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Comment by s3nnyy | Hacker News Reader

The three onsite days were paid I hope? If a coding task takes longer than four hours I ask companies to pay for it.

Honestly, I have not heard of this before. Is this real? Is this common? How does asking to be paid for an interview pan out?

Since I am an external recruiter, I ask for payment on behalf of my candidates but I can imagine if you formulate it nicely that it might work out, too without having a recruiter representing you.

You can argue that you are interviewing with five companies and all have 4-8 hours coding task, you can't possibly do all of them and you will just do three maximum.

At Level 12, we pay for the time spent taking our skills tests. About 16 hours worth if a candidate makes it through all phases. But I've not paid for the on-site interview, other than travel expenses for remote candidates.

Sixteen _hours_ of testing? I would've disqualified myself after the first hour. That's insane.

He's saying that's in total/spread out, but still seems on the high side. Between a take-home coding challenge (2h?), online coding challenge (1h), talking to recruiter/HR/hiring manager (1h), multiple interviews (coding 1h, culture/fit 1h, system design/architecture 1h, whatever 1h), you're already at 8 hours for a lot of places.

I appreciate them even knowing how long a person would spend on their interview process though.

We offer candidates pay for any code they write for us in "real" projects we use to judge them on. Only fair and square.

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