> Because you should have enough public examples of your work avalaible for your potential employer to evaluate. If you don’t, for whatever reason, then take yourself a little more seriously and get some public stuff out there.
Many people don't have this. And why would they: it's hard to evaluate a candidate via bits of random code and half finished projects which took their fancy, that they worked on on their own.
> Employers … you ask for spec work when you are incapable of evaluating a candidate based on interviews and existing work.
That's right. It's fucking impossible to evaluate someone based on an interview (there have been hundreds of posts to HN on this topic in the last few years). Existing work is hit-and-miss.
I personally feel that spec work is the only way to seriously evaluate people, with the caveat that _we pay for it_. If you're serious about interviewing this person, paying their day rate for a day of their time is a reasonable way to ask people to do this.