🏡 Homework is fine

I love take-home assignments — from the candidate’s perspective. I know that many strong and experienced candidates dislike them, and yet I’m going to rock the boat a little.

First, from age 8 to 32 I was an anxious person, and from about 14 I strongly identified as one. A test assignment, in that state, was my anchor — it allowed me to come to every subsequent stage with a certain confidence: at least at the level of hard skills, I’m a fit; everything else is about expectations matching. And once I stopped worrying about trivial things — like what an interviewer thinks of me — I still didn’t stop liking take-homes.

Second, a test assignment is a goldmine of information about the role. The position advertises you as a product manager, but the assignment asks what to do if the burndown chart in Jira looks ugly — that’s a reason to pause. The position boasts “serious analytics,” but the test gives you three Excel sheets instead of even a dummy database — that’s a reason to walk away.

A take-home is literally a hint about what you will actually be doing.

Third, you can negotiate a test assignment — and both my experience and my friends’ experience confirm this. My favorite example is a friend who received a task estimated at a full day of work. She sketched out a plan and said:

“You’re not paying me yet, so I’m not spending a full day. But if you were paying me, here’s how I would approach it.”

She moved forward in the funnel — I won’t lie, I don’t remember if she got the offer. But you can be less radical and simply ask: “What exactly are we testing?” — and based on the answer, complete the task in a “good enough” form.

Of course, I’m not talking about cases where companies try to offload actual work onto a junior candidate for free. To be fair, I’ve never encountered this as an applicant, but since the internet is full of this fear — let me address it. If you can see that the company might actually use the results of your assignment — run as fast as you can. Not only because it’s unethical, but also because it’s inefficient: think about the processes of a company that benefits from getting scattered pieces of work from a hundred candidates and then stitching together a Frankenstein. No, guys, companies where tea bags at the water cooler count as “food budget” are not the companies for us.

To sum up: I love take-home assignments because I’m a fan of asynchronous communication.

In an interview, you try to impress the company and the company tries to impress you — making conclusions on the spot can be difficult. But a test assignment gives you time to think — and not only about the questions inside it.