> If I spend 10 hours on a take home instead of my consultancy I'm out thousands of dollars. My reasoning for not demanding I should be compensated: 1. Presum

> If I spend 10 hours on a take home instead of my consultancy I'm out thousands of dollars. My reasoning for not demanding I should be compensated: 1. Presumably something about the opportunity on offer is more compelling than your second best option of working on your own consultancy earning $200+/hour, otherwise why are you applying for the role in the first place? I'd argue that if the opportunity is otherwise compelling in the long term, demanding breakeven for one day's work is being penny-wise and pound foolish. Taking it to an extreme, if there was a job that paid $10 million/year but the interview process was so involved I needed to burn an entire year's worth of vacation time to interview for it, whether I'd do it would come down to expected value of the decision (i.e. probability of passing the interview), not the absolute investment I was making. 2. I'd consider this form of cost-analysis rationale a weak one because it can be applied to basically any decision in life yet it gets applied selectively, so it's kind of a roundabout way of saying "I don't want to do that." Nobody (probably?) is applying this analysis to sleeping 6 hours a night versus 8, yet that would yield 10 more billable consulting hours (per week!) too.