Well, I would say the total tasks were tasks taking about a handful of hours, but the deadlines were about a week out from when they were given. So essentially, they were spreading the "normal" five or six hours worth of interviewing with developers and doing trivial tasks (that I think don't really show the interviewer what kind of programmer I am), but compressed into one project, meanwhile time-wise spread out across a week. I've interviewed maybe five times like this (most recently twice last year). Definitely I felt like the code they got was a good representation of the kind of code I write normally. I would never agree to working for a week for a job interview without pay. Though most recently I had an interview where the guys didn't even ask for my resume once. They only ever looked over my Github, which for me was a nice touch, and made me feel like those guys know wtf they're doing. I should mention here that I interview for fun continually, otherwise I would have taken the one the guys offered who didn't even ask for my resume.