From the point of view of interviewer. I find that take-home exercises have two major flaws: 1. The push the effort onto interviewee. Interviewee should not b

From the point of view of interviewer. I find that take-home exercises have two major flaws: 1. The push the effort onto interviewee. Interviewee should not be punished for the interviewer's inability to prepare good questions and exercises and inability to design the process so that bad candidates are filtered out early in the process. 2. They are not really meaningful. I've been there as a candidate. It is difficult to voluntarily stick to the timelines given when you know you could do this or do that to improve the solution and that other candidates will not hesitate to do it. As an interviewer, I have no idea if the candidate did the exercise by themselves or with outside help. Some (not all) candidates will do anything to game the system. You don't want to get these people onboard. Based on that I am strongly against take home tasks. On the other hand I like whiteboard exercises because they let me discuss things in an environment and closely to circumstances we could be having at work. It is normal for me to draw algorithms or even implement pieces of (pseudo) code on the whiteboard and to use it for discussion. What I try to keep in mind that different people deal differently with the whiteboard. Some people like to visualize, some think a little bit more abstract. I had to work hard to be able to draw anything in a way that will be digestible by other people and I still think am doing only mediocre job of it.