are paralyzed by past negative experiences with live coding and prefer take-homes to avoid the fear of being watched, rejected, and feeling inadequate.
Hear it at 0:38 →Take-home assignments feel comfortable because receiving requirements and writing code independently is the exact dynamic developers are used to in their daily jobs.
Hear it at 1:06 →If take home assignments are such a bad deal for software engineers because they are a red flag because they are usually a waste of time because you get no commitment. Why can't software engineers just opt out and why do still why are people still doing them? Well, the number one reason is because it's the only interview they got. Obviously, people are being rational and saying yes, you know, I don't want to do it, but this is the only company that actually called me back this week. So, what am I going to do? Do nothing. And we'll see in a second. This is usually a problem of not investing enough in your
job applications, not having a resume that actually gets you calls. So you want to focus on getting more people to call you back because they will fix all these problems in the interview process. They are terrified by other interview formats. Most of us had very bad experiences with live coding. It's very traumatic. They can treat you very poorly and then all that becomes kind of interview trauma and people are just paralyzed. They say I cannot code with someone looking at my code. They feel a rejection and above all they fear how they will feel with themselves when they get rejected. So they just avoid live
coding. They'll be they're like, "Oh, I'll just do whatever it takes not to go to that thing again." And it's also the dynamic that we are used to as developers, right? You get some requirements, you code. So it's literally the habit. That's how you what you've been doing at your job for the last two years. And so it feels like let me just jump on it. Like that's the first it's a reflex