How much to build on a take-home

Take-homes are the round where good candidates most often lose on judgement rather than ability. The brief gives a time budget, the budget is always optimistic, and the candidate has to decide what "done" means. That decision is the test.

Respect the stated budget, visibly

If the brief says four hours, spend something close to four hours and say what you did with them. Reviewers compare submissions against each other, and a submission that clearly took twenty hours is not impressive — it tells them you cannot scope, and it quietly punishes every candidate with a job and a family. If you do overrun, say so honestly in the README rather than letting them guess.

Build the spine, not the skin

• Make the core path work end to end, even if narrowly. A complete thin slice beats three half-built features every time.
• Write the tests that cover the logic that matters. A handful of meaningful tests reads far better than none and better than a hundred trivial ones.
• Handle the obvious error cases — empty input, a failed request, a malformed record. Reviewers check these first.
• Leave the polish. Styling, exhaustive configuration, and a plugin architecture for a four-hour exercise all signal poor prioritisation rather than thoroughness.

The README is graded

Most candidates write three lines about how to run it and stop. The README is where you recover every point the time limit cost you. Include: how to run it, what you chose to build and why, what you deliberately left out, what you would do with another day, and any assumption you made where the brief was ambiguous. A reviewer who sees "I skipped pagination deliberately — with this dataset size it isn't the bottleneck; here's what I'd add first" is reading a colleague, not a submission.

Assume you will present it

Most take-homes are followed by a call where someone walks through your code with you. Write it so you can defend every decision, and re-read it before that call. Being unable to explain a line in your own submission is a far worse outcome than a missing feature, and it happens most often to candidates who copied a pattern they did not understand.

When the brief is unreasonable

A take-home that would honestly take a full weekend is a signal about the employer, and you are allowed to say so. Asking the recruiter "this looks like more than the stated four hours — would you like the full scope, or a narrower slice done well?" is a fair, professional question. The answer tells you something either way.

They are not measuring how much you can build. They are measuring what you choose to build when you cannot build everything.