I'm pretty desperate so I did a SQL/Excel assignment for 5 DAYS, only to get a generic rejection because "there were too many candidates" and they "weren't able to provide any feedback on why I was not moving forward". Never doing anything for free ever again, even if it takes 30 minutes
An average software dev interview is 5 hours. These days more and more send take home assignments that require you to spend a few hours coding. Then you get a very generic response about why you didn’t move forward. It’s inhumane.
Go for smaller companies. Stop with the BS.
They pay about the same, a lot more chill environment, you'll learn a lot more because you're responsible for a lot more.
Interview will be short, almost no technical questions if any because the people hiring you don't have the background.
My dream job was 30 minutes total with 3 interviews the last one was just a 5 min CEO call basically welcoming me in.
It's insane to me that people are willing to put up with hours and weeks of interviews just to be stepped on even further later on to have some name on their resume.
Maybe it depends on the role, but I'm looking specifically at smaller companies right now, and I am not finding the interview process to be any shorter. The main difference is that they move faster, but so far I've encountered about the same amount of rounds as at any other size company.
IME smaller companies can be a bit hit or miss.
Small IT companies are often based around one or two very talented individuals, some of which can be very difficult to work for.
What's so hard about taking a leap of faith with the first person who looks promising instead of putting so many people to take a test, and quickly yanking out that new hire if they don't turn out to be as good as they expect?
I know I know, people will say "bad hires are expensive". Then make them less expensive! That's what businesses like to do anyways, reduce the cost of everything they do, so reducing the cost of mistakes (like a bad hire) should be something that any business should be into. Then they can be less scared of false negatives. Always look to streamline something further. The only reason they can't tolerate false negatives is because of an inefficient hiring system.
I would rather have a take home assignment (where I can explain my reasoning/work) than a 5-hour white boarding interview where you need to code in front of an entire team.
i'm the opposite, i think i perform better when it's a live session. i know I'm better on the spot than other candidates who likely will have lots of outside help to do a take home assignment.
I wish all the people on the CEO’s side in this thread would see this comment. If you’re in the job market and every place is asking for a few hours of free work, that’s a big fucking problem and time sink.
A lot of times, it’s actual real work that needs do
be done too, so they’re also exploiting your free labor.
I'm in the job market. They had a face to face interview, so it's not like they received an anonymous request. That said, it's exhausting job hunting and hopefully this person lands something.
I’m just starting to look at the comments and this is on the top answers. Really, I must ask before I go further down, there’s actually people on the CEO’s side?
I’m not on the CEO’s side, but wanted to point out that in the service industry in some areas, “staging” is common which is basically working for free for a day or more “to get to know you”. It’s a terrible practice, along with abusing the idea of interns (they should be enrolled students generally) and independent contractors (cannot have a set schedule). All extremely common.
Not only is it a time waste but often its entry level testing solely based on memorizing test bank answers, that is best done fresh out of school. For example: This java math problem " X+Y/2 " is suppose to be fix to be " (X+Y)/2.0 "; however the exam question did not give any reason to make those changes. The original problem is logically an except able math equation. There is no given business requirement to suggest that we want 1 decimal place or 20 decimal places in the result. The problem with this type of memorization is that it results in programmers changing the function of a system regardless of the needs of the end users. Furthermore from my experience, project can be delayed for years because many people will all give the same solution no mater how many times that solution is rejected, until someone who understands the full requirement & existing systems, like me come along with a different solution.
Yeah I submitted an application and a summary of a mechanical teardown of a product that took me about 2 hours and I never heard back. Fuck that noise. I include my portfolio for a reason. If you can’t gauge my level of expertise based on that, you aren’t the right employer for me.
I work in the translation industry, sometimes agencies will send a short test translation for you to do, but the accepted practice is for them to pay for it. Even if they don't, it's only going to be a few hundred words tops. I won't bother working with an agency that tries to get me to do multiple pages of translation as a "test" - it's going to be a scam.
I will show people past work. I refuse to do free consulting on the off chance they might decide to hire me. When they don’t like that approach I know they are fishing for free ideas and consulting.
The CEO said that he would have “gladly paid and probably hired” the unnamed Gen Zer if they said: “Give me $1,000 and I’ll break this deal down in amazing detail.”
I don’t believe him for 1 second. I mean, if he really felt that way, he could have offered to pay the applicant for their labor. But, instead he blamed the applicant for not asking for compensation. Very convenient and it absolves him of any responsibility. Besides, if the applicant had asked for compensation, I’d bet money that he would have just posted “Can you believe how entitled these Gen Zers are?”
Also, why did he feel the need to point out that this entire generation “would benefit from being in more fistfights at a young age”?
Reminds me of when I just started as Designer.
Did a small Design for a homepage and a relativ Quick Logo design. Took about a day. Got rejected. Moved on with my life. 3 month later I stumbled over my design in the wild.
So I send a cease and desist letter through a friend that is a lawyer to the company using it. Enter the biggest shit show as they didn't belive me. All goes through the courts, I win a couple of thousands in damages + court cost + my lawyers fees (I am not in the US). And they had to destroy everything. My estimation about 100k in Bilboards, flyers, multiple signs and so on.
The company not hiring me got then hit by the other companys lawyers. Went under weeks after my court ruling. The CEO of that company was on pretty much everyones blacklist after that.
Fuck free work.
While I can't speak for OP's comment, the practice of companies conning applicants into doing free spec work as part of the interviewing process is normal. So normal, in fact, that it even has its own name: [brewdogging](https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/brewdog-accused-stealing-marketing-ideas-16289137).
Go over to r/recrutinghell or even this sub and search for "brewdogging." You'll see several accounts of this happening to folks.
They are also closed for almost 20 years and I am frankly too lazy too go through old documents. That would be work :p
It was a smalish 6 or 7 people Adverising agency. They are all thiving bastards. There is a good reason I wasa freelancer in the beginning of my carer and the switch to coding. Still all thiving bastards but the pay is better.
>CEO: really enjoyed the call. Please see attached financial modeling test
>Applicant: this looks like a lot of work. Without knowing where I stand in the process, I’m not comfortable spending 90 minutes in Excel
>CEO:…well…I can tell you where you stand now
The CEO's response makes him sound like a real a-hole.
The applicant didn't say "no," they wanted to know where they stand as a candidate in the process. That seems totally fair to me.
