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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

In addition to covering all interview expenses such as travel food and lodging, candidates need to be paid for their time interviewing by the companies interviewing them.

Six hour take home tests is fine, but I want $1350 for that in advance as a consultation fee, and if I hit 6 hrs and it's not done yet they can keep paying until I am done or we can just end it, no refunds.

The idea that I should spend six hours doing free programming for random companies that say they are desperate to find anyone qualified is absolutely absurd and insulting. No one should put up with that, particularly anyone with an established and verifiable career.

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It's even worse when you're a consultant. At the moment I'm faced with scheduling my fourth round with a company, and of course it's 5 hours onsite. I have the option of skipping the free lunch, they said. It's nice of them, but my monetary loss for that time (including commute) is enough to pay lunch for a number of people. All that, and they can still can you a few weeks or months into the job if you're a dud.

It's employment, not marriage, guys, lighten up with your strenuous and time-draining processes. We senior employees aren't as, is the word excitable, as the entry-levels about joining your workforce.

That does sound excessive. I've never had more than 2 rounds of interview, and even at that the first round was typically over the phone and the second on-site.

This is pretty silly. Candidates routinely spend integer multiples of six hours running interview gauntlets for tech companies that are notorious for negging candidates. None of them expect to get paid for interviewing. An at-home work sample challenge is strictly less onerous than an interview gauntlet, but because it has the appearance of something people have heard other people get paid for, it's commonly suggested that they should be paid, too.

why are you even interviewing for these "random companies desperate to find anyone qualified" if you are so disgusted by them?

The elitism of some engineers is mind boggling, instead of being grateful working in an industry that has so much demand that you can easily find a job at anytime, you complain about the process being insulting to your oh-so-important persona.

If i really want to work for a certain company because what they are doing excites me, then yes, i'd do a 6 hour take home test where I can probably also learn a thing or two and I am willing to bet a lot of other developers would too. As an interviewer, someone charging >$1000 for a take home test would be an immediate red flag and our mindsets probably don't match up.

If this works fine for you, kudos.

It's good to see a full gamut of opinions on here. I'll say that mentalities like yours are why I'm a contractor in the first place -- you should be grateful for the opportunity, etc and so forth. No. I exchange my time for your money. If that's entitlement to you, we come from opposite worlds.

I'm not the guy who says he should be compensated for take-home tests above. I am however a senior engineer. I'm spurning any long interview processes because they cost money. I don't think it's entitlement, but if that's what you want to call it, so be it. It's called hours worked, hours paid, and in the West it's been a concept since at least the 18th century.

They cost money for both parties though so in that sense it's fair.

I agree with the statement "they cost money for both parties" but I disagree with "in that sense it's fair."

Individual consultant: loses 5 hours of interview time (and commute time) or take-home exam. Let's call it $800 for the sake of argument.

Company: loses 5 hours of interview time, plus the time it takes to "quiz" the exam.

Individual loses money that he / she uses to pay their mortgage.

Company loses profit because the time spent interviewing the candidate could have been spent working on feature Y of the application. So shareholders / VC's lose.

So you're saying it's fair that the individual contributor who loses half a day's pay in your interview process is equivalent (you DID use the word "fair" so that's an equivalence argument you made) to a company's loss of a few hours out of the many thousands of man-hours they rely upon? It's a .0001% of their profit, assuming the employers don't work a few hours more to make up for the lost time, because they will (they're salaried!)

Consultants also do not get paid vacation, or paid sick leave. They also don't get any of the benefits that a lot of regular employees get. But that's part of the game, they have to account for all of that which is why they earn much more per hour. A lot of those "customer acquisition" tasks cost time and may not necessarily yield a return, but that's part of the extra risk consultants have to assume and why not everyone is willing to do it.

Maybe all true with regards to cost considerations, but it doesn't support the notion above that a candidate's wasted time and money (vacation time and sick time costs money for an FTE) and a company's wasted time are somehow .. 'equal'.

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