Playing devil's advocate if you don't want to do the take home test then they just filtered you out and actually is serving their desires on who they want to hire.
A reasonably-scoped take-home project is fine in isolation.
The problem is the sheer number of steps required, of which the project is just one step. For example for a recent position I looked at:
1. Initial interview with some HR person: 1 hour
2. Interview with a tech person and review some code sample (spot security issues, bugs etc): 1.5 hours
3. Take home project (supposed to take 2 hours, but you'll want to make it look good so you'll probably spend twice that): 4 hours
4. Another in-depth interview with a couple other tech people: 2 hours
5. Another interview with the CTO: 30 mins
6. References & background check.
That's not atypical. Round after round of interviews. It becomes an endurance test, where only the most dedicated will stay the distance. While the 8-10 hours might not seem much stretched out over several days, you want to add some prep, keep your calendar clear so it does eat up your spare time, especially if you are already working.
And that's just one job. What if you are interviewing at multiple companies?
Note the take-home is at the start of the process, not the end: so you can end up putting a lot of effort in before you have even cleared four or five other hurdles. Oh, and I don't even have an offer yet. It could well be the offer on the table isn't worth my time.
Now you could say "well, we only want dedicated people". Fine, but I'm dedicated in so far as I get paid to be working for you. I don't get paid to run your interview gauntlet. Maybe you want people willing to do free overtime?
And this is way more than it used to be maybe 10 years ago, and it's for small to medium sized companies, not FAANG or other big corps. Nor is it a feature of recent layoffs and resulting increase in the talent pool: this has been the case for a few years now.
Just how many companies are you putting that far down your funnel‽ I mean, that's a bunch of time, yes, but you should start filtering out companies at step 1. If you're trying to collect a dozen offers before jumping ship then yeah, sure, but that's quite a lot of offers! The other question is how many of those result in an offer? Because I can see the frustration of there being no payoff at the end if you're not getting an offer most times after step 6.
FWIW, last time I interviewed at Google, there was no take home test, so I don't know where people are copying that from but I don't think it's Google.
I'm not disagreeing with you. But, I think the optimal way to actually assess someones abilities would be to pay them one day's wages for the role that they would be going for and to clear one task with a interviewer instead of this maddening complexity of an interview. Honestly I have been thinking of getting a tutor to help me pass these tests.
Take home projects are not work from the company’s backlog. They’re tests and all candidates receive the same test.
It doesn’t make sense for a company to open up their code base and infrastructure to random candidates and ask them to work on it. That’s an IP and leak nightmare.
OTOH, if you are taking a paid contract job to work with a company on real work as a trial, you could definitely be violating contractual agreements with an employer. This type of interviewing is extremely rare, though. Few full time job holders would consider it, so it would be largely limited to unemployed people who have the time to do it.
Yeah this. There's often a presumption like "I'm a very talented software engineer and everyone should want to hire me and thus companies shouldn't design a hiring process that I personally find annoying."
Hiring is a matching process. If a company with an annoying hiring process is a bad match for you, that's fine.
In what sense does the company have more information? They have more information about the details of the job, sure, but the applicant has more details about themselves. Which is “more valuable” depends on the market I guess. But why do you say one party has strictly more information?
