I’m also a parent of small kids with a busy schedule. Despite the packed schedule and demands of raising kids, it would be a huge exaggeration to suggest that I couldn’t find 4 hours of time to do a take-home if given a week of time (as is common).
The parent commenter might have been operating under the assumption that take home challenges must be done same-day, which kind of defeats the purpose of a take-home. If you’re demanding 4 hours of same day time, might as well bring them in for a 4-hour on site interview.
Strangely, few people complain about a half-day on-site but it’s literally the same time commitment. If you really have no other options and you literally cannot find a spare hour of time in any way, take a half day of PTO and complete the interview just as you would for a normal on-site.
Its not a one 4 hour take home project. Its the fifth one.
0) time doing the project is tracked, sometimes via the expectation that you commit to the git repository from start to finish. dinging you for "points" for going over the time allotment
and that the other candidates are:
1) doing way extra things that took way more than 6 hours
2) are not doing those extra things from scratch because they've been playing this game for a while
and that
3) the company still has inaccurate ideas of what a candidate should be expected to present in the 6 hours
4) is judging you on completely random things that they did not mention. "you didn't use this design pattern" "we don't like MVVP anymore, we're back on MVP. here's this other acronym."
waste of time
E.g. say they want me to commit to a Github project they provide or I am supposed to set up and commit to. I will use whatever time I am allotted and at the end, when I'm done and expected to hand it in, I will make one git commit that shows I committed everything exactly 1 second after I was supposed to start, then push that to the provided repo. Yes, start, not finish. Meaning "time travel". Maybe even commit as "Linus Torvalds" or something like that.
If they ask about this it's a great conversation starter either way. My experience is that if the talk does come to this either they have no idea how this could even happen and I can explain or judge them based on their reactions or we both have a laugh about their companies policies around this. They see I know my git and I know they're like most companies: actually pretty OK teams and hiring managers with generally crappy HR practices.
Just rewrite your git history and fudge the commit timestamps. It's not even dishonest, it's just demonstrating your experience with Git.
Of course, that doesn't work if they expect you to push to Github/lab as you go.