1) It's less time spent talking with potential coworkers. Which for me, coworkers (and how we work together/get along) determine about 90% of how satisfied I am with my job (assuming pay/benefits are standard).
2) You're still going to require me to take a day off and stand up in front of a whiteboard anyway eventually. Every take home I've done is an early stage filter. The final round is still a whiteboard panel.
You can learn a lot about a person by what questions they chose to ask you, but only if it's not a thing tacked onto the end of a long interview. If they haven't gotten much time to ask you questions, they only have your interview questions to go on. Which you know are not representative of the kind of work you do (but then, why are you asking them?)
So because you only ever talked to them about things that could readily be had off the shelf, and this is the only information they have, they can't know if you're bad at interviewing or some psycho who spends all their time reinventing wheels and then demanding that other people be impressed by your insanity.
The chances of the latter are bigger than you think. So if it's down to you or another opening, they'll take the other opening, and then you've wasted everyone's time.
Didn't hit it off with the last interviewer so it was a no-go.
If a take-home is required I'd at least expect a code review over it and focus the rest of the interview process on soft skills rather than trivia questions that are answered essentially by the take-home exercise.
1. 2 pms - collab and project management questions.
2. Trivia Q&A with 2 devs and tech projects
3. Lunch with Dir. Eng, and senior dev.
4. Whiteboard leetcode with A researcher and a junior dev.
5. Systems design with Dir. Eng and a senior devops
6. Chat sessionr for questions with VP of Eng.
Of course from their perspective I could be getting someone else to do it for me or something. Or maybe the take-home leaked (which becomes more probable as the company grows).
At my current employer, that’s exactly how we approach hiring. I send the candidate a take-home that broadly covers the basic tech skills they need to be effective in their role (implement a simple test api, some questions about scaling web apps in production, and a possible architecture sketch for a described system). It’s expected to be around 4 hours of work. If they pass that, the interview is free of technical topics - we just talk about your past experience and assess whether you’d be a good fit for the team.
Is this not how other take-home assignments work?
I'm interested to know who your employer is, if you're comfortable saying.