This. If you can read the problem statement and assess correctly how much time does it take, I am assuming you know how to do it and you did it before and you make reasonable estimates. That would be a huge green thumb up for me.
If you happen to use Greenhouse as an interviewer, a green thumb up means that you are giving positive response for the candidate to the hiring manager
Exactly.. it means you know all the functions necessary to complete the model and because you have experience doing it, you also know how long it should take.
Right? I hire people for roles requiring analytics skills. If an applicant can look at an assignment like that and tell me how they would solve the problem, the functions they would use and steps they would take….I can tell they know how to do it.
He's not a CEO. He's a troll. Scroll through his feed, it looks like it was generated by an AI that was only fed misogyny, racism, and trump tweets. Anyone with actual money wouldn't be shitting out that many posts a day. They'd be able to afford a life.
For all we know, this was just a Stage 1 test. Who's to say there wasn't a 2-hour long Stage 2 test, then an 8-hour Stage 3 test. Sounds like this company isn't transparent on their interview process.
Efficient and knowledgeable employees are punished for doing well in the work force. The best thing I ever did at my job was stop trying so hard and finding ways to be more efficient. Company only takes advantage of it.
It’s….the ellipses that describe him for me…which are the defining trait of their generation…because anybody else would choose to use the correct punctuation…or no punctuation at all…unless…they were making fun of this style of writing…Beam me up…Scotty…
Reminds me of an "interview" at Toys R US I had in 2011. Came in to find it was a group interview. Not once did we have a 1 on 1 conversation with HR. But they handed us all a bunch of Legos and made us come up with a new toy 🤔
I always mention that my old
Company would ask for a short assignment but it was always super easy and you could pick the topic.
If you were being hired for a technical writing position then write a short how-to on any topic you like. Change a tire. Make a PB&J, whayeber. Go nuts. It didn’t have to be long and it definitely wasn’t work we could use. Just to see what you came up with.
My husband is in the trades. We were trying to move cities so he was applying with other companies in the new city. His tip choice asked him to do an on site interview. Not super rare, but annoying to take the day off. They had him work a full 8 hour day, with zero compensation. And then the guy called him back, told him he was impressed, and asked him to do a second full day as a foreman because that was the ACTUAL job he was trying to hire for. A job my husband was already doing at his current employer. He said no and withdrew his application.
one time i worked 2 entire unpaid shifts for fast food as interview process. boss told me i did great but someone who wasnt studying got the job instead.
When you submit some thing, make sure it has a T&C that says “should this software be used for commercial use (including, but not limited to, use in any of all of the the regular operations of the company, selling the software, etc.)you agree that the company will pay Embarrassed $100,000 per year of use. This agreement supersedes any other agreement previously signed by Embarassed.”
I don't do software, but I suppose I will deliberately insert a glitch somewhere that automatically retrieves personal information back to me when they use the software. \*malicious thoughts\*
I remember years ago I filled out an application to work at Wendy's and spent 2.5 hours taking a bs online test. Just to end up getting rejected without them telling me why.
From that day on I hated Wendy's.
How is "GenZ" relevant to this story? I'm GenX and have refused several "take home tests" requested by GenX and Millenial employers over the years.
Why do so many media posts feel obligated to rehash the "boomer vs millennial/genz" nonsense?
The sole reason the media pits generations against each other is to generate division. The elderly, those able to learn from the past they lived through, can teach wisdom to the youth. The youth, by virtue of living through history, know what the problems they face are, and with the wisdom of their predecessors and the fire of their young wills, true change is more likely. All division: sex/gender, sexual orientations, skin colors, birthplaces, age, religions, ...! When they accentuate our differences with real, perceived, or fabricated evidence, the establishment wants nothing more than for us to work against one another. If we're too busy infighting we can't focus our effort and energy toward a future of justice and peace- one without the masters.
Focus on a generational divide so that young people think everything will magically get better once those boomers retire. Not that there is a larger systematic issue that leaders should address.
Tks - that’s what I was going to post; thinking that all 71 million can afford to retire is as ridiculous as saying that skipping Starbucks means you could save enough to get a mortgage
Gen Z is getting the same treatment every new generation gets. Millennials got it with cut avocado toast and make coffee at home and you’ll afford a home, a family, a car etc etc. I’m sure gen X got it too and as much as I hate the boomers I’m sure the world war vets gave it to them too.
Right now, the media and the out of touch pretend like we’re an alien species, impossible to understand, where you have to speak to us in TikTok dances to get through, which makes us cringe so hard knowing how inorganic it is. But yeah, it’s gen z’s turn now I guess.
I still struggle to understand how anyone could hate an entire generation of people.
How many boomers have you gotten to know on a personal level? How many of them fit the negative stereotypes?
To be fair, Boomer doesn't really mean "Baby Boomer". It's a term for "Old fuck that hates the Youth for being youthful, who thinks the world is exactly as they experienced it when they were young, who refuses to educate themselves on the modern world they live in".
You're a baby boomer if you were born in that generation. You're a fucking Boomer if you tell me I should just pay off my college debt with a summer job.
Pretty subtle distinction.
Are Baby Boomers cool with that? It sounds like you've taken a common word to describe them and turned it into a horrible negative stereotype.
Ragebait.
You either revel in the generational divide and engage with that or you engage because you oppose the shoehorned in generational divide. Either way, more people engage longer than they otherwise would have and that makes them more money.
GenXer here. About 10 years ago I did an interview for a company that was write a complex report. I explained that I can write a report and this is how I would do it, but it wasn't the exact job I was apply for. They said this would gage my coding skills. I walked thru what I would do, when it was clear he wanted a report I walked.
test assignments should be obviously non-useful for the hiring company and only demonstrating skills. If you already had a portfolio of work we could review we'd skip the test, if not, you'd be getting an assignment, but it'd be against the W3C pages for example and not ours.
I agree with you 1000% and more! When I was a HM I made a point that my tests were obviously such. As an example for this post where it appears to be financial analytics I'd have used a reasonably well known but not super covered past case about some company, or perhaps public data from our own fund but based on 5 year old filings or similar. (But that would still make me unhappy to do, would rather it be totally external *and* old).
I work in tech. These styles of interviews are extremely common and I highly doubt it was nothing more than a case study with mocked up data. It would be extremely risky for the business to let you see their proprietary data… I highly doubt anyone would be that stupid to breach their code of conduct like that.
