How would such a cap be enforced? If it's due 120 minutes from the time it's given, it's no longer a take home interview, it's a remote interview.

It doesn't need to be proctored. It would be easy to start a remote clock and the solution needs to be in by x minutes after the start. It can even be pretty generous. The idea is presumably not to see how fast they can sprint but just put some time-boxing in place so some people aren't taking days.

People can get help of course but that's going to be the case absent effectively a remote proctored assignment. And now you're back to effectively in-person.

> People can get help of course but that's going to be the case absent effectively a remote proctored assignment. And now you're back to effectively in-person.

I would vastly prefer an "in-person" interview in which I wasn't expected to speak to the interviewer to the in-person interviews we actually have. There is a world of difference.

You don't want to ask questions?

Why would I want that?

Because it's an opportunity to learn more about the company beyond what's on their website? Honestly, if I interviewed someone and they had no interest in asking any questions, that's probably an easy reject.

Presumably the difference is that the interviewee gets to choose when to start the clock.

That's what I had in mind. You would need a tool to enforce it.

At that point "take-home" may not be the best name anymore, but "remote interview" just sounds like it's an interview over video. Maybe "async interview"?

It is already a thing. I had a 2hr take-home before that was utilizing hackerrank.

But it wasn't a leetcode-style one (which are common), it was a skeleton of a React app, and I had to implement certain methods to tie it all up together.

The timer would start ticking from the moment I click "begin", and it will warn you that the timer will start after you attempt clicking (so that you don't trigger the timer by accident).

I have used https://takehome.io/. The timer starts when they check out the repo containing the project and instructions.

and however it was enforced, it would increase the stress a great deal

True. More stress than an untimed take-home, but I would think less stress than a normal interview (for most engineers, at least).

And the reality is that a lot of/most people interviewing in those type of situations arre very well familiar with time-boxed exams at school. (And even with take homes the reality of final exams as I recall is that you mostly didn't have the hours in the day to spend an outsized amount of time on one course.)