I did a take home assignment a couple years ago where it was time constrained to 2 hours. At first, the idea sounded cool: nobody looking over your shoulder, I

I did a take home assignment a couple years ago where it was time constrained to 2 hours. At first, the idea sounded cool: nobody looking over your shoulder, I can listen to my music, use my tools, and work in my most productive environment. Selfishly, it can be nice (assuming that you didn't just have a long day of work and aren't dirt tired). I'm very quickly realizing it wasn't that great and in fact, comes off as lazy from the interviewer perspective. There are several "coding interview websites" where you can ask the question, give the candidate a terminal to code, provide a list of available languages, and even have unit tests from the interviewer side to make sure the solution is correct. We've completely abstracted out the interaction and questioning of candidates and it has become a binary "did they get it right or not" type of process. Sure, there's follow up interviews and such but what have you gained from this process that couldn't be asked over the phone? Worse yet, if you aren't using these tools and simply letting the candidate email you a project (or however they choose to deliver it to you), it can quickly become a time sink as you spend it trying to understand the solution (i.e. why did they interpret the meaning of "API" as a REST service? What is this obscure library they're using? etc.) No thanks.