Part of being a developer is there's going to be some crap I can't shield you from as your manager, despite my best intentions. If I think you are going to suddenly turn barrack-room lawyer on me, or tell me it's not part of your job, or anything other than deal with it professionally and helpfully, you're a poor team fit.
And if you understand so little about how programming teams work, and think that you are going to - with no context of the codebase or problem space - significantly improve my Senior Developer's work such that you're worth your contracting day-rate for the interview (and are paranoid to think that the interview is a big scam to get you to work for free) ... you're probably delusional.
Thing is, as an employee, yes you should be able to deal with having to spend unexpected time on something. As a job candidate, the equation is a bit different. There is no commitment from the company or the candidate to each other, and the candidate may never get hired by the company in the first place. So why should the candidate give the company a day of work for free? And if a day of work for free is fine, why not 2 days, or a week? Clearly there is some point at which a job candidate should not be doing free work for a company.
It didn't sound like the company was looking for the interviewee to improve on the Senior Developer's work, it sounded like they wanted the interviewee to develop new features for deployment in a pair with the lead developer. Not the same thing IMO.
Maybe the company wasn't trying to concoct a grand scam, but there are certainly companies out there that would think nothing of doing so. And even if the whole 'write some deployable features' for us exercise was not devised as a scam, it doesn't change the fact that it is a bit unreasonable to ask a job candidate to spend a day writing code for you.
The guy even offered to write code for an open source project but the interviewer refused. What does that say about the company?
Part of being a developer is there's going to be some crap I can't shield you from as your manager, despite my best intentions. If I think you are going to suddenly turn barrack-room lawyer on me, or tell me it's not part of your job, or anything other than deal with it professionally and helpfully, you're a poor team fit.
And if you understand so little about how programming teams work, and think that you are going to - with no context of the codebase or problem space - significantly improve my Senior Developer's work such that you're worth your contracting day-rate for the interview (and are paranoid to think that the interview is a big scam to get you to work for free) ... you're probably delusional.