Depends on your target salary and luck. I do not earn a FAANG salary but my interview was a single 1 hour session where I showed them a few of my github projects and talked shop. My impression is most people going for high salaries need to do the leetcode grind and 8+ stages of interviews though.

i honestly prefer a take-home exercise to live-coding.

at least with a take-home exercise, i can take my time, do in a few hours, without the pressure of having someone looking at what i'm doing.

While hiring I've done a 15min test before an interview (always looking through their portfolio first) that took some candidates 30-45mins. If they fail or took longer than 45mins it ends there. I then do a 30min interview that sometimes take 45min if they talk a lot or ask me questions about the company

How does this sound? I have no idea if this is ideal but so far we didn't hire any more bad candidates than we did using a different process

Because they weed out people that just do a bunch of leetcode from people that actually know how to write quality software.

So there are two possibilities:

- There is no reason to take them and this process will slowly fail over time as companies who adopt these policies slowly push away talent options.

- You are not the target audience of a take home assignment hiring process.

I think it's easy to believe the first since it affirms your world view. Speaking as somebody who has a deep pocket of job opportunities and has taken one of these take home assignments, sometimes those opportunities become stale or you're in a tough market or need a job immediately. A number of companies who have bad hiring practices are still fairly acceptable to work at, even if it's not ideal.

TLDR - to pay the bills.