Can I get a quick sanity check from the community?...

# android

[Jez]

Can I get a quick sanity check from the community?

I'm applying for a senior Android dev role. There's a take-home tech test: build an app that requests and displays a list of categories and associated data from an API, and when a category is selected it displays a number of images related to that category, fetched from the same API. Then allow some categories to be favourited, with favourites persisted and displayed differently.

So we're talking an app (ui work) with multiple screens (navigation framework) that talks to an API (networking stack) and persists data (local storage stack). To a quality that withstands a tech interview discussion, so architecture considerations, tests, whatever you consider to be best practice.

The company reckons 1-2 hours, all told.

I've done the task and it took me maybe around 10-15 hours all told - and that's with some experience green-fielding apps for sideprojects, being able to crib ideas from said side projects etc.

Does anyone look at that list of requirements and think "sure, I could bash that out over lunch and feel happy interviewing with it" or is that time estimate completely unreasonable?

[Aldrin M]

1-2 hours sounds unrealistic. Having said that, sometimes it might be best to be honest and tell them
• what you could achieve in 1-2 hours
• how long it actually took you to complete the assignment
• if you could use copilot or similar, how long it would take

[Chrimaeon]

Ahm, how is your question in any way related to the kotlin programming language. This is a slack workspace for Kotlin. 😉 😅

[Frank Bouwens]

I would agree that it would take more than 1-2 hours.
Especially if you want to do it properly, and not like a “hackathon”-app.

If it was just a “hackathon”-app. You can get away with faking a lot of stuff, making things hardcoded, don’t care about all the things people care about. (like readable code, maintainability, tests, etc) But even then, 1-2 hours for all that is a big stretch.

If they would have been confident, it was doable in 1-2 hours. Then it wouldn’t have been a take-home test. Then it would be done there and then.

[Jez]

Oh yeah - it's also meant to be a Kotlin Multiplatform app XD Just noticed that extra requirement. That's fun.

[Frank Bouwens]

It may say a lot about the company.
If this is how they treat you now,
how will they treat you when you are hired. 😓