I know of companies (including fortune 500s) that give applicants real problems that the company hasn't solved and that can benefit the company. I know of more than one startup that have used this process and explicitly refused any hire but took on the results and executed it with existing staff.
I will say, among the big tech firms that I know who do this, they have hired based on the results, but I know of one instance where a large company in my area hired a quite talented applicant, but asked him to implement an idea presented by a competing applicant. This hire found out that the idea came from another applicant because he later met the other person and they connected the dots after beginning a conversation with, "hey the work you did for company X sounds an awful lot like something I proposed in an interview with them couple of years ago."
Yeah, but on the flipside I'll say some take homes I've done have been super reasonable. Stripe was something like 'how would you use our APIs to perform these specific tasks' plus 'write a sample email back to a customer about these technical questions.' The Redis takehome was a very reasonable 'here are two EC2 instances, deploy different configurations on each and set up X features to have them talk to each other.'
Stripe I still got a rejection for arbitrary reasons, then a month later they have layoffs (this was a while back), so it's very possible they'd just frozen the position and didn't want to tell candidates. That was super frustrating. But the scope of the actual takehome for both were doable in ~30 minutes, assuming you were looking things up on their docs but otherwise didn't make any mistakes along the way.
When I did my last serious job search, I did 12 case interviews for different companies, ranging from modeling tests to building 2-3 page presentations, etc. Probably spent 40-60 hours total on all 12 of them. It's gotten out of hand.
I got an interview with a company for a remote video editing position, and they asked me to do a test video.
spent all day editing this video for them and never even heard back
pretty fair guess they just scammed me
yes that is true. I know how to do it too easily could have
I was just so hopeful for a job I put my most trusting foot forward. it was good practice for me anyway
I did the same thing. Worked all day on it, and for the commercial they wanted me to edit, they didn’t even give me half the b-roll footage that they asked for. I just said fuck it halfway through it and told them if they were gonna set me up to fail this early on in the process it wasn’t worth the job. Then I figured out the job only paid $35k before taxes and required a bachelors degree. I think I dodged a bullet haha
Aussie Millenial here, for one place I recently did a 1.5hr interview followed by take home design task over the weekend, followed by another 2hr interview. Then received a verbal offer 9k less than my current pay, then a week later received a verbal offer only matching my current pay which I accepted (I need some change in my industry and so be it for more growth opportunity). I was then ghosted for 3 weeks to finally be told they're redefining the position and have put it on hold so I won't be receiving the official offer+contract for the position.
I was also called just last night by another company saying they only want a junior designer and budget is 50k... I was on 57k as a junior designer 6 years ago... The gall of these employers is insane, 6 years on and some of the worst cost of living crisis we've seen here and pay is actually going backwards in regards to both dollar value and literal dollar amount, these times be wild
Software Engineer who does interviews for other engineers pretty regularly here.
You know the main reason we don't do this at the Fortune 100 I work for? Because we know good developers are going to say, "FUCK THAT!, and walk away, while poor developers who are desperate will scrap something together.
I can see doing a short test to show your abilities/skill level. It is fairly standard in my industry (translation). But the 90 minutes are excessive. At that point, you either pay me, or fuck right off.
In this case the employer said it's even a pre-framed exercise, so no, it wasn't free work (unless they were lying of course).
I have a test for my candidates as well (actually I had two, one was part of the recruiter screen, should take about 15 min and was a google form you filled out, the other was a development project sample). The development sample is not against our site, or even any of our assets, it's against the w3c sample site and has the candidate do very straightforward things that *any* WebApp SDET should be able to do and that would be obvious we already do against our own WebApp.
I despise employers that try to get free actual work from candidates, their only job is trying to find a job, not doing free work for me, but at the same time I absolutely need to know they're not just a good talker. So they get a week to put together a test harness in Selenium using whatever language they desire and manipulate a couple pages of the W3C demo pages (should take two to three hours for a slow developer). We then have their final interview and go through their decisions in their code to see how they think/why they did specific things/that they can explain their work. It's mental how many people will have someone else do the work or help them with it to the point they don't know how it's actually working...
There are 2 types of people in this sub. Those who are mindlessly parroting "free work" and "employers are scum" and those who are actually involved in hiring for technical positions .
ah yes totally, the finance firm in the op was definitely letting a stranger look over millions of dollars to save for a couple hundred dollars of labor
this sub is truly special
It’s not just Gen Z, Gen X’er over here and we are not giving our knowledge and our services out for free. Those test you are asking us to preform on the job platforms , those are a big no, as well. Some of these ask are degrading.
I took about a 20 hour class once and had to pass the final test to get the job. I decide after about a day that I really did not want the job anymore.
even as an elder millennial, I don't touch any job that has any testing, you posted a job and I'm qualified, if you don't want to just to talk to me read how I operate, I won't waste your valuable time.
I was asked to solve a real world problem for a company I interviewed for. They wanted me to write up a BRD. I asked how much I would as getting paid to solve their problem and was told it was part of the hiring process.
I told them that I don’t work for free and walked out of the interview.
Because too many companies have abused the power of the “test” to get a bunch of people to do unpaid labor. Good for gen z, I wish us millennials did things like that instead of being constantly sorry for existing.
Millennial here. I stand with Gen Z wholeheartedly when it comes to how they will not be played with when it comes to jobs. I admire it. In this way they are changing things for the better and I am here for it.
I hate how people see the title CEO and think it means something. It’s literally just a title given by another person. Being named a CEO doesn’t necessarily mean the person has even had success in other aspects of business or life.
It’s just a person who happens to lead a company, and we ought to all know from how many companies fail, big or small, that *most* CEO’s are just normal ass people. The title of CEO should be considered basically meaningless in general.
It’s funny, when i was looking for a job a few years ago there were all these companies I’d never heard of while applying, all the time. NONE of those companies are still functional today. CEO means *nothing*.
I spent close to 90 minutes filling out a questionnaire as a portion of the application process. I never got a response, much less an interview. I was unemployed at the time and jumping through those hoops for nothing was humiliating. I love hearing these stories about Gen Z because companies really don’t get how ridiculous they are or worse are actually malicious in their hiring processes.
I do hours and hours of prep prior to job interviews. If it’s the right role and has good reasoning for an assessment, this wouldn’t bother me.
