> You shouldn't have to write a OS Kernel or a modern browser in your spare time either. I'd say it would be about 4-8 hours work that shows off your skills.
Well, this is a different suggestion. Now we're only talking about a few hours of work rather than a pet project. I don't think the licensing makes much of a difference since I probably couldn't monetize four hours of randomly dorking around. I'm still not a huge fan of the idea, though, because it sounds hard to me to show off (adequately) skills I've spent decades acquiring with less than a day's worth of aimless work. I don't feel like it would be very impressive.
> Is there a field that requires 4-8hr competency tests where each test is wildly different from the previous, with completely opaque criteria.
Nobody is advocating for eight-hour tests. The OP said they expected their test to take less than half that. And most fields that require competency tests (e.g. cooking, acting, music) will expect you to do it live, on the spot. Take-home tests are being suggested in the case of programming specifically because programmers hate being expected to perform on the spot.
> At least with the provide your own project idea, if the employer has fucked up criteria the candidate has only wasted a few seconds of their time in sending the zip file.
Not all criteria that someone might test for are "fucked up." If I'm looking for, say, somebody to do a math-heavy machine learning job, and your pet open-source project is a jQuery plugin that makes web page backgrounds sparkly, the mismatch between those two is not the fault of my criteria.
