Is it normal for a junior developer position to ask for a web scraping test assignment?

From my perspective, being given a take-home task at this stage can feel like a scam, especially in today's job market. You could suggest live coding instead, or propose to do the task for an hourly rate. If they reject that, it shows they might not value your time or expertise.

It's definitely a red flag that they're asking for web scraping, especially considering Reddit's Terms of Service. It kind of feels like they might be using this task to gain free work from you. If you decide to go ahead, tell them you'll only demonstrate your code without sharing it, just to keep things above board.

A charitable viewpoint here is that they might just be trying to see if you can complete a project at all. But it's odd they're asking for Reddit scraping specifically. Usually, you’d want a simpler dataset to work with!

You have to remember, as a junior applicant, the focus should be on demonstrating your ability to complete tasks, rather than showing deep expertise. That being said, scraping Reddit is pretty specific and unusual for a general backend task.

You could consider mocking the data instead of scraping it. If they need you to create an API, the source of the data isn't truly critical. A simple json or formatted messages from a lorem ipsum generator could suffice to showcase your skills.