For clarity, these take-home exercises that I'm referring to are completely toy problems. They're usually one or two REST APIs on top of a toy data structure (sometimes in-memory, without a DB at all), just to see how the candidate models, writes and tests code. An API that does some pricing math based on some in-memory state or the likes of it.
If we're talking about "make me a website" kind of exercises that one could throw into production after some tweaks, then that is free labor and I would absolutely refuse those.
Also, the fact that "leetcode scales" is part of the problem I was talking about. I really dislike the fact that if you train for months to develop a complete set of skills parallel and irrelevant to your actual role you can now efficiently interview for a number of companies that pay top dollar. So not only people with actual skills and experience are on equal (or worse!) footing than someone straight out of college, it also incentivises those who mastered leetcode to interview everywhere, since "it's all the same", while normal people who are good at their job get their torn to shreds after one or two interviews. So not only it's judging the wrong thing at the interview, but it's also causing a starvation situation for the candidates that are not playing that game.
Why are we creating incentives to people becoming "professional interviewers"? This would be like Google encouraging SEO spam instead of fighting against it!
