We once gave a trial task on an inherited lending service. One candidate wrote almost nothing for two days: he read migrations, then asked why one balance column existed twice. That was the old attribution bug nobody had documented. We had been screening for how fast people write code on a clean repo, when most of our real work is reading someone else's decisions first. The task now ships with legacy baggage on purpose.
The choice is what you hand a candidate: a blank file or a mess.