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I will however not accept a take-home coding test before I spoke with the engineering team and saw that they're seriously considering my application (i.e. it looks like I will be a good fit, and they just want to make sure I'm not some fraud who can somehow talk the talk, but can't walk the walk).
They are much better than livecoding. I take 8 hour home assignment over 1 hour livecode torture.
I find it weird that you guys don't want to spend some time to show your skills to the employer, without getting paid. These are not real projects. You're not benefiting the employer when you finish them. They also spend some time evaluating your project submission.
(I'm not talking about the companies trying to make people work free by giving them parts of the real projects in disguise)
2nd aspect is unpaid take homes. It's complicated. Companies do pay a lot to fly candidates, put them in hotels and feed them for onsite interview. So financially company can afford to pay something. But it adds a moral hazard as you are paying cash irrespective of any expected quality or commitment.
Other thing I would like to highlight is that unlike any other industry, tech. allows people to enter at ease irrespective of the pedigree and credentials. No hospital would hire a physician who has read a lot on the Internet and did some pro-bono help to the neighbourhood kids. So what is the best way to hire isn't very well defined. It could be Leetcode, puzzle problems, take home tests or something else.
Up front, ghosting is not okay in general. But, a few counterpoints: It seems very unlikely they expected or wanted it to take you 6 hours. Possible, but certainly an outlier (and obviously bad actor) if so. If they expected you to spent 1.5-2 hours on it - a reasonable amount of time IMO - but when got it back you clearly spent an entire day working on it, that's enough to fail because you didn't follow the directio…
FYI—Graphic Designers have been “bent out of shape” over spec work in hiring for ages.
That being said, I've seen cases where the take home assignment is actual company work, in which case I 100% agree you should be paid.
Up front, ghosting is not okay in general. But, a few counterpoints: It seems very unlikely they expected or wanted it to take you 6 hours. Possible, but certainly an outlier (and obviously bad actor) if so. If they expected you to spent 1.5-2 hours on it - a reasonable amount of time IMO - but when got it back you clearly spent an entire day working on it, that's enough to fail because you didn't follow the directio…
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.
If you ask a candidate to complete such a thing and then they turn in obviously copied work, isn't the author who published it doing the hiring manager a favor?
Up front, ghosting is not okay in general. But, a few counterpoints: It seems very unlikely they expected or wanted it to take you 6 hours. Possible, but certainly an outlier (and obviously bad actor) if so. If they expected you to spent 1.5-2 hours on it - a reasonable amount of time IMO - but when got it back you clearly spent an entire day working on it, that's enough to fail because you didn't follow the directio…
At least in my experience, people in most fields aren't expected to do free work to show they know what they're doing. In general, past jobs, references, and portfolios tend to be used.