I've only had to do 4 of these, as they aren't that popular in my corner of the earth yet, but I didn't like them, I have a kid and stuff to do and I can't spend my time doing 4 hours extra on the weekend unless it is a job I really, really want.
First out of the 4 I did what was asked but got refused because I didn't clean up the code afterwards ( I thought I'd been cool for demonstrating some lesser known functionalities of the language and API I was dealing with). If I've spent 4 hours doing it, I don't want to spend 2 hours making it really pretty.
Second out of the 4 I misunderstood the instructions so I went in and 'fixed' their code to make it work they way I thought they wanted it ( was maybe too tired since it was late at night after a day of working on a personal project) This was actually a job that was close to one I really, really want.
Third out of the 4 I can't remember anything about it now.
Fourth out of the 4 they really liked what I did and we had a great interview, and then I got turned down because they thought I wasn't really that interested in their company (which was true, I was just fulfilling a job search requirement while getting my startup going)
Aside from that I interviewed at a social analytics startup one time and we ended up talking data mining and they asked me to do a 2 weeks project with them to do a POC of sentiment mining Twitter/Facebook. I gave them what my consulting fees would be, but they seemed really interested in me doing it for free as conditional for pursuing employment there. So I never got to try that coding exercise.
First out of the 4 I did what was asked but got refused because I didn't clean up the code afterwards ( I thought I'd been cool for demonstrating some lesser known functionalities of the language and API I was dealing with). If I've spent 4 hours doing it, I don't want to spend 2 hours making it really pretty.
Second out of the 4 I misunderstood the instructions so I went in and 'fixed' their code to make it work they way I thought they wanted it ( was maybe too tired since it was late at night after a day of working on a personal project) This was actually a job that was close to one I really, really want.
Third out of the 4 I can't remember anything about it now.
Fourth out of the 4 they really liked what I did and we had a great interview, and then I got turned down because they thought I wasn't really that interested in their company (which was true, I was just fulfilling a job search requirement while getting my startup going)
Aside from that I interviewed at a social analytics startup one time and we ended up talking data mining and they asked me to do a 2 weeks project with them to do a POC of sentiment mining Twitter/Facebook. I gave them what my consulting fees would be, but they seemed really interested in me doing it for free as conditional for pursuing employment there. So I never got to try that coding exercise.