I've been on both sides of this, having completed and reviewed interview tasks, and I have to say it's absolutely crucial. As an interviewee, it gives you a gl

I've been on both sides of this, having completed and reviewed interview tasks, and I have to say it's absolutely crucial. As an interviewee, it gives you a glimpse of what work will be like once you come on board. Are the requirements solid or loose? Is testing required or even mentioned. These and other things can give you insight into how the business interacts with engineering. As an interviewer it's hard to take resumes and unfortunately even GitHub profiles at face value. I've personally had code taken from work put up on a colleagues personal GitHub. The coding task is also not a sure-fire way, as I've seen those taken from online tutorials. The real magic is in the tasks code review. I'm not saying this is how it works everywhere, but given the task matches the deliverables asked and we make it to the code review stage, it becomes less of a tech interview and more of a glimpse into the social skills of the developer. PR criticism is a daily occurrence and getting an opportunity to test these waters prior to fully committing to onboarding a developer.