Started with a Skype call. Went as expected, most of the time spent hearing about the company. Took about 30 minutes and ended with an email that included a coding "exercise". I emphasis "exercise" because it was anything but that. I was told it would take between 8-12 hours and included the research, design and development of a social first shopping list system. 8-12 hours to do something of that magnitude is completely absurd. At my freelance rate this is roughly $500 to $800 worth of effort if even achievable in that time-frame (which it is not). I took a stab at it against my better judgement and wound up spending over 16 hours researching, designing and developing their shopping list system known as "Basket".
After submitting the coding test I received an email back stating I didn't follow the instructions thoroughly. The problem? I "didn't use jQuery and a few links were not clickable". Nowhere in the documentation did it state the core jQuery library was required, it stated simply "Use jQuery". I loaded and used jQuery Mobile. They also stated not everything needs to "work" and you can assume the people reviewing know the basics of UI/UX. I made only the first link clickable which lead into one of the views to give an idea of how the others would look, I wasn't building a working shopping system as explained in the documentation Idean provided, but just use case examples. I sent an email back explaining why only the first link was clickable and the use of jQuery mobile but received no response.
I was under the impression the coding test was to be an example of research/design/coding work, not a finished and well polished product especially within the 8-12 hour time frame. Silly me for reading and following the instructions and not making the correct assumptions on a poorly thought out document.