I absolutely detest homework assignments, so much so that I don't use them when I hire people for my team. It's a waste of the applicant's time, and as other pe

I absolutely detest homework assignments, so much so that I don't use them when I hire people for my team. It's a waste of the applicant's time, and as other people have pointed out it is narrowly focused, sometimes not applicable to the entire skill set the applicant can bring to the table, and is typically trainable level material anyways. I highly prefer to engage the person about their previous projects. Through building good rapport it's easy to determine what they've done and where their passion is focused. If they can't tell me the details of building an X app with Y interfaces and Z databases, then I can figure out they are a bullshitter with only 15-30 minutes of total time wasted. If we can get past that step then we can start talking about more interesting things, like optimizations, scaling out, and our favorite unrelated technology stack and its merits. It's shocking to me that companies feel they need to do more than this these days. To be fair I work in an At-will state, so if by chance someone does sneak through the process we have a 3-6 month probation period where we make sure they can really do what they say they can. To date this has never been a problem.