Pretty much every company I have ever worked at has done the take home assignment (EU based). There is almost never any issue, at least on the surface, from the candidates side as to doing them. But online, these discussions immediately turn into the majority deriding the process.

I have probably done about 6 take home assignments in my 14 year career and 5 resulted in a job offer. In a recent company I worked for I was the hiring manager and we had about a 40% assignment completed to offer ratio. Which seems like a fairly decent conversion ratio, from the average candidates side that would be close to 1 offer for every 2 assignments.

Is there a correlation with people hating on them because the ratio is skewed much less favorably? Do I have too subjective a view? I know there are companies that give an assignment as practically the first step in the process; but I would never engage with that since the risk/reward is weighted entirely in the company's favor (which under the surface, is an even bigger red flag).

My favorite take homes, and almost always what I have come across, are the "build a mini api" ones. I will typically just draw from the structure I have in place in other applications, implement the custom functionality, and do a readme that delves into the philosophy (in a light touch way) of the choices I make. Then the conversation of going through the implementation in a technical interview is generally a relatively relaxed process.