You scope the deliverable to the level of the person you’re hiring, but at the end of the day I do want to hire people who have actually really done something, not just people with the potential to do something. There is nothing wrong with that and nearly every other job role and industry works within those constraints. Jr devs with no formal decision making authority have done well in our process, the bad ones do really poorly.
My personal experience has been that this format 1) gives the engineer “home field advantage” by allowing them to go deep on a project they should know a lot about and hopefully show off a bit and be confident 2) allows us to really press on how deep the engineer actually understands the tools they use and what they do/did 3) allows us to understand if the candidate is a leader/get shit done orientation person or a passenger on projects 4) allows us to see how polished their technical writing is
My personal experience has been that this format 1) gives the engineer “home field advantage” by allowing them to go deep on a project they should know a lot about and hopefully show off a bit and be confident 2) allows us to really press on how deep the engineer actually understands the tools they use and what they do/did 3) allows us to understand if the candidate is a leader/get shit done orientation person or a passenger on projects 4) allows us to see how polished their technical writing is