The last time I was in the hiring side of the process... I had what I considered a pretty easy assignment... it was for a full-stack JS developer (node). The assignment was to read in an XML file (preferably via an input stream) and write it out to a JSON file of a predetermined object structure.

There were no other limitations put.. "bonus points for stream based input" "bonus points for test cases" ... only a couple people actually delivered a "working" solution (one that ran and outputted anything), none of which had the correct output (one was close enough), and none had any tests.

It was truly something that should take a "skilled" developer a couple hours. And not something that should be entirely alien. To say the least, I was really disappointed with the results. I did the project myself in about 2 hrs, with test cases, 100% code coverage. (before I even gave it out, it was as trivial a challenge as I could come up with for a real world problem).

Why should I have to pay the couple dozen people for their 3 hours, when none delivered a correct solution?

In the end, the person with the closest to correct solution, was the one with the least experience... that person got the job.