[brycehamrick]

I've hired dozens of developers and I do use take home assignments but primarily to weed out obviously unqualified candidates. My objective is to keep good developers interested through the entire process but arrive at a "no" decision as early as possible. My take-homes typically take qualified developers 15-20 minutes to complete but require some amount of research to complete (e.g. third-party API documentation). I've found that if you ask too much of candidates too early in the process you lose a lot of good ones.

[collyw]

Nothing that you have to research takes 15-20 minutes of time unless you are literally cut and pasting a Stack Overflow answer.