I put in 60 hour weeks at my current job, except for a month before I change jobs, where I put in an additional 2 hours/night to prep for interviews, because that’s what will benefit me for every other company.
I care about my career and my family, so I don’t have the luxury of spending it on passion projects outside of work. I’d rather spend the precious little time I have left on my real hobbies and family/friends.
It doesn’t communicate that I’m a bad engineer. On the contrary it communicates that I give my all at work.
Having said that what you said about spending 60 hours at work tells others you will be a much better employee. Which is probably the signal they are looking for?
How many of those 60 are spent in meetings?
Superhuman working hours for someone with a family.
1. Despite the "let us work together" intent it is still an exam where you are penalized for taking too long or making a "wrong" assumption or missing a few bits,
2. Given above or not when confronted with a random question it can be easy to get very nervous unless you have built a similar system from 1 to 1b user scale or you have done tons of practise interviews with companies.
So apart from interviews being hard and what they are purely because of supply and demand I wanted to see if you can learn just as much from a more open book approach (with either a side project or candidate knowing the question ahead of time say the night before). It could even be more inclusive that way!
I'm fact I'd even say that even if you haven't built a side project, I'd still use op's technique and ask the candidate to talk about and white board a system they would like to build and then dive deeper from there. Heck I'd even tell this to them before an interview!