how long does it take?

I was given this project as a part of an interviewing process. Ok, I'm not asking how to implement it but how long it takes.

How long does it take to implement the following application?

Mike Smith wrote in post #1051939:

I was given this project as a part of an interviewing process. Ok, I'm not asking how to implement it but how long it takes.

How long does it take to implement the following application?

If I was presented with this question in an interview I'd think seriously about how much I really needed this particular job. If their first question is, "How long with this take?" I'd take this a bad omen indicating some very frustrating times to come.

It's like asking an artist how long a masterpiece takes to paint, or an author how long story development takes when writing a best selling novel. It takes as long as it takes to get it right.

Haha, nice response...

But on a serious note, isn't this very subjective.. like.. depends on who's doing the work.. How proficient, efficient, etc in the design skills necessary for the particular job..

Anyway I would think it would take you a month if you haven't done anything like it before and you can devote some serious time.. If you are quite knowledgeable, I would say a couple days.

Cheers, Abram

Great replies!

Well, the question wasn't to give the time assessment, they were asking to completely implement it within 3 hours, by clock (but I canceled it for that day). I'm not continuing with them, this is insane. I have good experience in RoR, but the job doesn't even put RoR experience as a requirement.

The whole premise, they had an old assignment taking a day, and said "it's too long, we want something shorter" and designed this one, saying it would take only 3 hours.

I ran this great tool

for the estimates. Optimistically, this app takes 9-14 hours with a bare minimum (just typing) of 5 hours. The old assignment takes only 6+ hours.

The thing is, I think you could do this in 3 hours. Not sure what they're trying to get at in the interview process. But given some RoR scaffolding magic, the right gems and some JQuery plugins for the Admin tables, I think you could do this all with very little coding.

Maybe they're trying to see if the candidate has enough experience to be able to pick those pieces that make this easy?

Not saying the job screening technique isn't rubbish, just speculating on the fact that RoR and JQuery plugins have made some of this standard web dev really easy.