Thanks for sharing your experience. I have heard a lot of good things about Facebook before - and my totally opposite experience was one of the reason for exaggerated reaction.

I agree that there are jobs where I would love to spend days, weeks and months of free coding and other efforts - all just to get them. But I have very different expectations of pre-interview process - when I saw it was 'do all this and mb we ll talk to you' thing.

Again - and I think post's update should explain it - what happened to me was an exception. I would just never expect to get such an exception from Facebook.