Take home tests are fine by me, but before you ask me to do that you better have sold me on the job first. If I really want the job, no problem. I expect, how

Take home tests are fine by me, but before you ask me to do that you better have sold me on the job first. If I really want the job, no problem. I expect, however, that spending 6 hours of my weekend on unpaid labor translates into a shorter on-site if you like the quality of my work. The goal of the on-site should be to verify that I was actually the person who did the work for the take-home. Things are a bit different when I'm some schmuck off the street begging for work. If you're trying to build a team and you want my skills, well, in this market I'm not putting a lot of energy into it. Case in point, I've had a company trying to hire me for over a year now. They're in consumer electronics and it is a fickle market so I kept turning them down, but I had a bad week at work and figured I'd go for it. I'd be an absolute perfect fit given my experience and what they're looking for, so it seemed like things were going to work out great. I accept an on-site, do well on a whiteboard coding test and a general review of my resume, and then one of their senior folks throws me an off-the-wall algorithm question(random sample a stream of data with uniform probability). Now, I'm an embedded guy, with an EE degree, and I specialize in "software engineering". They have many problems I'm perfectly suited to solving. They really, really need a guy like me(to design and fix drivers, abstraction layers, facilitate porting to new devices and enable third party clients). But here's this guy, asking me an algorithm question, and he didn't even explain it right. I googled the answer(reservoir sampling) when I was finished and understood the solution in a couple minutes, but it was too late. I was flagged for 2 more algorithm-heavy, 'cracking the coding' interviews the following Monday. I really didn't feel like spending my weekend reviewing bullshit I never use in my job, so I turned down the offer. It's too bad, I was a good fit for the team, and I was a great fit for the problems they were trying to solve.