I recently did a 6 hour take-home, but was given an expectation of around 2 weeks to accomplish it, with flexibility for more if I needed it. I thought it was pretty fair compared to a never-ending round of tech interviews.
0) time doing the project is tracked, sometimes via the expectation that you commit to the git repository from start to finish. dinging you for "points" for going over the time allotment
and that the other candidates are:
1) doing way extra things that took way more than 6 hours
2) are not doing those extra things from scratch because they've been playing this game for a while
and that
3) the company still has inaccurate ideas of what a candidate should be expected to present in the 6 hours
4) is judging you on completely random things that they did not mention. "you didn't use this design pattern" "we don't like MVVP anymore, we're back on MVP. here's this other acronym."
Totally agree that this will be something lots of places might do/expect. I will definitely work against that and judge them by it.
E.g. say they want me to commit to a Github project they provide or I am supposed to set up and commit to. I will use whatever time I am allotted and at the end, when I'm done and expected to hand it in, I will make one git commit that shows I committed everything exactly 1 second after I was supposed to start, then push that to the provided repo. Yes, start, not finish. Meaning "time travel". Maybe even commit as "Linus Torvalds" or something like that.
If they ask about this it's a great conversation starter either way. My experience is that if the talk does come to this either they have no idea how this could even happen and I can explain or judge them based on their reactions or we both have a laugh about their companies policies around this. They see I know my git and I know they're like most companies: actually pretty OK teams and hiring managers with generally crappy HR practices.
That's too bad, in this case I had a particularly good experience. I handed in a tarball, not a repo, so they didn't track time. No idea what other candidates did, but I got specific and positive feedback on the code submitted. The task was pretty carefully thought out and presented to not lean too heavily on specific patterns or techniques. All of your experiences do sound particularly frustrating, I wouldn't be too excited with them either!
