It's really not that weird at all. If you give me 4 hours of face-to-face time 1:1 with one of your engineers, I have a guarantee that you value my time as highly as you value your engineers'.
If you give me 30 mins of "homework", I have no guarantee at all, that you don't have 100 other candidates in this stage of the interview process, and one of your engineers is going to dismiss my application after 5 mins of looking at what I've produced and give me no chance of responding to any judgment they are making that I disagree with. For example I once got "I don't like the fact that you use semicolons in Python where they're optional". If someone thinks that's a valid reason not to hire me, I want the right to face my accuser.
Many of us have been through terrible hiring practices. And we're sharing them here. And when you give examples or critiques, we're critiquing them right back.
I've been around the block. I've done lots of interviews in tech. So have others here (naturally!). I've noped out of many for huge semaphore-sized red flags.
But the point stands - I'm not going to do "homework" without getting paid for it. I would much rather a sit-down with a fellow engineer and talk out problems. That shows the company is also willing to put time in as well.
Sorry for being incendiary, but this hits me as a recent trend that is nothing short of insane. I went to a top-ranked university on the highest-paid scholarship I was eligible for, got a Ph. D. there, then got the job that all my peers wanted but only a handful actually got. Then I booked 10 years of industry experience. -- You wouldn't believe the life sacrifices I've made to be able to have all of that on my resume. If someone tells me that's all "worthless" and they'd rather ask some stupid puzzle questions and see some indication of how passionate I am about working for some no-name company, or whatever the latest hype is, then that's simply where the interview ends for me.
A typical resume has none of that and is more like:
. BS from some un-ranked university
. 2 years at some company you've never heard of
.. Did things you have no way of verifying
. 2 years at another company you've never heard of
.. Did more things you have no way of verifying
I once had an interview with a scientist turned to industry who couldn't demonstrate how to load a text file after 30 minutes of trying. I mean, what should I have done with him? The position required lots of algorithms and data processing.
The fact is that there is such a thing as an "impressive resume". There seem to be people out there eager to dismiss the value of those. Frequently an explanation will be that they themselves don't have one and are engaging in cognitive dissonance reduction. In fact, one can say more generally that psychological forces will act powerfully in such a way as to make hiring managers want to hire people who are just like them, even when they themselves are worse than the best candidates they could hire.
That's the reason why having an analytically well-reflected hiring process, instead of just hiring who you like, is important, and resumes have an important role to play in that.
1. We tell candidates about the homework during the phone screen which is about 20 minutes, if they want to duck after that no time wasted. No one ever has.
2. We don't compensate for it since it's the 3rd interview. The idea that I can take 4 hours of your time for a half-day whiteboard interview but not a "do a simple task that should take 30 minutes at your leisure" is weird. We've never had anyone have an issue with it because we have the one of the least intensive interview processes in the area.
3. People lie or vastly overestimate their skills on the resume, surprise. If you submit code samples or your Github is good enough then we skip the homework. Designers/artists have it right with the "portfolio" -- resumes are very nearly worthless. We don't demand code samples or FOSS projects because we don't want to assume people code after hours and obviously can't share code they wrote at work but in that case we need an alternative.
3. You are interviewed by the team you would be working with. There is no hiring group. You have contact with all the engineers. You can even talk over the assignment with the team at the end of the second interview.