An hour of time for a homework is completely fine. A whiteboard interview would consume much more of both party's time. Just travelling there and back can easil

An hour of time for a homework is completely fine. A whiteboard interview would consume much more of both party's time. Just travelling there and back can easily take an hour of applicant's time. I used to invite people for an interview without any prior testing, but it was generally such a big waste of time for both me and applicant. What's more, quite often I can see from CV that someone is underqualified, but I do not want to reject them immediately without giving them a chance, so I send them a homework. Finally, you would be surprise how often even people with good CVs turn out to be quite bad.