Yes, it would be. If you have good time management you would toss the project and keep looking for a position.

If a company I'm trying to find employment at wants me to take my interview home for the entire weekend, it sends all sorts of bad signs:

1. They don't see working on the weekend as unreasonable.

2. They don't value my time.

3. They aren't comfortable making hiring decisions and taking on risk. What other hard decisions aren't going to be made or are going to be made too late by this company?

To answer some of your questions:

1. Nobody here works on weekends. In fact, it's not well received, but tolerated. 2. Everybody's time is valued here and on a individual basis. 3. I'm glad i had influence on whom i will be working with on a daily basis and have not regretted it either. My workmates are awesome. Why should the management decide this all alone?

Everybody here is free to openly make reservations about the companies strategies and decisions.

Would your view change if they paid you a contractor's rate?

No, not at all. There's plenty of freelance work out there. If I wanted to freelance on my weekend, I wouldn't go job searching to do it.

I work during the week. Mornings, evenings and weekends I spend with my son. I don't let work interfere with that, nor do I let time with my son interfere with work (Mon to Fri, 8am to 7pm).

THAT is time management.

This. Give someone a project that should take no more than n hours to complete and give then n/2 days to do it, preferably including a weekend. That should be plenty of time for some folks, even employed.

That's how I did several interviews a while back. Before everyone somehow knew and loved BackboneJS, I took a functioning data-driven sorted table app, removed some of the model and controller code, left the view, and then asked them to complete it.

People either:

- Hacked together the internals to make it function, never considering any of the existing Backbone or _s functions

- Figured the existing code was a template, and rewrote it all now they thought it should've been (which can be good or bad)

- Learned enough of Backbone to complete the example with minimal code, but generally took longer because they had to learn the tool first

As a result, I got a great hire that knows when to refactor, when to leave existing code alone, and when to use AngularJS instead of Backbone!