The internship take-home task: how not to fail it

What's actually assessed

Not brilliance. Three things:

• Does it run. They start it and it does what was asked.
• Can it be read. Sensible names, code split into parts, no commented-out leftovers.
• Did you finish. Half the task done superbly is worse than all of it done tidily.

How much time to spend

What was stated, plus a little. If the brief says four hours and you spent twenty producing a masterpiece, that counts against you: fitting the box is part of the assessment.

If you can't finish, submit the working part and say plainly what's missing and how you'd complete it.

Common mistakes

• Starting with architecture. Layers, abstractions and patterns on a two-hundred-line task read as a failure to judge scale, not as experience.
• No instructions. If the reviewer can't run it within five minutes, they won't go further.
• Ignoring edge cases. Empty input, zero, a negative number. Check at least those.
• Asking nothing. If the brief is ambiguous, clarifying is a plus, not a weakness.
• Sending it unchecked. Re-read the brief and walk through every point.

What to attach

A short note: what's done, how to run it, which decisions you made and why, what you didn't get to. Three paragraphs. It raises your chances considerably — it shows someone was thinking, not just typing.

When a take-home is too much

There's a line between an assessment and free labour. Signs you've crossed it: a task that takes days, work lifted from the company's actual product, a demand for a finished service.

Declining that is reasonable. You can politely offer to walk them through your own project instead: a finished piece of work with a confirmed contribution often convinces faster anyway.