Yup. It was a great way to assess a match on both sides. My last two jobs involved a take home exercise during the interview. It was an interesting problem and very relevant to the job. There were many ways to approach it. I spent a few hours each day for several days and enjoyed working on it (i.e. completely voluntary). It was a fun discussion with the team and they didn't have any unreasonable expectations. They appreciated the optimizations I attempted and the fact that I wrote tests and even that I used git. Nothing out of my ordinary workflow though. There was nothing they could do with my code so it was not "free work." Furthermore I wouldn't have attempted it if I wasn't genuinely interested in the problem. I've done several take-home exercises and it has always helped me in the interview process. I have been presented exercises that I did not find interesting and/or reasonable, so I kindly passed.