Its interesting how many of these companies have 'take home' challenges or projects. Even though the companies may say, "This should only take an hour", 99% of the time, it occupies my entire night/weekend, if not in coding but in thought. There's always something more you could do. Its presented as an objective test, but its very subjective, just as much as the whiteboard test.
With the whiteboard test, as a candidate, I know that when my hour is over, its done. Plus, I can get feedback during my whiteboard session to know if I'm on the right track, I can ask questions and get guidance on where to concentrate my efforts. With take home projects, I've woken up in the middle of the night and thought, "Wait, I know this is a full stack position, and they said that the UX just needs to be functional, but maybe my CSS knowledge is too old, and there's a better/newer way of doing the styles. I should really spend all night researching this, wait, BOM?! I should convert over to that, I don't want the front eng engineer reviewing this code and saying, OMG, this is so old, NOHIRE!"
EDIT:
Also, take home challenges are probably very discriminatory towards older candidates with families. So maybe just as subtle way of age discrimination?
With the whiteboard test, as a candidate, I know that when my hour is over, its done. Plus, I can get feedback during my whiteboard session to know if I'm on the right track, I can ask questions and get guidance on where to concentrate my efforts. With take home projects, I've woken up in the middle of the night and thought, "Wait, I know this is a full stack position, and they said that the UX just needs to be functional, but maybe my CSS knowledge is too old, and there's a better/newer way of doing the styles. I should really spend all night researching this, wait, BOM?! I should convert over to that, I don't want the front eng engineer reviewing this code and saying, OMG, this is so old, NOHIRE!"
EDIT:
Also, take home challenges are probably very discriminatory towards older candidates with families. So maybe just as subtle way of age discrimination?