A js-free version is nice though

Thanks for the comment. Yeah good point, I really miss people with the 8-5 mindset. At the moment there are too many people who just throw things over the wall, giving me nightmares once a month. (And users hate it) Already settled for something smaller but that definitely makes me feel better with my decision.

In Europe it's actually quite standard to give take home challenges (1-3h) and leetcode tasks are rare but becoming more common. Also many companies only do 1 or 2 rounds of interviews. (HR and technical) One could also argue that to prepare for leetcode style interviews much more time needs to be invested upfront, at least if it's not easy questions.

I would probably not want to avoid any challenge at all, but 1-2h seems reasonable to me. (live or take home)

This sounds interesting. Actually my job before was also in a large org and while there was a coding part, it was very basic. (String splitting, joining, a design/modelling task and pair programming on the actual code with the team lead) That team was quite large and everybody contributed their part.

Anyway in the current company the actual day-to-day challenges are figuring out things in the Linux ecosystem and also getting things done.

Working culture is rather demanding and things tend to be quite ambigious, so to be honest the challenge reflects reality to some degree. But our team works with niche technology and therefore the pressure doesn't fully apply to our small'ish team. (Honestly, I wouldn't recommend the position to a not so experienced engineer or someone who doesn't know how to limit their working hours.)

Good point, I fully agree with you. Didn't come up with it myself but it has been used for years already but I think HR also complained about it.

Actually I did the challenge a year ago and it was only circumstantial that I didn't decline. Yet, we need a good replacement for the challenge (or the whole interview process) because most of the workload is on me at the moment.

I think this is not how it works. It's like saying: I'll connect a physical lock to my laptop and I'm more secure. (Many PC laptops have on the side a standardized connector for physical locks which is often used in electronics stores)

Better to go a step back and to consider your Threat Model. What are you doing? What are things that could likely happen right now? Is adding to your security/backing up your Threat Model or is it making things worse because it's adding stuff that you don't need, making workflows so complicated you're likely to misconfigure?

To give a more practical example, there have been a lot of conspiracy theories about Antivirus software. In some sense the nay sayers are right and it actually adds possible holes since they tend to run with elevated privileges. On the other hand, does it really matter for your use case? If you download random stuff online, you should probably install one. (Probably also for your fellow humans so your computer doesn't end up being a botnet host) But if everything on your computer is hand-picked (TM), you might be actually right and they decrease security.