Well did you do any research about the company before dedicating six hours of your life? At the end of the day you got more programming experience and avoided a toxic situation. Sounds like a win to me
What a bad take. Are you volunteering your time for free on Upwork so you can "get more programming experience" and avoid a bunch of toxic situations? Of course not.
I’m saying when you apply to a random company you’re going to get random results
You don't interview to get "programming experience". You're interviewing to get a job. Definitely not a win.
Well apparently he needed it because they felt his coding skills weren’t good enough to hire
We don't know that. Perhaps someone else appeared to have more skill.
Or they had too many applicants and ignored him randomly, or they had an internal transfer, or they decided they didn't like his resume and never even looked at his code (no cost to have him do the exercise after all...), or they didn't like his style of tabs vs spaces, etc.