Which is why if you commit to doing a take home project, you should at least ask how much time they expect the project to take. For a lot of software development projects there is always something to work on and improve if time allows. Parkinsons Law and all. I might be a good idea to exceed their estimate a little to get a more finished product, but that number at least anchors the project timeline. If they legitimately answer with 50 hours, then feel free to laugh in their face. However a 2 or 3 hour project to be completed at some point over 2 weeks seems completely reasonable.

It has been shown that most software estimates are out by a factor of 40% (from what remember). I have a feeling take home exercises will add even more to that due to the initial setup as well.

They gave him two weeks to do it and it was apparently a multi-part thing where it made sense to send in answers to the first part before doing the rest. That doesn't sound like something that's supposed to take 30 minutes.

If it takes 30 minutes then what you do is organize 60 minutes coderpad session and get lots more information than just a solution that the candidate pretends he did in the allotted time.

It's still very rude not to respond to someone's efforts just because they took extra time to get things right.

But yeah, as another commenter said, they gave two weeks and it seems like a multiparter.