[GVIrish]

Thing is, as an employee, yes you should be able to deal with having to spend unexpected time on something. As a job candidate, the equation is a bit different. There is no commitment from the company or the candidate to each other, and the candidate may never get hired by the company in the first place. So why should the candidate give the company a day of work for free? And if a day of work for free is fine, why not 2 days, or a week? Clearly there is some point at which a job candidate should not be doing free work for a company.

It didn't sound like the company was looking for the interviewee to improve on the Senior Developer's work, it sounded like they wanted the interviewee to develop new features for deployment in a pair with the lead developer. Not the same thing IMO.

Maybe the company wasn't trying to concoct a grand scam, but there are certainly companies out there that would think nothing of doing so. And even if the whole 'write some deployable features' for us exercise was not devised as a scam, it doesn't change the fact that it is a bit unreasonable to ask a job candidate to spend a day writing code for you.

The guy even offered to write code for an open source project but the interviewer refused. What does that say about the company?