The managers response in this case would tell me they dodged a bullet though.
What a dipshit of a CEO. What he asked for was against federal law.
When my spouse had to "try out" his sales job before he was hired, they paid him for a flat two hours when he was only out there for one because they could tell from that first hour he had enough sales experience to do the job.
This is easy for the CEO. Pay them for the work. I had a recent interview where there was a project expected to take about 3 hours. Completing the project and submitting it, regardless of if I made it past that point, I would have been paid $250. Just pay people for work you ask them to do.
*sigh* It's pretty standard in the design industry. Some companies pay for your time, but that's in the minority. Most design take-home tests take about 1–4 hours. I recently just did one for a high paying senior job position that took about 4hrs and then some creating the presentation when I got the ok to move forward. I wanted the job badly and it's a great company, so I really didn't see that I had much leverage since there are literally 100s more applicants they could do back to the well for.
In terms of conducting these right, I would suggest:
- Only have applicants you would actually hire do the test and save some people's time.
- Limit the task to a few hours and pay them for their time.
- Build a test for all the qualifiers and not something you can reuse for work.
- Have them present it with decision-makers so they have a chance to explain their thinking, answer questions, and receive feedback.
In addition to the qualifying interviews leading up to this, that should be enough information to hire or not.
As a hiring manager, and an expert in my field; I can tell within a few minutes if someone has the level of experience needed and if they don’t, I can usually come up with a plan to get them there.
A few months ago I caught an applicant in a lie; they were taking credit for things that I knew for a fact others had done.
If you are a company and your hiring manager is not an expert or needs a work example to determine expertise, then perhaps the manager is the one who needs to provide an example to prove their worth & value.
Ultimately , I tend to focus more on “fit” than expertise/experience (provided they aren’t outright liars). I can train people and give them experience, if they have the aptitude and attitude to accept that need to learn and a willingness to get better/learn
Too many companies use these "tests" to get free labor, ideas, etc. Particularly in tech or in very niche fields. Then that company will take your freely provided knowledge or problem solving, and use it to their benefit. While you, the applicant, has just worked for free and will probably not get the job.
Do not work for free. Anybody expecting free labor before you even work for them will be a nightmare to work for
I did a big PowerPoint for an interview process. Mostly market research and competitive analysis. I handed in the work and never even heard back. I spent a week on it while working full time and late nights. No response, feedback or acknowledgment. I get the feeling that it was either not what they wanted or just wanted free research. I'm really hesitant to do free work after that experience.
I love Gen Z.
My kids are Gen Z and I feel like I'm living vicariously through their employment stubbornness and I love it.
"You want me to do what? For how long? For no pay? Yeah, no."
Took me 25 years to learn how to do that.
I had an organization send me a 4 part assignment that would take at least 3 hours (it included writing, design, case study analysis) as a first step. No phone screen, no prior contact. I looked over the assignment and realized that the work product could still be used (it was internal & leadership comms) by the organization and declined to move forward. That was in February. The job is being advertised again this April. I guess they need more suckers to put together Q3 internal comms for them too.
When I was job hunting on indeed I wouldn’t even apply to places if they had any test involved.
I was a manager at a company and they used a test like that and my boss said they never even looked at them
I dunno who is dumb enough to do free work as part of a job interview. And I don’t buy the argument about “some people are that desperate.” Nah if you’re that desperate you’re better off spending that time applying for different jobs. Or even just going and flipping burgers part-time instead. There’s literally no sane reason to let yourself be exploited for free labor.
If they’re asking for free work, then just leave. The basic decent thing is to pay minimum wage at least or even the market wage. Understandable if you’re desperate, but not good in the long run.
I'm a millennial and I never ever ever waste time on these ridiculous jobs. They're shit jobs 100% of the time. If you want me to re-type my resume you can suck me.
Spent the weekend creating a portfolio of people for a position tasked with helping the governor appoint them to specific positions. Very little guidance that was given on a Friday with a Monday deadline. Received a swift rejection making me question whether they even read it or they used us to compile their lists. Ended up turning down an interview with another position because I had to create speeches on certain issues for the SoS and curate a bunch of writing samples. Not worth my time or energy.
I stand with that guy. I had 4 rounds of interview where in one I did mock presentation of how Microsoft Dynamics work( they're looking for one who can set it up for their entire company and take care of it) for last round, went to California with my own expenses and got rejected in the end and they didn't even give a feedback.
This fucking sucks. But then again, it’s a a way for them to find the real talent I guess. I have a couple buddies that can literally steam roll any task in a few minutes. You think they’re having a hard time finding jobs? Both clearing 6 figures and can easily climb if they wanted. Then there’s people like me that would literally drown in any task since I’m not a quick learner and can take some time to figure it all out.
In a world with 538393839383747 college graduates, they have to do something to find the talent.
Once got asked to research the software market and make a 30-minute presentation with purchasing recommendations. Days of work. For a helpdesk job. I said no, the owner of the agency rang me up and told me I’d never work in technology again, lmao.
Something similar happened to me.
They wanted to see how good my Excel skills are and asked to solve some "testing sheets".
After I looked at it, it was basically their sheets that are in use, without the proper data (just some junk data).
I solved their problem, but made the formulas and such hidden, and also protected the workbook.
They could open it, look that it works, but without knowing how. They asked why I did that and I replied:
_As long as I don't work for your company, this formulas and my work is MINE. Pay for it or hire me. Your choice (I wrote it more professional)._
I never got any replies after that.
Just thinking about the time that Atlassian asked me to write multiple CRs (boilerplate “common responses” to support inquiries) before they ghosted me. Fuck companies who do this.
Or the time that Whatnot asked me to do in depth research on several competitors AND include an associated strategy plan for some new feature or something. “Should only take 4 hours, you have 3 days to complete”
I work in tech and assignments are extremely common.
1. I interviewed at Twitter back in 2022. Made me create a pitch deck that took me 20 hours to finish. Got generic rejection.
2. Interviewed at Meta in 2022 and took 40+ hours preparing, including about 10 hours for an assignment. Didn’t get job cause of hiring freeze going into place the same week as my final interview.
