On paper (or blog), having a candidate write code for an interview is better than a BS whiteboard session. In practice, it means I spent 20 hours on my last pi

On paper (or blog), having a candidate write code for an interview is better than a BS whiteboard session. In practice, it means I spent 20 hours on my last piece of sample code I submitted to a job I was excited about. Only to be told no thanks, with the feedback of: "Your app meets what we spec'd out, but it differs from our style." And to be clear, after I repeatedly asked for what they were looking for in this code, they replied "we are purposely providing nothing except functional requirements to see what you produce". I could have given them exactly what they want, but I guess they'd rather just wait and hope that someone magically codes the same way they do? Honestly I should have billed them after that.