Sounds like you’re doing a lot of good work on the process since the time of my experience. As long as the full set of evaluation criteria and expectations are

Sounds like you’re doing a lot of good work on the process since the time of my experience. As long as the full set of evaluation criteria and expectations are made clear, and they sincerely fit into the time limit given, a take-home test can be perfectly fine. The trouble is two-fold - the test creators usually drastically underestimate how long the data canonicalization / normalization process takes just to get up & running with a toy data set. This stuff plus cursory data exploration always takes an hour or two — so code tests asking you to just hack together a model plus a write-up in a couple of hours are just not realistic. - tests are often subverted for political reasons. Someone doesn’t want to hire a candidate who is more skilled than they are; someone wants to recommend their college friend for the role; someone just prefers to work with extraverts but the candidate comes across as an introvert on the phone — whatever it is. Then arbitrary and secondary aspects of a test solution get amplified for debate to steer the decision in a political direction. Nobody wants to believe their teammates would do this, and many times people do it without realizing. But I’ve seen my own team doing it in the past during interview evaluations, and it’s particularly bad when debating over how to assess a take-home test submission. As a candidate I experienced it a few times too, notably with Asana as mentioned before. The other sad part of that Asana interview was that nobody in any part of the Asana pipeline ever asked me about my work experience. Every interview was tech questions, programming questions, and the take-home test. Not a single question about my work history. In the test feedback, the reviewer suggested I might not work well in a product-oriented environment — yet nobody had asked about my work experience in a product-oriented environment at an education technology company. That’s just one example, but there were others. It saddens me a lot that the tech industry is like this. It’s so myopic to believe I could assess someone’s subjective disposition towards being results-oriented or customer-focused or product-minded based on some random 3-hour test, and never even so much as ask them about their actual work history, where they actually solved problems and delivered products. It doesn’t feel good to be told, “based on this ambiguous code test, you’re probably not good at thinking about product development,” when you’ve got plenty of product-development items on your resume you’d be happy to share yet are never even asked about.