Paying people to do demo work is revolutionary, I love this idea. I can't tell you how many hundreds of hours I had to put in over the last 25 years doing these "evaluation tasks" where essentially the company is getting me to put in 20 hours of work for $0. Then there's the places that use puzzles from CS courses to exclude anyone who hasn't been through CS school. Practical experience is often treated as worthless by our industry. They don't make a lawyer who has been practicing law for 25 years take some bullshit test to get a project. but in our industry the more experienced you are the more the industry diisrespects you.