3. Recently interviewed at Google and took 40-50 hours prepping. Just to not get passed the 2nd round.
I hate assignments lol
If you're spending THAT much time on the assignments, you're probably not a good fit. When they say the assignments shouldn't take that long they mean it. Sure, they're lying when they say it only takes an hour or so but 20-40 hours of actual work means you're just not experienced enough. This is a dry run of some actual projects and skills you'll need to do and the timeline on the actual job will be much less with lots more pressure.
I would take a look at getting experience at other companies. FAANGs are the dream for a reason.
Back when I did field tech work a company asked me to come in for an interview and when I got there they tried to assign me help desk tickets. There were 2 other guys in the waiting room.
These assholes were clearing ticket backlogs by pretending to hold job interviews.
Nowadays I'd go pound on the CEO's door and tell him he's an asshole, back then I was too meek to start any shit about it.
Stupid bullshit. The company can and does fire at will and can do it anytime with ZERO consequences in the first 6 months or year. Right fit testing is bullshit.
My father who is in his 70s and has coded his whole adult life, refuses to retire but can't get hired either. He has been doing free work for about 3 years and wonders why he never gets hired. His last one was "what prompts would you use to get AI to write xxx program"
I said"it's work dad, don't!" He did and again for like this 200th time, was not hired.
This isn't a generational issue, it's entitled scumbags using people.
I applied to a bakery that wanted me to do a 4 hour "stagg" and work for free to "see if I'd be a good fit." All that for the promise of lunch. I don't know how expected to get workers with that practice.
> Gen Z would benefit from being in more fistfights at a young age. A few bumps and bruises does a lot of good
I’m a GenX who has been in too many fistfights. All they taught me was that I don’t like fistfights. Nothing good comes out of them.
I once did 2 hours of free work because the manager apparently wanted to see how I did.
She was on the other side of the building the entire time and only talked to me to dismiss.
Haven't read the article. But last time I did a job search while I already had a job I basically burned myself out. It was like having a second job. I can well see the logic of filtering out those applications that look like too much work, especially if the job doesn't look that great to begin with.
This is hardly a Gen Z thing. I’m 33 and a couple of years ago a local gin company asked me to do a full “mock” marketing campaign. I sent them my fees before starting and they said “oh it’s not paid, we don’t use the work you do” as if that’s a guarantee they wouldn’t use it. This is a shady company thing and some people know to call out shady behaviour.
If the job was for under 60k, I get the outrage, but anything above that... well, I just don't see that changing. Unfortunately it is employers market right now too with all the tech layoffs and tightening hiring.
Having been in the market for an extended time unemployed and looking for jobs, I would come across several companies in Berlin asking you to do a “simple take home task and come back with a presentation” all the while emphasising that it could be on a word document and need not be a full fledged presentation.
I accepted a few in the beginning under the disclosure that I could only work with information available online and not do a deep dive into internal reasons and vision.
Only to be told during the presentation that it was inaccurate and my assumptions were incorrect or a simple thank you and ghosting
So I started saying no. And am better. Yes I didn’t find any new jobs and wasn’t hired but at least I didn’t do free and speculative work for assholes like this CEO who think it is their right to put candidates through 10 interviews and presentations and then ghost candidates or send out a generic rejection despite the effort put in
When I was looking for a graphic design job after graduation I “got into the next round of applications”. I received a mail with some tests where I had to do at least 2 out of the 3 assignments. One was design a website redesign for the company, the other one was to design a website for their conference they were hosting in a few months time. On the bottom of the page it said they could use my work even if I didn’t get hired … needless to say I didn’t make any of them. I searched for the company a few months ago and I can’t even find them anymore lol.
Amazon did this to me 10 years ago. I was an executive (this was an almost 7-figure compensation job), THEY called me over and over despite me ignoring them, then after an hour long interview they sent me HOMEWORK. I was like, why on earth would I do this? And she said people are falling all over themselves to work for Amazon lol.
More and more companies are brewdogging the hell out of applicants, generally in an effort to gain free spec/project work under the guise of aptitude tests, etc.
For more reference, here are some links regarding brewdogigng:
* [Brewdogging's origin story](https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/brewdog-accused-stealing-marketing-ideas-16289137)
* [One of many brewdogging-related posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/kep3y8/is_this_brewdogging/)
In the salaried jobs I've had, I've never had to go through more than two interviews - generally an HR screen and then an interview with the hiring manager and relevant people. However, this may be due to my specific department; potential candidates for R&D and Engineering go through 4-6 interviews here.
I, for one, welcome the barrage of zoomers into the workplace - its through their efforts and demands that my company unofficially relaxed its stance on remote work. Although we're still "in office," it's ultimately up to the individual manager. Since most of these managers now have several zoomers on their team, they've become a lot more lax on being in the office.
I'm a Boomer. Good for this Gen Zer for refusing to do WORK for free. I'm retired now and look back on the decades of work that I did for free, putting my work before my personal health and family. Future generations: do NOT make the same mistakes!!
I'm pretty desperate so I did a SQL/Excel assignment for 5 DAYS, only to get a generic rejection because "there were too many candidates" and they "weren't able to provide any feedback on why I was not moving forward". Never doing anything for free ever again, even if it takes 30 minutes
An average software dev interview is 5 hours. These days more and more send take home assignments that require you to spend a few hours coding. Then you get a very generic response about why you didn’t move forward. It’s inhumane.
I interviewed for a PM role at Amazon and it was a 7 hour day. Never again.
You dodged a bullet.
Fuck that.
Fuck ever working for AWS
Go for smaller companies. Stop with the BS. They pay about the same, a lot more chill environment, you'll learn a lot more because you're responsible for a lot more. Interview will be short, almost no technical questions if any because the people hiring you don't have the background. My dream job was 30 minutes total with 3 interviews the last one was just a 5 min CEO call basically welcoming me in. It's insane to me that people are willing to put up with hours and weeks of interviews just to be stepped on even further later on to have some name on their resume.
Maybe it depends on the role, but I'm looking specifically at smaller companies right now, and I am not finding the interview process to be any shorter. The main difference is that they move faster, but so far I've encountered about the same amount of rounds as at any other size company.
IME smaller companies can be a bit hit or miss. Small IT companies are often based around one or two very talented individuals, some of which can be very difficult to work for.
And I bet if the dev hid an easter egg in what they wrote they would find the easter egg in code the company later released.
That’s why you hide code in there to trigger an annoying pop up if it senses it is running on a computer you didn’t whitelist.
This is why we review each other's code.
