But the vast majority of the time -- that's not what your company needs at all. You need someone who's smart and reliable, and more to the point, believes in your mission. And who will go in and do all that far from algorithmic, highly unglamorous stuff that keeps your business from going underwater, day in, day out.
But of course - those skills are difficult to evaluate in a short amount of time. So instead companies go for a skill that can be "measured".
A skill like -- you guessed it -- algorithms.
Is it, now? The best thing you can say about is probably "it seems to kind of, sort of work" -- at the cost of burning through a whole lot of candidates, and their presumably worthless time.
no top notch engineer is going to do a 8 hour take home test for every interview
Yup, take-homes suck, also. But that doesn't mean that complementOf(8-hour-take-home) is the right answer, either.