I think they are really testing the ability for a new developer to get a build machine set up and running so that they can check out, modify, test, and check in code. This is as much of a test of Cheeseburger as it is of the new hire (or their bladder).

In the past I have worked at or consulted for places where doing so was a black art that could easily occupy a week or more of a new hire's time. Most small companies had a single "expert" and the rest of the developers would copy code, libraries, and settings from one machine to another in cargo-cult fashion.

Nail on the head, here. I'd say it isn't a test of the new hire at all. Having this rule in place requires their code and tools to be in order and easy to set up at all times. That alone is priceless company-wide, however it makes the new hire feel on the first day.

> that's far from what you'll encounter with complex projects

I don't think that's true. Even complex projects have some simple bugs. The example given was making the software produce a nicer error message if the output was out of bounds; you can do that kind of work for almost any program. It's not like they assigned a random bug...

Or even jut fix a typo in a comment or error message.