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Anything more than an hour or two should be paid for. That's been my experience interviewing across London and SF.

Completely agree with the author, being asked to create potentially production-izable work is ethically wrong.

On the flip side, you learn a ton about how the engineering culture by looking at their codebase.

I wonder how the copyright situation would be if you were to write code during your interview that they continue to use. That's before any sort of contract that details what rights the company has to your work (since they cannot take your copyright they usually reserve all other ways of using it). So technically that's still your work and you have full rights to it.

IANAL

You're right you'd own full rights to your work. That doesn't make a difference though - you'd realistically never sue them.

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