Do you have companies asking you to do something that they expect will take a week? I've never heard of that in a job interview. That said, I have interviewed h

Do you have companies asking you to do something that they expect will take a week? I've never heard of that in a job interview. That said, I have interviewed hundreds of candidates over the years, and my typical take-home request is something like "write this subset of checkers, spend at most 4 hours on it". I've seen other take-home tests where it seems like the expectation is 8-16 hours of work. But never 40 hours of work. For you to be able to charge for your time, it needs to be that you're writing something useful to them, that they can use - e.g. temp work, spec work, whatever you call it. I've often toyed with that idea to see what the results would be, but never did that. You should not expect to be paid for work that's not useful to the other party. If they have unreasonable expectations about the time you should spend on proving yourself to them, politely inform them of this; and if they don't change, move on. It would be interesting to survey hiring companies and get a better idea of what the common and accepted practices are. It's on my to-do list.