Every company that has given me a take home exercise gave me a phone screen first. I don't think your order is at all typical. When there is something before t

Every company that has given me a take home exercise gave me a phone screen first. I don't think your order is at all typical. When there is something before the phone interview, it is a coding assessment; these are generally different from a take home assignment in that they are generally timed and automatically scored, e.g. you hit start and have two hours and then a computer scores you. With take home exercises, I've always had engineers at the company read my code and discuss it with me.