I've recently had a very similar experience with work sample/coding tests and I completely agree. It strikes me that most people setting these tasks are pretty clueless about how difficult the task is and haven't tested them out on non-candidates.
How they're implemented has varied wildly between companies, but most of them were used as an initial screener rather than a major deciding factor, despite being one of the most time consuming parts of the process for the candidate.
Like you I was able to go through with most of them, but I felt like they were a massive waste of my free time and companies were often very slow to follow up in it. I think a lot of the time it just isn't worth jumping through these hoops for a company I don't know anything about.
My best test I took was around an hour and involved building a really basic CRUD app in Django as part of a larger face to face interview, followed by a short discussion. It worked well because they set up an environment for me, the data model was fixed, and there was a list of short requirements I could complete in order, so I was able to just dive into the work, and spend time on the kind of things that were relevant.
Another one basically asked me to take a large dataset, build a web application around it, and deploy it, which would probably have taken me a week to complete but "should" have taken around 3 hours. They tried to present it a really interesting problem I would enjoy working on and then asked me to keep all my work confidential.
Most of the tests I've done are still closer to general problem solving/comp sci tests, which is still pretty far removed from the actual work, but at least they're not a huge time sink when implemented properly.
How they're implemented has varied wildly between companies, but most of them were used as an initial screener rather than a major deciding factor, despite being one of the most time consuming parts of the process for the candidate.
Like you I was able to go through with most of them, but I felt like they were a massive waste of my free time and companies were often very slow to follow up in it. I think a lot of the time it just isn't worth jumping through these hoops for a company I don't know anything about.
My best test I took was around an hour and involved building a really basic CRUD app in Django as part of a larger face to face interview, followed by a short discussion. It worked well because they set up an environment for me, the data model was fixed, and there was a list of short requirements I could complete in order, so I was able to just dive into the work, and spend time on the kind of things that were relevant.
Another one basically asked me to take a large dataset, build a web application around it, and deploy it, which would probably have taken me a week to complete but "should" have taken around 3 hours. They tried to present it a really interesting problem I would enjoy working on and then asked me to keep all my work confidential.
Most of the tests I've done are still closer to general problem solving/comp sci tests, which is still pretty far removed from the actual work, but at least they're not a huge time sink when implemented properly.