Can you really benefit from having someone work 1 day? Someone has to babysit them, check the work, ... I don't think there is anything to gain for the company apart from judging the candidate.

@DobQuiKong I've heard stories on a forum where a business management type was brought back for multiple hours-long "interviews" with a company where they were given a "hypothetical scenario" in front of senior management and asked to develop a marketing strategy while the secretary took notes.

@DonQuiKong You can't, but that doesn't mean some businesses won't try. Particularly the ones who don't actually understand technical work/believe developers are interchangeable parts.

@DonQuiKong Assuming these "interviews" to be 50% productive, the company gets a week's worth of free work done by interviewing 80 candidates. They only need to invest a little by appointing a pool of babysitters ... er, interviewers, and even they need not be occupied full time.

@MaskedMan no they don't. Someone able to do the work needs to check the work. Would be easier doing it than investing all that time by all those people needed for interviewing etc.

@user1666620 then the answer should be “don't work for free for someone who isn't able to do that work themselves“

@DonQuiKong Considering NP for analogy, checking the work is far easier than doing it. Inviting people to interviews isn't exactly time-consuming either, if you are okay with anyone who has uploaded a resume on a job site and knows the programming language. The pool of interviewers can take turns to "supervise" the "interview", while doing their own work at other times. So overall, it can be made to work. Is it a good idea? Likely no, but hey, the magic word is "free", so people will be tempted to try.

@MaskedMan what kind of work can you efficiently outsource to someone who works on it for just one day? Free, sure, but it's not free, it costs time. And even if someone tries, the chances of success are so small that making that the main point of the consideration as the candidate is just wrong. It's a chance to get to know the company and show your skills. It's very likely not a scam, and if it were, you'd lose a day and they'd likely not win anything. Saying there's a good chance they want free work is like saying a possible employer just wants your personal data so don't go to interviews..

@DonQuiKong Absolutely. I once had an interview like this where in about 6 hours I built the application the company was looking to create (it was dirt simple, they just didn't have anyone in house that knew Unity very well). They had another guy come in who did the same thing in Unreal. I was told "come back tomorrow" because they hadn't actually seen me work (no babysitting). That turned into a schedule conflict/reschedule when I showed up, then before I got home I was told by the recruiter that they're not going to hire anyone. I billed for 8 hours of work + 2 hours of wasted time.

@DonQuiKong I didn't say there's a "good chance" they want free work, just that some companies will be tempted to try. Anyway, the whole point is it is not one candidate that's spending one day doing "free" work. It is fairly simple to design an "overall" architecture for a non-critical component, and get interview candidates design submodules that can be done in a day's time. If he doesn't finish it, you just give that incomplete code as a new problem statement to the next candidate. The candidate loses a day, and the company doesn't lose a lot of time.

@MaskedMan That's pretty much what happened to me (see above comment). I know exactly who the end client for the project they had me work on (it was the same company my dad retired from a year prior). I am 100% confident that they took my work (or the other candidate's) and finished it up with their in-house talent. They had some knowledge of the engine(s), but had a specific issue they wanted solved and I solved it. And I know that they presented something five months later (my dad saw it). I also got paid ~$200

@Draco18s You only charged $20/hr? You need to charge way more, especially since you should have charged a contractor rate. Consider that you have to pay payroll taxes (15.3%) and income taxes on that. Plus, you're undervaluing everyone else who does contract work. $50/hr minimum for experienced, specialized work, more like $100/hr for most people over 10 years, and higher depending on your area; my entry level contractor rate was $30/hr, 10+ years ago.

@BloodGain Limits of the comment length. The company told me that they would pay for me to be in their office and quoted some price. I agreed to it. I don't remember what it was. I billed for 10 hours. The amount I got to actually put in my bank account was about $200 to $250 (remember, taxes!). I'm not exactly happy with the exchange, but that was because I was still unemployed at the end of it. I had another company "pay for travel" to have my in their offices for a day. They never sent me a check (or even called me back...). That went on my taxes as unreimbursed business expenses.

@DonQuiKong I can imagine some cases where you could benefit from this approach, but in most cases, I'd still follow up with "hire the guy who solved our problems".

@DonQuiKong: Adding one day of work on an existing project, you're right. But not for tasks that can be completed start-to-finish within that day. If it's easily testable to see if the proposed solution works or not, then the company either wins a day of labor (if it works) or doesn't lose anything (if it doesn't). Code reviews and babysitting are generally done for things where it's less than trivial to immediataly prove that they work at the time of committing the change.

@Flater in what world can a candidate do more work in one day than the three interviewers, managers, hr people, etc. Involved in the hiring process on that day and the previous days needed to even get the candidate there. Plus expenses for travel, advertisement of the position, etc. And if you do that big style, good luck with the fallout when the media finds out. And they always do. That's just ridiculous.

@DonQuiKong: (1) You are assuming a single applicant (2) Is your interviewer, manager or hr rep going to be able to fix the technical issue if they weren't busy hiring people? (3) Travel expenses are not a wage. (4) How will the media find out, since you're able to refuse the applicant for any reason? "They were a bad fit" is not something that can be objectively refuted. (5) And even if the media could find out, who says this company is publicly known? (6) And even then, who says that the company made a smart decision in trying to get free labor? Stupid people break the law too.

