What about the time it takes for interviews? Is it being disrespectful to take up an hour of their time for an interview? What if you do a 2nd interview for another hour? What if you have a 3rd? It's not unusual to have 2 or 3 interviews before hiring. What if you replaced one of those hours with a coding task that should take under 1 hour to complete. Is asking for 1 hour disrespectful to their time? Why is asking for 1 hour of their time to code different than 1 hour of time for interview?

I think the expectation that I have random projects that I'm passionate about to be more disrespectful of my time. I have to compete against an unknown, I don't know what the other people interviewing will be doing for their projects so I have to try and make it more impressive than projects I don't even know about.

It's much less stressful and takes much less time to give me a basic to intermediate coding problem to solve on my own with a pre-set number of days/hours to work on it.

I think many of the people on HN that say they won't do a take-home assignment would actually do a 30-60 minute take-home assignment if it meant avoiding the "code some algorithm on a whiteboard while the interviewer glares at you" situation. Then on the on-site, you can focus on the design/behavioral type things appropriate to the role's level of seniority.

Also, if you give the same assignment to multiple candidates, you'll get a better sense of how people use different approaches to solving a problem. You can still use discussions around side-projects to complement the process, but having a standard approach for all candidates is helpful.