On one hand I like take-home exercises because they are closer to what is a real world job and I guarantee the quality of my deliveries. Up to now I can say I've passed every single take home exercise that was thrown at me. On the other hand... the time I spent on those is abysmal. If I sum it up, I must have spent over a month working on take-home exercises. And even if I passed all of them, in the end no company gave me an offer because I wasn't a cultural fit or something. One company even ghosted me after having me to do a 1-week take-home exercise where I had to build an entire app, front end and back end, that consumed an open data API that had 1 million rows.

I still prefer take-home exercises because are more realistic and make more sense than timed, algorithmic exercises. But I wish companies would do their cultural fitness thing _before_ having candidates to spend their time on their code challenges.