I agree with you in principle, but I don't think characterizing most of these types of assignments as "free labor" is quite accurate. What I suspect is going o

I agree with you in principle, but I don't think characterizing most of these types of assignments as "free labor" is quite accurate. What I suspect is going on is that companies simply aren't taking the time to calibrate the effort required to complete their take home projects. I've had many "two hour" projects end up being more like 6-8 hours to properly complete (I tended to just stop at 3-4 hours and opt out of the rest of the process on this type of thing). Calling it "free labor" implies to me that the company is going to get some kind of actual value out of it in the end, other than as a candidate assessment. Most of these types of things I've seen simply haven't been the type of project that would be useful in that sense. OTOH, the big mistake I see a lot of companies doing is doing a 2+ hour take home assignment, then not making the tech portion of the actual interview process just a discussion of the take home project. If I'm going to commit that amount of my own personal time to your interview process, I want to know that it's going to get me out of at least as much "whiteboard hazing" in the end. In my experience, this frequently has not been the case.