It's quickly become common for a company to assign a homework assignment that will take "2 hours". However the nature of development is often a process of debug

It's quickly become common for a company to assign a homework assignment that will take "2 hours". However the nature of development is often a process of debugging (even if the end fix is stupidly simple, just difficult to nail down). This is a cancer because many hiring managers will assign out these homework assignments to all the applicants, before doing almost any due diligence or getting to know an applicant. If you want someone to jump through 8 hours of interviews and calls, then 8 hours of coding, you should be paying them at least for the coding.