A plan they could implement without hiring him
The exercise was to produce a full performance-improvement plan: review the code, work out what to say to the staff, specify the engineering changes. Six or seven hours, unpaid.
He could see what he was really being asked for.
This is the point at which an assessment stops resembling a test and starts
resembling a deliverable. The distinguishing question is simple: if the
candidate is rejected, can the company still use what they made?