One of my most enjoyable past interviewing experiences was doing a take-home for some game company (probably Accolade). They shipped it as a zip file (late 90s)

One of my most enjoyable past interviewing experiences was doing a take-home for some game company (probably Accolade). They shipped it as a zip file (late 90s), and there was a clear "todo" function. The task was to navigate an airplane across the map from a starting square to a destination square while avoiding mountain squares. The airplane always moved ahead 1 square each move and you could tell it to turn left 45°, stay straight, or turn right 45°. If you compiled it without writing the function, the airplane just flew straight. Perfectly reasonable task, IMO; it's even relevant to the gaming domain; you could do a simple version in an hour; I spent about 2 hours as I wrote a test harness and let it run overnight keeping score of how many maps it succeeded on and how many it failed on. The interviewer used my submission in the on-site as well to ask a few questions about it. Your numbers game comment is spot-on. From the employers' end, the hiring market problem looks like: There's high pay for software engineering roles. There's no effective credential mechanism. (I think this good, but it's not helping employers here.) Because of the combination of the first two, lots of people are motivated to try to land a job. Because of that, lots of people who aren't really qualified enter the pipeline. Because they're not really qualified, they keep applying over and over, while the qualified eventually get hired. Because of that, the applicant pool has a massive adverse selection problem (the average applicant is *much worse* than the median employee) and companies have to find a way to filter out the worst-of-the-worst before applying significant manual effort.