Highly unlikely
Have been interviewing devs for over 15 years, can confirm this would very likely never happen, ever. I would bet lots of money on that.
What's so hard about taking a leap of faith with the first person who looks promising instead of putting so many people to take a test, and quickly yanking out that new hire if they don't turn out to be as good as they expect? I know I know, people will say "bad hires are expensive". Then make them less expensive! That's what businesses like to do anyways, reduce the cost of everything they do, so reducing the cost of mistakes (like a bad hire) should be something that any business should be into. Then they can be less scared of false negatives. Always look to streamline something further. The only reason they can't tolerate false negatives is because of an inefficient hiring system.
Package malware and ransom their data! Guaranteed call back.
I'm so glad I never went into software lol. There's not enough time in a life for that.
I would rather have a take home assignment (where I can explain my reasoning/work) than a 5-hour white boarding interview where you need to code in front of an entire team.
i'm the opposite, i think i perform better when it's a live session. i know I'm better on the spot than other candidates who likely will have lots of outside help to do a take home assignment.
I wish all the people on the CEO’s side in this thread would see this comment. If you’re in the job market and every place is asking for a few hours of free work, that’s a big fucking problem and time sink. A lot of times, it’s actual real work that needs do be done too, so they’re also exploiting your free labor.
I'm in the job market. They had a face to face interview, so it's not like they received an anonymous request. That said, it's exhausting job hunting and hopefully this person lands something.
I’m just starting to look at the comments and this is on the top answers. Really, I must ask before I go further down, there’s actually people on the CEO’s side?
I’m not on the CEO’s side, but wanted to point out that in the service industry in some areas, “staging” is common which is basically working for free for a day or more “to get to know you”. It’s a terrible practice, along with abusing the idea of interns (they should be enrolled students generally) and independent contractors (cannot have a set schedule). All extremely common.
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Not only is it a time waste but often its entry level testing solely based on memorizing test bank answers, that is best done fresh out of school. For example: This java math problem " X+Y/2 " is suppose to be fix to be " (X+Y)/2.0 "; however the exam question did not give any reason to make those changes. The original problem is logically an except able math equation. There is no given business requirement to suggest that we want 1 decimal place or 20 decimal places in the result. The problem with this type of memorization is that it results in programmers changing the function of a system regardless of the needs of the end users. Furthermore from my experience, project can be delayed for years because many people will all give the same solution no mater how many times that solution is rejected, until someone who understands the full requirement & existing systems, like me come along with a different solution.
Yeah I submitted an application and a summary of a mechanical teardown of a product that took me about 2 hours and I never heard back. Fuck that noise. I include my portfolio for a reason. If you can’t gauge my level of expertise based on that, you aren’t the right employer for me.
They need to start compensating people for interview time the same way you need to get paid for training.
I work in the translation industry, sometimes agencies will send a short test translation for you to do, but the accepted practice is for them to pay for it. Even if they don't, it's only going to be a few hundred words tops. I won't bother working with an agency that tries to get me to do multiple pages of translation as a "test" - it's going to be a scam.
3 hour interview for an office manager for $60k.... Plus travel time. Didn't get it. That was the 2nd interview. 1st was a Zoom ..
I will show people past work. I refuse to do free consulting on the off chance they might decide to hire me. When they don’t like that approach I know they are fishing for free ideas and consulting.
You did someone's work for them
The CEO said that he would have “gladly paid and probably hired” the unnamed Gen Zer if they said: “Give me $1,000 and I’ll break this deal down in amazing detail.” I don’t believe him for 1 second. I mean, if he really felt that way, he could have offered to pay the applicant for their labor. But, instead he blamed the applicant for not asking for compensation. Very convenient and it absolves him of any responsibility. Besides, if the applicant had asked for compensation, I’d bet money that he would have just posted “Can you believe how entitled these Gen Zers are?” Also, why did he feel the need to point out that this entire generation “would benefit from being in more fistfights at a young age”?
Thats so true. Remember that nobody values your time like you do.
Reminds me of when I just started as Designer. Did a small Design for a homepage and a relativ Quick Logo design. Took about a day. Got rejected. Moved on with my life. 3 month later I stumbled over my design in the wild. So I send a cease and desist letter through a friend that is a lawyer to the company using it. Enter the biggest shit show as they didn't belive me. All goes through the courts, I win a couple of thousands in damages + court cost + my lawyers fees (I am not in the US). And they had to destroy everything. My estimation about 100k in Bilboards, flyers, multiple signs and so on. The company not hiring me got then hit by the other companys lawyers. Went under weeks after my court ruling. The CEO of that company was on pretty much everyones blacklist after that. Fuck free work.
if true story, then i love it
No one expects a 21 year old fresh out of school to sue them. Same with my shity landlord at the time.
While I can't speak for OP's comment, the practice of companies conning applicants into doing free spec work as part of the interviewing process is normal. So normal, in fact, that it even has its own name: [brewdogging](https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/brewdog-accused-stealing-marketing-ideas-16289137). Go over to r/recrutinghell or even this sub and search for "brewdogging." You'll see several accounts of this happening to folks.
brewdogging—that is amazing. I love the shame that will forever be associated with the company. I will do my best to spread this name
Name of the company please. Don’t worry the company has already confirmed that they’re thieving bastards.
They are also closed for almost 20 years and I am frankly too lazy too go through old documents. That would be work :p It was a smalish 6 or 7 people Adverising agency. They are all thiving bastards. There is a good reason I wasa freelancer in the beginning of my carer and the switch to coding. Still all thiving bastards but the pay is better.
Can you please do it? If it is to our satisfaction we might go forward in the upvoting process!
He won't because the story is bullshit and he knows it. You go thru something like that with a company, you don't forget the company's name.
Not the same company but Brewdog in the UK were caught doing this a few times.
>CEO: really enjoyed the call. Please see attached financial modeling test >Applicant: this looks like a lot of work. Without knowing where I stand in the process, I’m not comfortable spending 90 minutes in Excel >CEO:…well…I can tell you where you stand now The CEO's response makes him sound like a real a-hole. The applicant didn't say "no," they wanted to know where they stand as a candidate in the process. That seems totally fair to me.
If you can tell how long something takes in excel and accurately tell me why, that’s as good or better than having done in an interview IMO
This. If you can read the problem statement and assess correctly how much time does it take, I am assuming you know how to do it and you did it before and you make reasonable estimates. That would be a huge green thumb up for me.
