5 ms·

So if you have a years worth of work todo, and 50 people apply, you get the work done for free?

• viraptor 7y ago
  That would be the worst consulting experience for the company and I think you can easily tell a different between a test and outsourced work. Also that wouldn't likely save time. If the task will take someone 2h, I'd have to spend more than that: describing the task with all the relevant context, providing a mock of the environment it needs to be plugged into, reviewing the result, fixing any issues, changing it to match the internal style, and also waiting for the solution itself which may not even arrive any time soon. It's not like every (or even most) candidates will produce something you'd want to keep.
  • iso1631 7y ago
    2 hours sure. A week not-so-much. OP wasn't clear how big the task was.
    • viraptor 7y ago
      Even worse. A week long task without internal context or being able to chat with people who know it would be next to impossible to prepare. I've seen some projects which were thoroughly specced and handed over to a consulting agency. Half were not usable, the other half need heavy fixing. It was never a happy outcome.
• ken 7y ago
  Only if they've found a way to consistently defeat Brooks's Law -- and if they have, there are much more efficient ways to exploit it than counting on free labor of uncertain quality.
• wtracy 7y ago
  There's a certain startup I won't name that has a reputation for outsourcing it's engineering proof-of-concepts this way. You're certainly not going to get code you could actually put in production by doing that.