> Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time That's fair. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible, and especially giv

> Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time That's fair. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible, and especially given what I've heard from friends who've worked in freelance web development there's a huge long tail of scummy opportunities out there. I more meant to suggest that it was unlikely this was CircleCI's motivation. Also an important distinction between these two situations is that in the example you point out, someone is being assigned a specific task to produce some new IP which the company can then simply steal, whereas in the CircleCI case I am assuming the "problem/projects" they have you pair on are something in the neighborhood of e.g. "let's go analyze some page load performance data together and see if we can fix some low hanging fruit" or "let's figure out how to set up an alert in our Slack channel for this signal we have in some logs". Yes it's still true that a candidate could come up with some brilliant insight that saves CircleCI real money in this scenario, but it just seems unlikely and not something they could profitably build a development strategy around.