I have had a couple of take home coding tests recently and I wanted to see what people thought the expectations were for these.
In the most recent one I was asked to code a thread safe message queue for scheduled tasks, with a number of other specific company related requirements. You can potentially spend a lot of time on this, a few people I showed estimated that this would take at least 4 hours to do a simple implementation of all the basic requirements.
That led to a discussion of what is the appropriate amount of time to expect someone to spend on a take home code test? And, if you're spending 4 hours on something like this, do you expect an opportunity to review what you've turned in with the developers who looked at it?
How do you handle it if you get no feedback about how long they expect you to spend and are just told to take a few days?