I on the other hand have never come across a scenario where I run git bisect to find a commit that broke something, discover a small commit as a culprit and wish I had instead found a commit that's hundreds of lines long.
What has happened a whole lot though is the exact opposite.
I feel your pain. I've got similar amount of experience in my own area, I've been part of several successful software projects, and I have several popular open-source projects that I'm maintaining, but it all seemed to not matter a whole lot as I slogged month after month through interviews with rejection after rejection.
All I can say is that perhaps all those places that reject you are not actually the places where you really would like to work.
At one point I managed to get a job at a company which from the outside looked like a really cool place to work in. However all these interviews painted a very different picture of the work that I was actually assigned to do. I felt like I was being paid a senior engineer salary to do the job of a junior engineer. I was utterly bored and I complained that it's too boring and way below my skill level. This ended up getting me fired. Strangely, I've never had so many work-mates expressing to me how sad they are that I'm leaving. Several of them left the company not long after me.
Currently I'm in a happier place. Not getting as big of a salary but having an opportunity to work on a way more interesting software. And how did I land this job... after a single short interview they told me: would you like to start tomorrow?
I find that take-home assignments are very one-sided form of an interview:
- The candidate needs to do lots of work while the company gets away with little to none.
- The candidate never knows what exactly the other side will be looking for, so the only way is to put in more work. Like when the assignment didn't ask for tests, they might still be expecting them.
- The candidate usually gets no feedback about the work he did. More importantly he usually doesn't get a chance to defend his solution. It's either great or garbage.
- While the company can learn something about the candidate, the candidate will learn nothing about the company by doing the assignment.
What has happened a whole lot though is the exact opposite.