GitHub — Technical Interview, take home exercise

Some time ago I had the opportunity to get into a Technical interview at GitHub for a senior software engineer role. During the selection, the first step I got assigned was a take home exercise, which I failed because I did not read properly the requirements.

Preface

I am not going into too many details and polemics about this kind of hiring process but frankly speaking, if you plan to assign hours of work to a candidate, you should, at least, present yourself first, explain the role and company and then, if you believe there is a human match, assign a take home task, which should be properly described.

The Process

The process I went through was quite anonymous and cold. I simply got an e-mail from the hiring HR manager stating that my resume was outstanding, they wanted to move forward and the first step would be a take home exercise. No calls, no interviews, no questions.

Few days later I got a GitHub URL with a small ASP.NET Core 3.1 web api project and a 300 minutes activation link. Within the 5 hours I had to:

• understand the project
• enhance it accordingly to very vague requirements
• fix the existing Unit tests
• add additional Unit tests
• create a PR with all the details

Now, considering the interview pressure (wow I am doing something for GitHub), the vague…