I'm tired of companies asking me to code at their interviews. I have 10 years experience with references. I have code that I've built, deployed to production still running today. I have cultivated my own clients, gathered requirements and built something that delivers business value. Instead of a coding interview, I'll make a counter offer. Why not hire me on a 1 week contract to come and do some real world work. Wor…
But candidate evaluation is not an objective business, one company's perfect candidate might be complete trash at another firm. A company's interview process then is necessarily a reflection that company's character, culture, and attitude just as much as it is a process to find potential employees.
For example, your suggested hiring process of doing essentially an extended homework assignment might be great for a firm who doesn't care about "hiring the best", "building the elite team" or whatever, and instead wants to just assemble a ragtag team of misfits who trust and work well with each other to get things done.
Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley standard Googlesque hiring practice of using timed tree-inverting-list-o(log n)-optimized-talk-through-what-you-are-doing-(oh-90%-of-our-devs-use-your-oss-but-you-dont-remember-red-black-trees-so-fuck-off) algorithm questions to pinpoint the most academically smart candidate is perfect for companies who want to hire the "smartest programmer" to create a culture of intelligence oneupmanship to drive "innovation".
And unless one happens to be in a situation where one absolute needs a job right away, a candidate could really glean a lot about a potential company's direction and culture through just how they conduct their interview, and decide if this is, indeed, a place where one could do one's best for the company and continue with the application or apply elsewhere.