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How they're implemented has varied wildly between companies, but most of them were used as an initial screener rather than a major deciding factor, despite being one of the most time consuming parts of the process for the candidate.
Like you I was able to go through with most of them, but I felt like they were a massive waste of my free time and companies were often very slow to follow up in it. I think a lot of the time it just isn't worth jumping through these hoops for a company I don't know anything about.
My best test I took was around an hour and involved building a really basic CRUD app in Django as part of a larger face to face interview, followed by a short discussion. It worked well because they set up an environment for me, the data model was fixed, and there was a list of short requirements I could complete in order, so I was able to just dive into the work, and spend time on the kind of things that were relevant.
Another one basically asked me to take a large dataset, build a web application around it, and deploy it, which would probably have taken me a week to complete but "should" have taken around 3 hours. They tried to present it a really interesting problem I would enjoy working on and then asked me to keep all my work confidential.
Most of the tests I've done are still closer to general problem solving/comp sci tests, which is still pretty far removed from the actual work, but at least they're not a huge time sink when implemented properly.
I prefer back end web development but am happy to work on the front end when needed. I have 5 years experience in web dev.
Tech: Python, Django, SQL (Postgres/SQL Server/MySQL), Javascript, AWS/Heroku, Ansible, Git.
Organisations are more than the sum of their parts. It's not like you can take a bunch of 10x programmers from a successful project, put them on a failing project and expect them to just get it done. Why is 10x programmers a thing but not 10x management?
I'm a back end web dev with 5 years experience, focused on Python, Django, and plain SQL. I'm proficient with Javascript, JQuery, AWS, and ansible, and am fairly comfortable with numerical computing (NumPy/Matlab) from a degree in Physics. I enjoy working on useful tools and APIs.
Contact: mat [at] mooresoftware.co.uk
What this really highlights is a lack of consistency. If adding a security measure involves some kind of trade-off (UX in this case), you should really understand what you are trying to prevent and consider the rest of the attack surface. I think it would be a fallacy to immediately give up just because a larger vulnerability exists though.
I was curious to see whether there is a way round this and a quick search threw up https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/40694/disclose-... - the top answer is quite informative.