Comment by kayo_20211030

Your experience sounds horrible, and unfortunately those sort of "tests" are just a horrible thing. Generally, do NOT do take-home exercises. That's your time, which has value; the company doing the hiring contributes nothing. At least, in a live-coding exercise both you and they have some skin in the game. As with all tests, good or bad, part of the test is actually doing the test. Often it's less what you know, or could do; and more about "can you do the test?", and mostly "doing the test" is a poor proxy, and the whole exercise becomes a waste of everyone's time.