8 ms·

I had 2 take homes in a late stage interview, but up front they told me I would be paid a reasonable hourly wage to complete them. honestly the practice of doin

I had 2 take homes in a late stage interview, but up front they told me I would be paid a reasonable hourly wage to complete them. honestly the practice of doing lots of take homes seems like a waste of everyone’s time. Companies should only do it for their final few candidates and pay them to do it. In the grand scheme it costs the company basically nothing - think about the enormous profit these companies make on a good employee for a few years. At my company I do trial projects (real actual work we need done) for prospective employees. We pay them to do it. It’s never anything that would cost more than $500. The point is not to test how committed they are or how above and beyond they are. The point is to see if they know what they are doing in the simplest, fastest, cheapest way possible for everyone involved.

solipsism 7y ago
Why does it matter if it's real work, versus just resembling real work? At some companies the work may be of a nature that it's easy for someone to jump right in and do $500 worth of work in a reasonable time. At other companies, identifying the work, scoping the work, vetting to work, finding an owner for the work, etc adds up to enormous effort and is not even close to worth it. For those companies (by far the majority I would guess), it's going to pay off to have one or a few projects that they give everybody. To the candidate, it doesn't matter. Whether they see it as a waste of time or an investment depends only on whether they end up getting the job.