[ronaldx]

You seem to have missed the point.

Consider the following two developers. Who would you rather hire, and who will get hired under this system?

1. Developer completes the task, unfamiliar to them, in 2 hours, or

2. Developer completes the task, familiar to them, in 1.5 hours?

[ricardobeat]

Maybe I'm biased (no Objective-C experience), but in the platforms I work with this is a 15-minute task, so I wouldn't hire either. There is nothing extraordinary about being familiar with XML or regular expressions.

[ronaldx]

Take your point, and it's probable that the employer had other concerns and picked a covering excuse.

(Some Objective-C flavour: NSXMLParser is a more appropriate solution than the one described)

One reason I picked 90 minutes for my example is that I was imagining a hypothetical task, and I don't think you would/should be left sat at a task for 2 hours where 15 mins was expected. I hope that wouldn't happen.