Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 470 posts

Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#1
I’ve just been ghosted by a company after finishing a 2kloc home assignment.

It took me about 6h to develop and iron out the edge cases.

My take away from this is that:

I will not do take home assignments for free if they take more than 1h of my time.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#2
I've had the same experience. Submitted a working code test and crickets. I left it up on my GitHub named "{company name} coding test" and a couple of months later they asked me to take it down beacuse other people were plagiarizing it. Like them, I was concerned with the legal ramifications of providing any sort of contact, so I took no action and didn't respond.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#4
That sort of thing happens —- try and be really clear what you expect back if you do an assignment. Put it on an email.

Otherwise I’d write to them and tell them that you have an issue. Chase a bit, presumably you don’t know the reason for the ghosting.

Having said that they could be ghosting you because they are assholes. There are unfortunately a lot of inconsiderate assholes in tech.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#5

I've had the same experience. Submitted a working code test and crickets. I left it up on my GitHub named "{company name} coding test" and a couple of months later they asked me to take it down beacuse other people were plagiarizing it. Like them, I was concerned with the legal ramifications of providing any sort of contact, so I took no action and didn't respond.

Yeah, they were clearly plagiarizing. You should’ve told them to go pound sand

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#6
post #4

That sort of thing happens —- try and be really clear what you expect back if you do an assignment. Put it on an email. Otherwise I’d write to them and tell them that you have an issue. Chase a bit, presumably you don’t know the reason for the ghosting. Having said that they could be ghosting you because they are assholes. There are unfortunately a lot of inconsiderate assholes in tech.

There’s also a lot of people that think the world owes them something. Why do they owe you a response? OP agreed to do an assignment did but did they get the company to agree to call them back on a set date? A good job is like a hot girl they don’t have time to text back all the rejects

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#7
post #6
post #4

That sort of thing happens —- try and be really clear what you expect back if you do an assignment. Put it on an email. Otherwise I’d write to them and tell them that you have an issue. Chase a bit, presumably you don’t know the reason for the ghosting. Having said that they could be ghosting you because they are assholes. There are unfortunately a lot of inconsiderate assholes in tech.

There’s also a lot of people that think the world owes them something. Why do they owe you a response? OP agreed to do an assignment did but did they get the company to agree to call them back on a set date? A good job is like a hot girl they don’t have time to text back all the rejects

Are you serious? It is a common courtesy to at least reply with a generic email.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#8
I've had this before from a big company in the Go space. They constantly still sent me job ads and requested for me to interview and repeatably ghosted me. Wasn't until I direct messaged the CTO on a public Slack community to find out that I had not passed and that was why they wouldn't consider me and why I had been repeatably ghosted. No feedback as to why I failed the test or anything

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#9
I have a rule that I refuse to participate in hiring processes that require unequal investment (of time/money) from me and the company.

If the hiring process requires 2 minutes of the company's time for every 1 hour of yours they are pretty much guaranteed to waste your time.

I've made exceptions to this rule before for what I thought were good reasons and deeply regretted it every single time. I no longer believe there are exceptions.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#10
post #3

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

You don't interview to get "programming experience". You're interviewing to get a job. Definitely not a win.
Post reply on HN