[vorpalhex]

I've pushed against tests like this before, especially "sample projects".

My experience doing so falls into exactly two categories:

+ Companies that get very upset (one even had the CEO email me cursing me out after I said I wasn't going to remake a twitter API client considering I had a github full of API clients including one for twitter already!)

+ Companies that go "Oh, actually yeah, that seems to make sense. Can you highlight a few repos you'd prefer to show us, or do you mind doing some whiteboarding with us?"

You never, ever, want to work for the first category. The first category of companies are the same people who usually expect you to work a lot of additional hours for free, have poor internal practices at least around work/life balance, and generally treat their engineers like code monkeys instead of people.

So, I usually push back against these tests because it's very revealing to do. Even if you end up caving, it's important to test the companies response to a bit of polite push back.