Counterpoint, I botched a coding session at a FANG interview. They wanted me so they gave me a take home coding problem. I spent 40+ hours over three days banging it out.

Got the job. 57% increase in compensation. 550k/year combined.

Totally worth it.

Only negative is it's months later and my right shoulder still hurts a bit. Getting old sucks.

Are you able to work remotely as well? If you don't mind, what percentage of annual is stock options?

Ok, but FANG is a different matter: those are established, respectable companies. You shouldn't do the same for small, no-name startups that try to use those take-home assignments to extract free labor from you.

I agree, the risk reward has to be there.

But I don't interview at companies unless I really need to get in. If it were some lousy startup and I'm interviewing there it's because I am hard up and need the job or it's tactically where I need to be next to get where I am going.

Basically if I am spending the time interviewing I am probably willing to do whatever it takes to get the job.

Or maybe they expect it to be a 30 minute assignment and the fact that it took the guy 50 hours to finish it is a clue in and of itself.

Which is why if you commit to doing a take home project, you should at least ask how much time they expect the project to take. For a lot of software development projects there is always something to work on and improve if time allows. Parkinsons Law and all. I might be a good idea to exceed their estimate a little to get a more finished product, but that number at least anchors the project timeline. If they legitimately answer with 50 hours, then feel free to laugh in their face. However a 2 or 3 hour project to be completed at some point over 2 weeks seems completely reasonable.

It has been shown that most software estimates are out by a factor of 40% (from what remember). I have a feeling take home exercises will add even more to that due to the initial setup as well.

They gave him two weeks to do it and it was apparently a multi-part thing where it made sense to send in answers to the first part before doing the rest. That doesn't sound like something that's supposed to take 30 minutes.

If it takes 30 minutes then what you do is organize 60 minutes coderpad session and get lots more information than just a solution that the candidate pretends he did in the allotted time.

It's still very rude not to respond to someone's efforts just because they took extra time to get things right.

But yeah, as another commenter said, they gave two weeks and it seems like a multiparter.

I'll take it, if I don't have anything else important to do and the task are interesting. Sure there is a risk of them ghosting me but whatever.