If that's how you want to test potential engineers, I don't necessarily see a problem with the task itself. Just pay them! I'm sure Uber can find the budget for that.
I'm sure they're fine with engineers who don't ask to be payed for random tasks encroaching their private life.
Snark aside, it can iffy to pay someone for a task at your company when they are still under contract in their previous job. In that sense, while your point is sensible, it can be difficult to go that route from the candidate side.
Yup. Will anyone who cares find out that a competitor paid you to do some task? Probably not, but it seems like an iffy proposition to violate your current employment agreement to have an interview.
I once was invited to interview for a startup to work with their (mostly remote) team for a week, for which they would compensate me at a decent rate. I never managed to find the drive to take a week off for this, but yes, it would have been tricky to explain to my then manager.
I doubt they had the budget for that or they likely wouldn't have been essentially trying to get someone to making their MVP under the guise of a new hire interview.
Keep in mind the OP mentioned that this was pre-launch, when they were still UberCab and only had aspirations to be a peer-to-peer cab app. Long before they started marketing themselves as a logistics juggernaut or world changing self driving car creators for valuation justification purposes.
One thing I've tried at my company is to present a complicated task with many parts and considerations, and then explicitly say that you are not required to complete all of it. Just do the the minimum required (which can be done in an hour or so) and the parts that catches your interest. Looking at which parts the prospective engineer completed, we could also determine which part of the stack he/she likely wants to work on.
If you've never had a job as a developer before and don't have any open source contributions, then that's actually a pretty good take home project. Yes it will take a week or two of unpaid work, but no one is going to hire you for your first job without having built at least one project of that size anyway.
For an entry-level fullstack iOS developer it's not that bad.
For context, for my first job as a developer the take home assignment I got was creating a web app that logged realtime CPU usage and created a graph of that CPU usage that was updated in real time.
And this all had to be done using a specific language, web framework, and database that I had never used before.
>For context, for my first job as a developer the take home assignment I got was creating a web app that logged realtime CPU usage and created a graph of that CPU usage that was updated in real time.
That's at worst a 4 hour job to do with a beer over the weekend. You sound incredibly incompetent if you can't tell the difference in difficulty between that and that they asked OP to do.
That assignment is 1/128th the work of point 1) from OP.
You download a list of every street address in San Francisco, pick two at random, and write one line of code to get Google Maps to tell you how long it takes to drive between them. Where exactly is the complexity?