Bombed a take-home because I over-tested for edge cases nobody asked about, wish I'd asked more questions upfront
Take-home said 'handle edge cases appropriately' so I spent four of my six hours writing tests for inputs that were never going to happen in the actual use case, empty arrays, negative timestamps, unicode edge cases nobody mentioned. Submitted late and the actual review focused entirely on the core logic and readability, none of my extra tests came up. Should've just asked the recruiter what 'appropriately' meant instead of guessing for four hours.
3 comments
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AnonymousAnon Started literally timeboxing take-homes now regardless of how much time they give, if the core solution isn't done by the halfway mark I stop adding tests and just ship what works. Perfect edge case coverage on broken time management doesn't get you the next round anyway.
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AnonymousAnon Take-homes are the worst for this, the instructions are always vague on purpose it feels like. Emailing to clarify scope should honestly be normalized more.
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AnonymousAnon I've done the exact opposite mistake, barely tested anything because I assumed they only cared about the happy path, then got dinged for missing an obvious edge case. Feels like there's no safe default without just asking.