What is the real purpose of the programming assignments? Do they serve a mere purpose?

I found it! The code written in February 2010 for the company called kaChing, later - WealthFront. So-called kaChing hired a recruiter - Dane Santos, who contacted me through linkedin on Saturday morning, and insisted I cancelled my plans for the weekend. Instead, he said, I should not miss this great opportunity and waste spend a weekend prototyping a Widget for kaChing. I agreed. And I wrote the code. And I spent a beautiful weekend day not on the beach playing with children, but in front of the computer. And I sent my code back to Dane Santos. And this is a feedback I have received "from kaChing" through Dave:
Regretfully, kaChing will not be moving forward with you. 
Here are a few technical comments they shared with me on your code exercise:
- update is triggered by button click instead of form submit, so Enter doesn't work
- document.forms isn't as robust or as simple as using an id on the text input
- arrow uses an img element instead of background-image
- arrow is stretched by browser because dimensions are wrong (8x7 instead of 7x8)
- not using a table to display tabular data (his div/span layout fails for some data values; try GOOG)
- quote box has a fixed height, so description can get truncated and even partially spill out beneath
I was shocked. One part of the feedback was simply false, and other - just not part of the requirements.
Yes, it featured table less design, background-image styles to render the arrow on the meter properly, and javascript to the extend to meet the assignment requirements.
Basically, what I've got back is: code is not "robust" enough! Hey, dude, thank you for your code, it sucks!

I really-really would like to know the people who I work for. Before coding for them for free. It's just another lesson.

And here is the widget (I don't have an access to kaChing API, so YHOO ticker is hardcoded now):





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