You finally received a Calendly invitation for a call with the recruiter. You got past the recruiter call and received a home assignment. You promised you would never do them again, but here we are. The opportunity looks promising, the company seems solid, or it’s just the first application that got past the initial round after tens or hundreds of attempts. So, you decided to take the home assignment for this one. The email sounds abstract but understanding: “You have a week to complete this. Don’t worry; it won’t need more than a few hours of your time. We understand that you have other obligations. We only want to see how you deal with the given problem.”

The home assignment is very abstract: no clear definition of the prerequisites, no explanation of the provided data or what each column means, and no clear end-goals. You’re thinking you should ask them for clarifications, but the last time you did with another company, you received another generic and unhelpful response. In any case, this seems to require days of your time, so you let them know about it. “Don’t worry, we understand it’s the festive season. We only want to see whether you know how to code and approach problems.”

You provide some simple and clean solution, write a couple of scripts, automate them with Docker and Docker Compose, and provide some documentation; everything you could do within three hours. No time for tests. You literally cannot spend more effort during this time of the year or this phase of your life. You want to spend time with your family on your free time. You expect some open-ended discussion when you meet the team to review improvements and discuss how the setup would look in a production setting.

No, you get an email saying you got rejected because the setup does not meet some requirements and a senior level for the role. You obviously dodged a bullet, but why can’t hiring/engineering teams have a proper discussion and give feedback face to face?

  • Give me your feedback on the solution, but try to understand why I delivered it in this state. How much time I spent on this? Were the instructions good enough? What I could improve if I had 10 more hours, days, or weeks?
  • Do you have doubts about whether I used AI to complete the task? Ask me to go through the code or modify some parts to implement a feature or extension. You wanted to see that I know how to code, right?
  • Ask me how I would approach the same problem in production. Did I build anything similar in the past? What are the lessons learnt?
  • How does your application or tech stack compare to this. Let me ask questions and dive into that. Perhaps I can show you how I help you (or how junior I am if I don’t ask/suggest anything).

But have this discussion or an additional technical interview with me. I deserve this conversation versus getting a simple rejection email. Now I spent 3+ hours (or others with more time will spend days on it), and you spent 30 (hopefully?) minutes evaluating it and 2 minutes writing some feedback. Years of experience don’t matter, you just evaluated me based on a 3-hour toy project and we never discussed about it. Maybe next time, let’s prioritize human conversations over impersonal rejections; it’s the least candidates deserve especially after home-assignments.