Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
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Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
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Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#2No. Only if they are asking the candidates to do free work.
Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#3[flagged]
Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#495% of tech companies do not require 10-15 hours of take home interview work.
Edit: adding additional context, any company working with a recruiter will constantly be told by the recruiter repeatedly that the company should simplify and shorten the interview process because if you don’t, you risk losing candidates to other companies. Recruiters put extreme pressure on hiring managers to make the interview process as easy as possible. I’ve hired a lot of engineers via recruiters and none of the recruiters I’ve hired with would have allowed me to give a 10 hour assignment. They likely would have dropped me as a client.
Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#5I 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 probably completely ignored, they just wanted to see what things I learned about the assigned API in a couple hours.
I know that has nothing to do with the question in the title, but I found it interesting.
Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#6No. 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 reference and to validate it.
Not sure I agree about free work. There are things you can't possibly evaluate in an interview. For a senior role, I'd expect good documentation skills and the ability to present tradeoffs of their designs, which is the purpose of these technical steps.
Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#7No. Only if they are asking the candidates to do free work.
Yeah I don’t understand this. It’s a fantastic tool for young employees - it tests that you have the coding chops in a meaningful way, and it typically isn’t a huge time commitment for people who generally have limited responsibilities. You should make allowances for those who have limitations but I think people have been throwing out the baby with the bath water.
That being said, they’re a bit challenging to manage on the employer side for the same reason as hacker rank - maintaining a pool of high quality questions that haven’t leaked is hard.
As a proxy I usually instead give design questions about relevant difficult problems I’ve seen and solved at work. Even if I blog about it I’ll either be able to tell if the person is parroting the solution back to me or legitimately solving it on the spot and it’s something I know inside and out well enough that I can give answers to hypotheticals they ask me.
Still, figuring out who’s going to be a good hire is a challenge whatever tools you try to apply so I haven’t gotten so invested on any one technique. Bad review processes are much worse and orgs are stuffed with them despite best efforts (lots of subtle social pressure mechanisms with people oblivious to what’s going on or not caring).
Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#8No. 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…
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Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#9No. 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…
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 amount of time we’d have together. I think it tests things that aren’t a good signal.
Re: Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical?
#10[deleted]