My rule of thumb was to decline any interview with "challenges" - works perfectly as a filter of perverted corporate climate.
which is unlikely to be available if they aren't the owners of the IP.
So either you have to guess real lucky, or have a probation period of a week or two with any new hire. Wouldn't you say that's worse than a short take-home project (for the employee)?
Of course, unless it was already on Github, etc.
[while I'm in the "there's no secrets in software" camp, there are still policies and laws to follow]
You've possibly eliminated a lot of adults who are 10+ years out of college and have family commitments.
You've possibly eliminated people with significant side-interests outside the realm of software. Writers, artists, musicians, marathon runners, activists, etc.
Just because someone doesn't have side projects doesn't mean that they don't have ambition, enthusiasm for learning, or other ways to show you they're perfectly capable.
I think the "more than just a 9-5" idea is a toxic pattern which has been championed by the privileged. In short, by wanting something like this, you risk selecting for a fairly homogenous set of people.
I think you can write a good coding challenge which doesn't look like all the others (the socialite example in Takehome.io is particularly good because it scales with skill level – it's not a pass/fail, but a spectrum from just making it work, to showing you have thought about and dealt with an array of odd things that might crop up).
The biggest reason for this attitude stems from the immense amount of people who are getting into CS just for a paycheck. Sure, we're only working to get paid, but in my experience, these people have zero motivation outside of it. Endless hordes of bootcamp type people, who see six figure salaries, and can spew out all of the stuff they've memorized in a book. Without actually thinking about why or when. I'm not looking for "rockstars", "ninjas", "gurus" or whatever other nonsense words phrases use, but rather people who are genuinely interested in their field.
For example, writing up a silly application to make a daily task easier. One candidate had their own tooling for time tracking. It wasn't much to look at but it was there and working for them. It wasn't on github, well commented or entirely complete. It was however a neat tool and well enough written. The candidate didn't really think about it as a project, just a little tool they wrote.