> That's the point at which I would have stopped the process personally.
Why is that? I love take-home assignments. At least, if it's just an initial get-to-know-you interview, and then the assignment. What I utterly despise is the get-to-know-you interview, then a tech interview with the entire dev team, then a take-home, then a meeting with the CTO.
I will never, ever, ever go through with any job that has an interview process like this again. I always ask up-front what their interview process is like.
If a take-home or anything else (automated half-hour online test or whatever) taking more than a couple minutes and not requiring as much time investment from them as you comes before they've winnowed down much of the field—if it's used as any kind of screener—I'd be out. That time's better spent sending more applications (or, IDK, drilling leetcode) if there are more than a very-few candidates still in the running for a given position.
If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.
Why would I spend 4 hours (in the best case scenario, otherwise days) on the very first step of the application process, where, regardless of my resume, I have an extremely high chance to be rejected, while the company puts literally no time in?
Well, that's different. If it's a super challenging take-home, with requirements that exceed 1 page, then yeah, I'd agree. Most take-homes that I've received have been super simple, though. And they're usually not the first step, but the final step, in my experience.
I've been at a past company where we (well, mostly I) set up a take-home that would take a mid-level web dev familiar with the material maybe 15-30 minutes to knock out, basically just to test if candidates could produce responsive CSS layouts and knew how to make a proper web form work. It was wild how many we got back that still didn't account for basic (explicitly outlined) use cases like 'works on a phone screen'.
Why is that? I love take-home assignments. At least, if it's just an initial get-to-know-you interview, and then the assignment. What I utterly despise is the get-to-know-you interview, then a tech interview with the entire dev team, then a take-home, then a meeting with the CTO.
I will never, ever, ever go through with any job that has an interview process like this again. I always ask up-front what their interview process is like.