Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?

inhersight.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 40 posts

Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?

#11

Post by zamalek »

gchamonlive wrote: post #6
purpleblue wrote: post #2

No. Only if they are asking the candidates to do free work.

When hiring at my last company, I suggested we should offer two possibilities for the technical part. Either to bring a simple but well documented engineering project compatible with the role or take out challenge, which consisted of deploying a couple of services and a static website to a cloud provider using whatever means of IaC and cd pipeline technology. I made sure to do the challenge too both to have a referen…

It also creates the bar of "can this person actually code" that fizzbuzz used to cover. I would take an unpaid assignment 10 times out of 10 instead of a stupid leetcode session.

Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?

#12

Post by msikora »

purpleblue wrote: post #2

No. Only if they are asking the candidates to do free work.

Unethical business idea:

1. Make a VERY lucrative well paid dev job posting (completely fake) 2. Make them do home assignment that is actual work that needs to be done. Make sure the candidate understand how important this assignment is for their chance to get hired. 3. Tell the candidate you are not moving forward with further interviews since their work was shite 4. Profit!!!

Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?

#14

Post by jclarkcom »

At VMware while looking for systems level engineers our team would give out a take home programming assignment and it was the most accurate measure of how good someone was. We’d give everyone the same test so it was easy to compare and it was quite niche so you couldn’t google an answer or ask someone else to do it. Not everyone has time to do it, but enough were that we found great candidates and didn’t hire any duds.

There was never a question (by us) about it being ethical. There was an initial engineering phone screen before we asked people to do this so there was serious intent to move to the next stage before the ask. We were also so specialized that we’d only get a couple of candidates per month get to that stage.

From an employers perspective I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again, but now you have to find things chatgpt can’t easily do, which is getting harder to find. someone who knows how to use chatgpt/claude well could be a good find if they know the fundamentals underpinning it.

Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?

#15

Post by cj »

dcdc123 wrote: post #5

I once had a take home API integration task that was time-boxed to 2 hours using the honor system. I handed it in but then the interviewers never mentioned it so I assumed nobody paid attention to it and was a bit annoyed. Then I got into the technical interviews and I was asked tons of questions about the APIs I was supposed to integrate with. It wasn't until after the interview that I realized the task itself was p…

That’s actually pretty smart if your goal is to weed out people who used ChatGPT without caring to understand the output, while also weeding out fake candidates who outsourced the project to someone else.

(The latter issue with fake candidates is a real problem - our company gets literally hundreds of human beings that apply who will get on a call with you, claiming to be in the US, but are actually in something of a call center where you can actually hear other people doing interviews in the same room if the candidates noise cancellation isn’t turned on)

But agree it’s shitty that they didn’t at least acknowledge your work.

Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?

#17

Post by gchamonlive »

vlovich123 wrote: post #9
gchamonlive wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When hiring at my last company, I suggested we should offer two possibilities for the technical part. Either to bring a simple but well documented engineering project compatible with the role or take out challenge, which consisted of deploying a couple of services and a static website to a cloud provider using whatever means of IaC and cd pipeline technology. I made sure to do the challenge too both to have a referen…

I would caution against the bring your own example. I’ve found myself nodding off and getting distracted because while it may seem interesting and important to you, and you may have done something legitimately cool, it may not be interesting to me, you may be bad at presenting it, you don’t have sufficient time to go into sufficient detail, or I may not have the requisite background to understand in the limited amoun…

Depends on how you use it. If you use the project as a motivation to start a technical conversation it's ok. You had access to the documentation before, so at least you have an idea of the project. If the documentation isn't enough for you to prepare for the interview, that already tells you something about the candidate.

Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?

#20

Post by alangohe »

I've done a bit of research into this topic as my startup is building a platform that combines leetcode and traditional take homes. I have come to conclude that it's not only unethical, but it's not in the best interest of the company. We landed on 1h "take homes" as those that maximize the completion rate. It was also clear that take homes, or work sample tests, are amongst the most valid signals for future on the job performance. But companies abuse their power with extra long take homes and don't even have the bandwidth to review and provide feedback.
Post reply on HN