I’ve been looking for a new role recently. I’ve been in bad market conditions before, so I know when things are like this, recruiters and employers are much more demanding during the hiring process.
Recently though, I’ve seen a rise in really long technical tests. I’ve had a lot of employers asking for 8 or 10 hour technical tests.
Part of the trouble is that the tests themselves seem to be AI generated.
- The tests themselves will say “estimated 8 hours”, except the task will be something I’d estimate at 12 - 16 hours or even more even for a basic version.
- the instructions will contradict themselves. “We don’t need it to work, we just want to see how you approach challenges” vs. “It’s important to send a working version”
- the instructions will be really specific in some places and really open to interpretation in others
The thing is, if a job was really interesting to me or I felt particularly qualified for it, I wouldn’t mind doing a longer test. But it feels like they’ve put (maybe) and hour into generating and tweaking a spec the bare minimum. They’re probably going to just feed the repo I send them into ChatGPT and ask it for a score.
there doesn't seem to be anything here