This article hit me in the same spot your rage did but for different reasons. I’m a hiring manager and have been for a long time. I would love to have a dialogue around what’s reasonable. Here’s what we do here at GoCanvas (as background, I’ve been here 6 months and hired several people in that time and been on countless interviews):

• Only after the recruiter has talked to you, I’ve talked to you and someone else senior on my team has talked to you, do we ask you to do an exercise for your in-person interview. So by now, we’re pretty confident we want to bring you in for the in-person (and we are genuinely interested in you).
• We give an exercise with short details around the ask — reimagine some “part” of our app and its experience. We let YOU chose. Our software is free and open to d/l and try out.
• We ask that you only spend 2–3 hours on the exercise and to do it in whatever medium feels right to you. We include some things to think about and some questions we’d be asking you in the in-person. We prep you as much as we can. I’ve had candidates come back wanting more info and I’ve had to be very explicit in saying “please don’t spend the time exploring all of that — just go off what you have” aka, with less info I’m hoping you will be free and open with your ideas.
• No final design, no polish, no nothing like that — sketches and simple wireframes are fine — we just want to see some of your thought process on something we can relate to.

The thing is, I see a ton of work, especially from junior-mid level that’s all “dream design” or done in a course. I need to know I’m hiring someone who has the chops at the level I’m seeking and can execute in a corporate/business setting. Often these folks haven’t had that (or have had very little of it)

In my previous job, we had no design exercises and I can tell you there were multiple ppl we hired that turned out to have been less than honest in their portfolios, in their resumes and even in their in-person interviews. I had one individual run through several weeks of client money, multiple onsite trips and bad presentations before we pulled them. Literally their dishonesty cost us thousands and damaged the team dynamic before we could pull them off the project and deal with the issues.

If I give you an exercise that you can’t bullshit your way through, a small one that isn’t in any form I can use as “free spec work” then I can tell if you’ve got what it takes and will make a good addition to my team. This also ensures I don’t have to fire you in 30, 60, 90 days which gets really uncomfortable and expensive for a startup (and causes a ton of problems from a culture perspective)

So if there’s a better way to ensure we’re being fair and able to really assess talent, I’m all ears. As a final thing, when the candidate comes in, we spend an entire day with them, walking through their project, we take them to lunch and we give them a gift card for their time regardless of whether we extend an offer or not. So we try to be fair but again, I’m open to alternative suggestions!