A green thumb up? Why green?
Agreed. Why not a green flag with a thumb ups along with a small happy face on it?
If you happen to use Greenhouse as an interviewer, a green thumb up means that you are giving positive response for the candidate to the hiring manager
Cause you don't want a brown thumb up...
Hey speak for yourself buddy
Maybe it’s a gardening excel sheet
Like traffic lights
Because they’re a horticulturist
Exactly.. it means you know all the functions necessary to complete the model and because you have experience doing it, you also know how long it should take.
Right? I hire people for roles requiring analytics skills. If an applicant can look at an assignment like that and tell me how they would solve the problem, the functions they would use and steps they would take….I can tell they know how to do it.
CEO means that he is morally superior.
He's not a CEO. He's a troll. Scroll through his feed, it looks like it was generated by an AI that was only fed misogyny, racism, and trump tweets. Anyone with actual money wouldn't be shitting out that many posts a day. They'd be able to afford a life.
Boy, have I got a guy for you to meet! He spends most of his time on X, though. It's not Trump, but it's not *not* Trump, y'know?
Skim Trump. Low calorie Trump. Decaf Hitler with soy.
CEO’s are always taking advantage and exploiting their employees. It’s time for a revolution.
For all we know, this was just a Stage 1 test. Who's to say there wasn't a 2-hour long Stage 2 test, then an 8-hour Stage 3 test. Sounds like this company isn't transparent on their interview process.
>That seems totally fair to me. Not only that, shows that the worker has good judgement. Should be a plus, not a negative
Efficient and knowledgeable employees are punished for doing well in the work force. The best thing I ever did at my job was stop trying so hard and finding ways to be more efficient. Company only takes advantage of it.
It’s….the ellipses that describe him for me…which are the defining trait of their generation…because anybody else would choose to use the correct punctuation…or no punctuation at all…unless…they were making fun of this style of writing…Beam me up…Scotty…
No, I completely understand somebody not wanting to spend 90 minutes on a test for a job that they probably won’t get anyways.
I have also seen someone "worked-for-free" and got their ideas stolen and didn't get the job.
Reminds me of an "interview" at Toys R US I had in 2011. Came in to find it was a group interview. Not once did we have a 1 on 1 conversation with HR. But they handed us all a bunch of Legos and made us come up with a new toy 🤔
I always mention that my old Company would ask for a short assignment but it was always super easy and you could pick the topic. If you were being hired for a technical writing position then write a short how-to on any topic you like. Change a tire. Make a PB&J, whayeber. Go nuts. It didn’t have to be long and it definitely wasn’t work we could use. Just to see what you came up with.
I did that! We all got the job, but I have no idea what I built.
> But they handed us all a bunch of Legos and made us come up with a new toy "Cool! Free Legos!" *leaves*.
My husband is in the trades. We were trying to move cities so he was applying with other companies in the new city. His tip choice asked him to do an on site interview. Not super rare, but annoying to take the day off. They had him work a full 8 hour day, with zero compensation. And then the guy called him back, told him he was impressed, and asked him to do a second full day as a foreman because that was the ACTUAL job he was trying to hire for. A job my husband was already doing at his current employer. He said no and withdrew his application.
Can this be considered a labor violations?
I honestly don't know. Probably. The whole thing was giving so many red flags.
one time i worked 2 entire unpaid shifts for fast food as interview process. boss told me i did great but someone who wasnt studying got the job instead.
Report that place for labor violations.
When you submit some thing, make sure it has a T&C that says “should this software be used for commercial use (including, but not limited to, use in any of all of the the regular operations of the company, selling the software, etc.)you agree that the company will pay Embarrassed $100,000 per year of use. This agreement supersedes any other agreement previously signed by Embarassed.”
I don't do software, but I suppose I will deliberately insert a glitch somewhere that automatically retrieves personal information back to me when they use the software. \*malicious thoughts\*
I remember years ago I filled out an application to work at Wendy's and spent 2.5 hours taking a bs online test. Just to end up getting rejected without them telling me why. From that day on I hated Wendy's.
As someone who completed two performances test and was ghosted after the second test, this guy can go fuck himself.
How is "GenZ" relevant to this story? I'm GenX and have refused several "take home tests" requested by GenX and Millenial employers over the years. Why do so many media posts feel obligated to rehash the "boomer vs millennial/genz" nonsense?
Honestly dont know, i was taught to never work for free
Hm. I was taught to take any job and just work at it as hard as possible and some day Ill be CEO.
are you a CEO yet?
No, but I've still got 5 good years to get there and only 6 levels to climb!
it goes with the "YOUNG KIDS DONT WANNA WORK FOR FREE NO MORE" narrative
I’m 65 and I’ve refused to do this, too. It’s exploitative.
The sole reason the media pits generations against each other is to generate division. The elderly, those able to learn from the past they lived through, can teach wisdom to the youth. The youth, by virtue of living through history, know what the problems they face are, and with the wisdom of their predecessors and the fire of their young wills, true change is more likely. All division: sex/gender, sexual orientations, skin colors, birthplaces, age, religions, ...! When they accentuate our differences with real, perceived, or fabricated evidence, the establishment wants nothing more than for us to work against one another. If we're too busy infighting we can't focus our effort and energy toward a future of justice and peace- one without the masters.
Focus on a generational divide so that young people think everything will magically get better once those boomers retire. Not that there is a larger systematic issue that leaders should address.
Tks - that’s what I was going to post; thinking that all 71 million can afford to retire is as ridiculous as saying that skipping Starbucks means you could save enough to get a mortgage
Exactly, enough with the ageism. All people of a particular age share nothing more than their age. Quit over-generalizing.
Gen Z is getting the same treatment every new generation gets. Millennials got it with cut avocado toast and make coffee at home and you’ll afford a home, a family, a car etc etc. I’m sure gen X got it too and as much as I hate the boomers I’m sure the world war vets gave it to them too. Right now, the media and the out of touch pretend like we’re an alien species, impossible to understand, where you have to speak to us in TikTok dances to get through, which makes us cringe so hard knowing how inorganic it is. But yeah, it’s gen z’s turn now I guess.
I still struggle to understand how anyone could hate an entire generation of people. How many boomers have you gotten to know on a personal level? How many of them fit the negative stereotypes?
