My stance has been that, just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I’m happy to do it, up to an undetermined time threshold. A screening interview, a tech screen, and then a bunch of panels is what I expect from a solid firm. Just as long as I’m interviewing with someone, I have a lot of opportunities to learn myself. I will also occasionally do a take home if and only if there’s a novel problem I want to solve related to that take home (eg I want to learn a library related to the task) but this is very rare.

As a hiring manager, I try to keep things to a hiring screen, a tech screen, a team interview, and a culture interview. My team is small. I don’t want to spend more than three hours of someone’s time (partially because I can’t really afford to spend more than that myself per candidate or lose more team hours than that). My tech screens are related to the things I actually need people to do, not random problems you’ll never see.

My assumption is that a good dev has lots of opportunity and I am in competition with everywhere else. I need to present the best possible candidate experience. Big companies with shitty employee experience telegraph that by presenting a shitty candidate experience, which is where the employee experience begins. You can’t have a good customer focus without starting from a good employee focus.