I’m a staff engineer @ a big co, and my guess is the assignment is filtering out senior people with day jobs already. I hate take home assignments since they ar

I’m a staff engineer @ a big co, and my guess is the assignment is filtering out senior people with day jobs already. I hate take home assignments since they aren’t fairly timeboxed and offer no opportunity for me to ask questions or get info about the company. There is nothing realistically preventing other applicants from spending 12+ hrs on it over the weekend or whatever, and so I feel pressure to also “cheat” on the time box. Not to mention this is competing for weekend or family time. Timed interviews, even if they take all day are a much easier pill for me to swallow, I just burn a vacation day. I also get something out of the much-maligned leetcode+behavioral style of interview- usually 5-10 minutes depending on how long it took me to solve the question to ask them about their role, tenure and pulse on the company. These quick chats with the potential team members are incredibly valuable and missing out on them is an understated cost to take-home assignments. I’ve only done take home assignments as a junior eng for startups that sounded really cool and wouldn’t do it any other way, (and I never actually ended up working for any of them afterwards making the roi kinda bad).