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I am a big fan of the take-home problem. For example, Symantec once asked applicants to design a simple virus detector with wildcards (similar to grep) and then they gave interview spots to people with the best performance. During the actual interview, however, there wasn't much whiteboard coding only designing or "how would you do X" sort of questions.

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There's a small list of companies I'd do a, "Take home test," for. In my experience, most companies that ask for it are looking for free labor.

I've never done a take home test that produced anything that could have been vaguely useful for the interviewing company. Usually the problems are pretty artificial.

They absolutely should be artificial problems. If they're not carefully designed to test what the hiring company cares about, it's a bad test

Well if they are good enough for you to put their code into your program then shouldn't they be good enough to be offered a job? Seems like it works exactly as intended in terms of trying to find someone who can do the job

I've had multiple take home tests result in changes to the products that company offers. I've never received a job offer from those companies. Maybe your experience differs, but I've had a sour taste left by such practice.

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