I'm looking for work and this is kind of driving me up the wall too. Not so much the algorithm stuff (generally I can crush that, even if I see the point the au

I'm looking for work and this is kind of driving me up the wall too. Not so much the algorithm stuff (generally I can crush that, even if I see the point the author is making). It's the take-home stuff. After you pass that their algorithm trivia test (subset sums? REALLY?), then they ask you to do a take-home test. The latest one is literally "here's some data, code up an interface. Be creative." No direction, no use cases. They barely explain what the product even is. This isn't going to be easy. I've already spent four hours on it - getting a sense of their product and what their customers even want - and a few more hours thinking about it and then one hour just massaging the data. I can see six more hours ahead of me. I'm doing it mostly because it's a way to motivate myself to learn more about mobile interfaces, but it's really irritating. Perhaps I could use more boilerplate code (and I'm trying to use as much off the shelf stuff as possible), but what do they learn then? One of my old employers was guilty of something even worse - their take home exam was "code up a bug tracker". I felt so embarrassed about that. Either they whipped up a basic thing in something that creates most of the forms for you (which tells us relatively little), or they spun their wheels for two or three days (trying to do it from scratch, likely not producing anything that good).