My most enjoyable interview was for an internship in college. I had a take home coding challenge where I had to write some simple code to fetch information from an API using whatever language I liked. I was given a week to do it, but it only took me an hour or so to meet all of their explicit requirements. I liked that there was no time pressure in that regard.
After the week was up I went into the onsite and in the "technical" portion of my interview two engineers went over the code I had written for the assignment and asked me about design choices I had made and what I would do if constraint X was added or feature Y. It was all very open ended and much more of a true discussion than an interview which I really appreciated.
I think this kind of format is ideal for interviews. The assignment requirements were simple enough that you could fulfill them easily and in your most comfortable language without any time pressure, but you could also go above and beyond and show that you really knew your stuff. For example, in the instructions they didn't explicitly ask for error handling on the input, but both of the engineers I interviewed with really liked that I had included it. You weren't penalized if you did just the bare minimum because you had the opportunity extend and build on the assignment during the onsite. I felt enabled to showcase my knowledge and justify my design decisions and that that effort was rewarded.
After the week was up I went into the onsite and in the "technical" portion of my interview two engineers went over the code I had written for the assignment and asked me about design choices I had made and what I would do if constraint X was added or feature Y. It was all very open ended and much more of a true discussion than an interview which I really appreciated.
I think this kind of format is ideal for interviews. The assignment requirements were simple enough that you could fulfill them easily and in your most comfortable language without any time pressure, but you could also go above and beyond and show that you really knew your stuff. For example, in the instructions they didn't explicitly ask for error handling on the input, but both of the engineers I interviewed with really liked that I had included it. You weren't penalized if you did just the bare minimum because you had the opportunity extend and build on the assignment during the onsite. I felt enabled to showcase my knowledge and justify my design decisions and that that effort was rewarded.