The better way is to treat people's time as important as you treat your own and your resources at your company. There is a large company based in NYC that inte

The better way is to treat people's time as important as you treat your own and your resources at your company. There is a large company based in NYC that interviews thousands of developers a year, but only hires a few hundred. Each of those devs do a take home project that takes about 16 hours to complete. The project requires nothing to ask, so this company asks everyone. 30,000 hours is a lot of time - it's about 3.5 years of someone's life - and at least this time is spent each year by this company (and they pay nothing for it), not counting the rest of the interview process, because it is cheap for them to do this. And we wonder by productivity is down :) Respect people's time. If it is hard, figure it out. That is your job if you want to hire people and feel good about it.