If the work is in any way usable to the interviewing company, definitely. We went that route for one of our work samples where abstracting out a context-mirroring scenario was going to be very difficult. We then paid the candidates for the time spent doing the 4-hour take-home work sample.
One anti-pattern here involves turning all of your work samples into week-long consulting engagements. Those are a great way to evaluate candidates, but it means you can only hire folks who are already doing consulting (or are otherwise unemployed). For some companies, that works.
I don't see how this can be practical when it generally takes at least a week of ramp-up before a new hire has gained enough familiarity with the tools and codebase to do anything that could be called "real work".
While that 1-week (or longer) ramp-up is generally true for companies, it's clearly not true for most (successful) open source projects. The things that a good open source project has (good documentation, onboarding, tests, etc.) are also the things that a good work sample will have.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 20.1 ms ] threadAnd real pay to go along with it?
One anti-pattern here involves turning all of your work samples into week-long consulting engagements. Those are a great way to evaluate candidates, but it means you can only hire folks who are already doing consulting (or are otherwise unemployed). For some companies, that works.