@Flater the media would find out because a disgruntled manager/hr person would take evidence and show it. But that's not the point - unless you haven't worked for a company before, its really hard to get a new employee up and running on the first day - and we're expected to believe that this company has total strangers up and running and producing meaningful, quality code within one day? If that is their skillset, they should ditch this ludicrous rigmarole and just sell their process to get people working faster.

@DonQuiKong: Saying there's a good chance they want free work is like saying a possible employer just wants your personal data so don't go to interviews. The market value of a single person's details or 8 manhours of expert work are many orders of magnitude apart. They are in no way equatable the way you are suggesting they are.

@bharal: Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Your argument relies on the notion that "if no one has seen a problem yet, there is therefore no problem", which is putting the cart before the horse. unless you haven't worked for a company before, its really hard to get a new employee up and running on the first day Quite the opposite, new starters are slower starters. Secondly, this highly depends on the work you're hired for. If a company consisting of junior starters has a "free day" with a senior architect, that architect will add value to the company without wage.

@Flater no it won't. You won't get anything out of the senior architect, because they'll be so confused by what is going on. Also, who is going to explain to them what is going on? You're not going to work it out from the messy code. Absence of proof might well not be proof of absence - but why are you telling me that anyway? What problem hasn't... been seen...?

@bharal: You've said that "the media would find out". If you are asserting that the media not having reported anything means that nothing illegal is going on, then you're counting on absence of proof equating to proof of absence. ANd it you're not asserting that the media hasn't reported on it, then it's completely irrelevant to mention it to begin with.

@bharal: Secondly, you are still assuming that the "free hire"'s work can be done by someone else. That is not always the case.

@bharal As a much more blatant example, let's say I'm hiring a cleaner but expect them to do a day's free work to prove that I like their work. Even if I say no, I still end up with a cleaned house, no? Your argument is basically relying on the house being so dirty that it can't be cleaned in a day, but that is besides the point. The effort that was put in was not remunerated, regardless of whether the job was finished, and that's where the issue lies.

@Flater in regards to the media, i just meant that a company would be very wary about this, lest it appear. And as such, this would be another reason not to try this particular trick. As regards to your cleaning example - what you're saying is you think it would be a good idea to let a total stranger into your house and just let them have free rein of the place and rarely check on them.

@Flater You would have no recourse if things went missing, and you would have no idea anyway which of the free cleaners you had come in were the thief should anything go missing (and it would), and you would have no platform to complain about them.

@bharal: i just meant that a company would be very wary about this, lest it appear. And as such, this would be another reason not to try this particular trick. This is the same argument again. If no company would ever take an action that would put the company in a bad light if uncovered; then logically speaking we should have never seen an article that puts a company in a bad light. That is obviously not the case. Like I said, stupid people break the law too.

@bharal: what you're saying is you think it would be a good idea to let a total stranger into your house and just let them have free rein of the place and rarely check on them. Absolutely beside the point. The idea of having someone for "free labor" is built on the assumption that their work will bring value to you. That does not in any way prove that (1) the company is obviously reviewing the work (not every company does everything the way they should in theory be doing things)...

@bharal ... nor (2) that the expertise of the applicant is still in question, nor (3), the good old NP problem: that checking to see if the solution is correct somehow takes more effort than developing the correct solution.

@bharal As to your "you can't trust the cleaner" argument; you're missing the point. A company who would rely on free work is not inherently skeptical of the "free hire's" work. If anything, it is companies that have no other recourse (e.g. they don't have an employee with the skillset that the applicant does have) that are more incentivized to rely on outside help like this.

@bharal: As a very simple and very real example: I am a development consultant who is often brought in to fix projects that have gone wrong. I completely agree with your notion that my work needs to be checked just as much as anyone else's; but you need to understand that the projects that end up failing often lack those good practices to begin with. 90% of the work I do is checked in without anyone reviewing my code.

@bharal Is that irresponsible of the company? Sure. Just like I have no recourse if the cleaner steals from me, they have little recourse if I break their project (versioning history aside). But that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen in practice.

@bharal: The entirety of your argument boils down to "You can assume that they're not doing anyting illegal because getting caught doing something illegal mean you get punished and no one wants to get punished". And if that argument were correct, no one would intentionally commit a crime. EVER. Which is obviously untrue and a dangerously naive approach to making assumptions about others' behavior.

@Flater the argument is "this is unlikely because the cons outweigh the pros". the company cannot really "sue" a person for writing malicious code, for example - but they can certainly sue you. Again, for gross incompetence etc. Nobody is arguing it is impossible - they are arguing that it is overwhelmingly unlikely and that just because it is an 8 hour project interview doesn't mean the OP is being taken advantage of.

You are arguing that it is possible - fine it is possible,

@bharal the company cannot really "sue" a person for writing malicious code - Sure they can.

@IDrinkandIKnowThings no, they cannot - not if the code was part of an interview, and was not compensated, and not made clear that it would be production quality. That would never pass muster in a court.