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Comment by Zenbit_UX | Hacker News Reader

2-4 hours is anywhere from $100 to $800 worth of free labor depending on how the dev values their time. The GP was bragging about how generous they were in providing multiple days and weekends to finish it.

How did this become acceptable practice for hiring people? Do any other industries besides tech do this?

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So teams should just not vet candidates? An in person interview is also going to be 2-4 hours, plus travel time. Should we stop doing those, too? How exactly do you suggest teams screen candidates?

Designers are hired based on their portfolio, why are devs treated differently? I have a plethora of options on my github as I'm sure most here do. Why is it not acceptable to judge a candidate by their already written code?

Lots of people would see this as unfair, as they don't have anything GitHub. Either for preferring to do something else with their precious free time, or perhaps slaving full days in their closed-source jobs.

I think the only fair option is an in-person interview without homework assignments. Treats everyone the same and doesn't require inordinate time commitment.

This is a good point. Also many places don’t even allow open source contributions, even in your spare time.

Studying for a programming interview is also transferrable, whereas maybe pieces of your weird homework assignment will be applicable in another requested project.

If I want to interview at 6 places that just use onsite interviewing it's easy to figure out how to prepare.

They are asking the interviewee to complete the same task as done by an existing staff member, and compare the results, how is that "free labour"?

I'm not sure where I stand on this sort of thing to be honest, my only experience of anything similar was a pre-interview task to implement a simple 10 entry LRU cache, and after getting the job I was told the only reason it was there was to weed out time wasters with next to zero skill being sent by the recruitment company.

work is work, whether or not it gets used. arguably this is, though

Any industry where hiring candidates with bad fit is extremely expensive will have a long interviewing process. For the candidate there is not much difference between spending 2-4 hours at home at a time of their choosing and 2-4 hours in a first of the N rounds of on-site interviews. Except they will have to expense transport and work around their job schedule.

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