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Comment by luord | Hacker News Reader

> It reeks of entitlement.

Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.

> Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject.

I wouldn't, so there's that. And, mind you, I don't even consider myself particularly introverted, so I highly doubt that I'm the single exception to what you said. So what I'm trying to say is that one can't assume that one's sensibilities are shared by everyone else.

> someone who just walked in off the street.

Not only had the author already been through a process, the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that the company (or the recruiter) contacted him, not viceversa. So it doesn't seem like he "just walked off the street".

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I’ve never had a candidate do the take home and come back with some significant angle on it we’d never thought of before. The value of the ‘free work’ to the company is the same as the value it has to you; it lets them evaluate you.

Some companies structure that better than others. Some feel like more of a time waste than others. But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems naive. It’s not a trial shift at a bar.

> The value of the ‘free work’ to the company is the same as the value it has to you

Absolutely none? I somehow doubt that, otherwise only the most incompetently run companies would still ask for that kind of commitment during the process and... Actually, you might have a point. I certainly have rarely liked work in companies that demanded free work from me during the hiring process. That might be one of the reasons why I haven't done an unpaid take home test in a long time.

> But the idea that the company is getting you to do work for its value outside of the interview process just seems

So the company isn't getting the candidate to work for free because it isn't getting value... If we ignore the value it gets from the interview process itself.

Providing some company a service so that it can make a decision on how it operates sounds like work to me.

On another note, this doesn't take into account that pointless busywork is still work.

I don’t recall ever saying it wasn’t work, so I’m not sure why you’ve taken the discussion in that direction.

It is work, it’s just not the cynical exploitation that’s being implied. The intent is that both employer and candidate mutually benefit from it. Evaluating the output of these assignments is also work given for your mutual benefit, and it’s typically seen by multiple people, which makes it a non-trivial amount. Both sides do speculative work for the evaluation stage, in that sense.

Primarily, the employer benefits - which is particularly evident in this case.

They can ask the applicant to do the work to prove themselves, with the pretence of an available job, and don't even have to consider the result of that work.

This scenario lays bare that the employer has all the power in the situation.

>Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.

If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation.

I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work".

> the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him

Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".

I think the ‘free work’ idea is just a misapplication of a trend from another context.

It’s a relatively recent thing to call out unpaid work on social media. The bar that runs entirely on trial shifts. The media giant running unpaid internships.

In those cases the work really is valuable to the business. You can do bar work or proofreading at close to the output of an experienced person right off the bat. So those are rightly called out when abused.

On the other hand, the idea that you’re gonna come to an established engineering or product team with novel and valuable new insights, after a random Saturday of you thinking about it, is patently silly.

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