I feel your pain on coding questions which have nothing to do with the job, but this can be difficult.
We recently tried to identify such a question, with a scope such that the candidate should take about an hour and a half to complete - where complete also implies documentation, tests, etc. We couldn't find an appropriate question which would be something that would be highly indicative of the specific work they'd be doing that a) Didn't require a ton of domain knowledge (we don't expect people to have that domain knowledge coming in) or b) Would be too specific to particular technologies such as which ORM type library one is using, which type of DB, what libraries, etc.
Typically when I've seen examples of these questions where they are fully relevant they're in a space that's tightly defined - you're using say RoR, MySql, etc and candidates are expected to be proficient in those. That's not us.
We recently tried to identify such a question, with a scope such that the candidate should take about an hour and a half to complete - where complete also implies documentation, tests, etc. We couldn't find an appropriate question which would be something that would be highly indicative of the specific work they'd be doing that a) Didn't require a ton of domain knowledge (we don't expect people to have that domain knowledge coming in) or b) Would be too specific to particular technologies such as which ORM type library one is using, which type of DB, what libraries, etc.
Typically when I've seen examples of these questions where they are fully relevant they're in a space that's tightly defined - you're using say RoR, MySql, etc and candidates are expected to be proficient in those. That's not us.