I've been on both ends of this story: as a developer candidate and as a manager willing to fill the position. Story 1: test project for about 10 hours, done ac

I've been on both ends of this story: as a developer candidate and as a manager willing to fill the position. Story 1: test project for about 10 hours, done according to industry standards. HR asked to refactor it so the code base would be read-accessible via webserver. I've declined it as a bad practice, learned enough about the company. Story 2: put 10+ hours into inventing interesting take-home case and writing spec, gave it to 5 candidates, gave every one of them a half-hour code review session, accepted the best one. I am having fun while writing code and prefer to work with similar people. It's okay if you don't want to build a take-home project for me, there are lots of software engineers who will and it will be more fun to have them around. And, by the way, you may chat with cook for hours about food, ingredients, sauces and hygiene, or you may ask him/her to just grill a steak right here and taste it.