This is an accurate view of take home assignments. Most of the take home assignments I've done were "supposed" to take 5 hours. Most of them too around 20.
The worst take home assignment I ever had was an extremely tricky brain teaser, the answer to which could not be found on google, and had to be done in the not very popular language this company used. So I not only had to write useless brain teaser code, but I couldn't do it in a language I was already comfortable with.
Yea, I had one take home problem where the instructions stated "Please don't take more than 1 hour to solve." So, just once, I decided to hold myself to one hour, and barely managed to get to a solution that worked.
During the code review in the follow-up interview, I was raked over the coals for not writing tests, failing to cover edge cases, etc. ,etc. Basically, they expected production-ready code. Didn't get the job.
I’ve shared the same experience! Coming out of college every time I’d get a take home I would always blow way over the expected allotted time. They’d say it should take 5 hours and I’d end up on it for 20 since I actually had the time then.
Year’s later I did the same as you and decided to stick to the recommended time, because I really don’t want to waste my nights/weekends on this junk anymore. Working full time there’s barely any time for relaxing anyway. Sure enough, the same thing happened in review. Got absolutely shredded on my implementation. Didn’t get an offer and kind of wish they didn’t even call me back.
And that's the worst part about the take home assignments, all the people you're competing with are claiming they did it within the time limit when they're really taking far longer to make it perfect.
The worst take home assignment I ever had was an extremely tricky brain teaser, the answer to which could not be found on google, and had to be done in the not very popular language this company used. So I not only had to write useless brain teaser code, but I couldn't do it in a language I was already comfortable with.