It's lower-status, more degrading and has worser odds than cold-call telemarketers trying to sell you some new credit card.
By the way, when a telemarketer tricks you into answering his call, you don't subject him to a 3-days intensive rectal exam ("homework") just for the remote possibility of getting a new credit card, which at the end you still don't buy anyways on some made-up pretense.
So developers agree to way worse level of abuse and degradation than the lowliest sales guy.
At least 5 years runway, entirely on your own "payroll". If you're actually competent, that's more than enough time to pick any skill (possibly starting your own business rather than look for a job using it), if you can do 12 hours per day by your own choosing on whatever you see fit.
Don't have those 5 years but only 1-2 or, god forbid, have nothing more than a few months on top of a large amount of credit you have to pay back.... and you're in the 99% percent of desperate and destitute crowd who will submit to anything in exchange for a bowl of soup (guarantee they never break out of slavery).
Problem with the solution is that it's a vicious circle: if you don't already have those 5 years of savings, chances are you're never going to save them anyways.
Also it shouldn't be the first stage of the interview process. That's just taking a piss. For this job it was after a phone interview, and with a scheduled face-to-face interview (where we discussed the code I'd written).