There's not much you can do about the fact that most prospective employers won't have a particularly good idea how to optimize the hiring process and even if th

There's not much you can do about the fact that most prospective employers won't have a particularly good idea how to optimize the hiring process and even if they did, their incentives wouldn't always be aligned with applicants when it comes to questions of investing time. But in a market like the current one, many developers can do some filtering of their own. When I'm asked to complete a test or exercise, over time I've made it a habit to ask questions like these: - Do you have reference solutions that someone at the company completed on company time? - Exactly how long did it take them? - Do you have a rubric for evaluating submitted solutions? - Will you share the reference solutions and/or rubric once I've submitted mine? I don't need 100% positive/detailed answers to each one of these -- I know from the other side why they're not always there -- but how people respond seems to improve my early feel for (a) how the organization approaches process and problem-solving and (b) whether my solutions are likely to get a serious examination and useful feedback, which I can then use to inform my choice about whether putting in the time is worth it.