[cj]

95% of tech companies do not require 10-15 hours of take home interview work.

Edit: adding additional context, any company working with a recruiter will constantly be told by the recruiter repeatedly that the company should simplify and shorten the interview process because if you don’t, you risk losing candidates to other companies. Recruiters put extreme pressure on hiring managers to make the interview process as easy as possible. I’ve hired a lot of engineers via recruiters and none of the recruiters I’ve hired with would have allowed me to give a 10 hour assignment. They likely would have dropped me as a client.

[racional]

95% of tech companies

That might be true. But the primary beef is with the average case, not the tail end.

The main point is -- way or another, a lot of these companies end up giving out assignments just end up taking way too much time to get reasonably correct. More specifically an average of about 2x the time estimate that apparently just ... popped into their head when coming up with the assignment (and which is of course almost never actually verified in any other way than handing the assignment out to a bunch of candidates and seeing what happens).

Along with the clunky websites ("Hey could you fill out the exact starting and dates for every position you've every had, and pick the country from this big long drop-down, even though it's always the same country for every job? Along with the supervisor's name and the reason for leaving? It's not like we really care or are anyone's like to even look at these fields, we're just asking because, like, umm, they just changed us over to this new ATS and we haven't bothered to figure out how to configure it yet"), the jaggy communications ("An update on your application ... except it's just a link to a survey we'd like you to fill out, because we know you really care about our application process and you have lots of free time that you're happy to donate to us"), and all the other delays and silliness ...

And without even getting into the ghosting rate (even though they all insist they strive very hard not to do this) --

It all just takes up way too much time.

[sshine]

I’ve had some excellent jobs as a result of take-home tests. They may be time-consuming, but they leave the best impression about your skills. And if you have a feeling you’ll end up working there, they’re a lot of fun.

I’ve rejected time-consuming tests if I thought it’s either not a good match, or I get the impression that there’s a ton of candidates and my odds are low.