dw.svbtle.com
As it currently appears, the argument is not even very clearly thought out. You just kind of yell at them about slavery and feudalism, which imho doesn't have any relation to the puzzle you were asked to solve.
I agree that I wouldn't have done it, but then again, I don't want to work for Facebook.
You have a chance of a job at a household name company (who can afford to be selective) , probably with cushy salary and benefits.
8-10 hours worth of work isn't a great deal, especially if they give you a few weeks. Even a person working a full time job should be able to squeeze that in by temporarily reducing hours spent watching TV.
It's not like facebook even get any benefit from you performing this work for them.
There are many such companies out there and the better ones will talk to you politely first, look at previous work you've done and then perhaps invite you over for a couple of interviews (including some code puzzles). I was once flown from Europe to Florida before any code puzzles, got to see the whole company, talk to founders (the company was a subsidiary of a household name in games) and technical directors before sitting down for some tests. It was a great experience and I felt very bad for turning down the job offer because they treated me so well ...
Google and Facebook I'd avoid from what I've heard (no firsthand experience though), they seem to hire talent just to keep it away from the competition.
Therefore they need some way to filter people quickly. Would it be better to do this purely on the basis of resume? Forcing people to invest time making sure they have the correct mixture of buzzwords or would you rather spend that time demonstrating that you can actually code?
This really depends on whether they chose particular people to contact directly or whether those applicants contacted the company.
Sure, the 1000s of applications these companies get every month must be filtered quickly, but if someone was selected for a "cold call" by the employer (presumably based on some research), then handing him menial tasks upfront is a terrible idea and unacceptable for the probably more skilled people typically contacted this way.
Facebook isn't requiring him to do this. They are asking him to if he wants to get further in the candidate process. Clearly a bad approach by the recruiter (perhaps a mistake?), but to liken this to slavery is a reach. Just withdrawal candidacy since you weren't very interested anyway.
It seems like it was a mistake and miscommunication. I could not expect Facebook to make such mistakes, but rather change policies. Thankfully I was wrong.
I can't imagine spending this time for someone I don't know, someone who never ever bother to talk to me but demanded them.
Few years ago I have spent few days of work planning project with people with whom I had interview - just because I started to like them in 10 minutes of the interview. I ended up working for them for the next few years and some of them are still my close friends.
I could ignore the offer, decline it (as I did) and live on. But if nobody will tell those guys in fat cat corporations that they are wrong - they will continue to think and treat people as "resources", not persons.
You could be ok with that - they do have great salaries, career opportunities etc. But accepting this treatment as a norm is unthought to me. It's not about ego, it's about some tiny respect of a human being for a human being.
Some of these people will be great, some will be ok and some will be useless.
Throwing up a filter like this weeds out people who have no chance of a successful interview or those who don't want the job all that badly.
You would seem to fall into the latter camp.
8 - 10 hours for a prestigious job like FB isn't all that much. I have heard of people doing weeks of unpaid work for a chance at a minimum wage job.
I agree that there are jobs where I would love to spend days, weeks and months of free coding and other efforts - all just to get them. But I have very different expectations of pre-interview process - when I saw it was 'do all this and mb we ll talk to you' thing.
Again - and I think post's update should explain it - what happened to me was an exception. I would just never expect to get such an exception from Facebook.
And by the way, there is nothing at all special about getting an email like this from Facebook, Google, or any of a dozen other firms. They all have industrial-grade recruiting machines and this initial stage is like a trawler scooping up half the ocean. If you post on technical forum or mailing list, or have a LinkedIn profile, it would be more unique not to have been approached.
A lot of people would go to a lot further lengths to work at a place like Facebook, that's for sure. The holier-than-thou attitude here is so aggravating, for many reasons.
Perhaps the kind of applicants Facebook are looking for are those that do want to spend 8-10 hours on a puzzle.
I really doubt this puzzle constitutes "work" (in the sense of being beneficial for Facebook's bottom line). This seems analogous to an audition to me.
You could've had some fun with the challenge. E.g. Write a piece of code that draws a massive middle finger on the screen. That would've been a cooler response!
Here's how I responded to a small company that was trying to make me jump through (unnecessary) hoops: http://www.andrewdyster.com/how-to-fill-out-selection-criter...
(These guys were a small 3-4 man operation, not a mega corp. My way of telling them to stop acting like dicks.)
On the other hand, your actual response, with all the slave talk, was pretty juvenile.
Opportunities have costs. They also have benefits. One evaluates and decides.
Shrug.