[andrew_eu]

I did hundreds of interviews for a former employer (10k+ employees) and developed a fondness for in-person coding interviews. In particular I would tell the candidate up front that the goal of the exercise is to see how they collaborate on a problem, how they communicate about their thinking, etc. The problem itself was considered too easy by many of my colleagues, but I still found it an extremely useful for the seniority and capability of engineers.

A later employer was in the hiring tech space, enabling this kind of take home exercises. Lots of time was invested into getting signals as the developer was doing it because everyone knew that's just as valuable, if not more, than the final solution. But many companies using these take-home exercises do it just to filter out candidates. To them, it's a proof-of-work system that helps regulate the intake of their hiring funnels.