[wool_gather]

It does, if they're actually doing it in a way that's useful to them. At least one, probably two, engineers are going to evaluate what you send in, take notes, and then go over it with you. And they have to do that for every response.

So that's an absolute floor of an engineer-hour per candidate: Anything less than 30 minutes to read through it and take notes is useless, and figure another 30 minutes minimum for a call.

If they're not going over the responses in detail and then talking through them with the candidates, then they're just wasting their own time because they're not actually judging anything.