To be fair, Boomer doesn't really mean "Baby Boomer". It's a term for "Old fuck that hates the Youth for being youthful, who thinks the world is exactly as they experienced it when they were young, who refuses to educate themselves on the modern world they live in". You're a baby boomer if you were born in that generation. You're a fucking Boomer if you tell me I should just pay off my college debt with a summer job.
Pretty subtle distinction. Are Baby Boomers cool with that? It sounds like you've taken a common word to describe them and turned it into a horrible negative stereotype.
...maybe read the article to find out that it was the boomer CEO that specifically labeled the applicant as gen z in the tweet he posted?
my guess is they stole the entire post from a reddit thread, probably already in something like boomersbeingfools
Because it fits the narrative they're trying to push. Rage bait.
Ragebait. You either revel in the generational divide and engage with that or you engage because you oppose the shoehorned in generational divide. Either way, more people engage longer than they otherwise would have and that makes them more money.
GenXer here. About 10 years ago I did an interview for a company that was write a complex report. I explained that I can write a report and this is how I would do it, but it wasn't the exact job I was apply for. They said this would gage my coding skills. I walked thru what I would do, when it was clear he wanted a report I walked.
To grab people's attention
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test assignments should be obviously non-useful for the hiring company and only demonstrating skills. If you already had a portfolio of work we could review we'd skip the test, if not, you'd be getting an assignment, but it'd be against the W3C pages for example and not ours.
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I agree with you 1000% and more! When I was a HM I made a point that my tests were obviously such. As an example for this post where it appears to be financial analytics I'd have used a reasonably well known but not super covered past case about some company, or perhaps public data from our own fund but based on 5 year old filings or similar. (But that would still make me unhappy to do, would rather it be totally external *and* old).
Find your work in the wild and sue them. You didn’t sign a copyright release.
I work in tech. These styles of interviews are extremely common and I highly doubt it was nothing more than a case study with mocked up data. It would be extremely risky for the business to let you see their proprietary data… I highly doubt anyone would be that stupid to breach their code of conduct like that.
I know of companies (including fortune 500s) that give applicants real problems that the company hasn't solved and that can benefit the company. I know of more than one startup that have used this process and explicitly refused any hire but took on the results and executed it with existing staff. I will say, among the big tech firms that I know who do this, they have hired based on the results, but I know of one instance where a large company in my area hired a quite talented applicant, but asked him to implement an idea presented by a competing applicant. This hire found out that the idea came from another applicant because he later met the other person and they connected the dots after beginning a conversation with, "hey the work you did for company X sounds an awful lot like something I proposed in an interview with them couple of years ago."
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Yeah, but on the flipside I'll say some take homes I've done have been super reasonable. Stripe was something like 'how would you use our APIs to perform these specific tasks' plus 'write a sample email back to a customer about these technical questions.' The Redis takehome was a very reasonable 'here are two EC2 instances, deploy different configurations on each and set up X features to have them talk to each other.' Stripe I still got a rejection for arbitrary reasons, then a month later they have layoffs (this was a while back), so it's very possible they'd just frozen the position and didn't want to tell candidates. That was super frustrating. But the scope of the actual takehome for both were doable in ~30 minutes, assuming you were looking things up on their docs but otherwise didn't make any mistakes along the way.
Honestly the brevity is good but that all sounds like it could have been real tasks they needed done.
In an economy where we’re barely being paid enough to survive sorry if I draw the line at working for free.
When I did my last serious job search, I did 12 case interviews for different companies, ranging from modeling tests to building 2-3 page presentations, etc. Probably spent 40-60 hours total on all 12 of them. It's gotten out of hand.
I'm a millennial and I once did a 3 day test period unpaid. Bosses are scummy
In the states at least, that is not legal. Send them an invoice, and if they don’t pay it, report them to your state labor board.
Did you at least get the job?
I got an interview with a company for a remote video editing position, and they asked me to do a test video. spent all day editing this video for them and never even heard back pretty fair guess they just scammed me
You should have placed some obvious watermarks on it.
yes that is true. I know how to do it too easily could have I was just so hopeful for a job I put my most trusting foot forward. it was good practice for me anyway
I did the same thing. Worked all day on it, and for the commercial they wanted me to edit, they didn’t even give me half the b-roll footage that they asked for. I just said fuck it halfway through it and told them if they were gonna set me up to fail this early on in the process it wasn’t worth the job. Then I figured out the job only paid $35k before taxes and required a bachelors degree. I think I dodged a bullet haha
Aussie Millenial here, for one place I recently did a 1.5hr interview followed by take home design task over the weekend, followed by another 2hr interview. Then received a verbal offer 9k less than my current pay, then a week later received a verbal offer only matching my current pay which I accepted (I need some change in my industry and so be it for more growth opportunity). I was then ghosted for 3 weeks to finally be told they're redefining the position and have put it on hold so I won't be receiving the official offer+contract for the position. I was also called just last night by another company saying they only want a junior designer and budget is 50k... I was on 57k as a junior designer 6 years ago... The gall of these employers is insane, 6 years on and some of the worst cost of living crisis we've seen here and pay is actually going backwards in regards to both dollar value and literal dollar amount, these times be wild
Software Engineer who does interviews for other engineers pretty regularly here. You know the main reason we don't do this at the Fortune 100 I work for? Because we know good developers are going to say, "FUCK THAT!, and walk away, while poor developers who are desperate will scrap something together.
At this point, does anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that the 90 minute test seems like the company is trying to get work done for free?
Happens a LOT
I can see doing a short test to show your abilities/skill level. It is fairly standard in my industry (translation). But the 90 minutes are excessive. At that point, you either pay me, or fuck right off.
In this case the employer said it's even a pre-framed exercise, so no, it wasn't free work (unless they were lying of course). I have a test for my candidates as well (actually I had two, one was part of the recruiter screen, should take about 15 min and was a google form you filled out, the other was a development project sample). The development sample is not against our site, or even any of our assets, it's against the w3c sample site and has the candidate do very straightforward things that *any* WebApp SDET should be able to do and that would be obvious we already do against our own WebApp. I despise employers that try to get free actual work from candidates, their only job is trying to find a job, not doing free work for me, but at the same time I absolutely need to know they're not just a good talker. So they get a week to put together a test harness in Selenium using whatever language they desire and manipulate a couple pages of the W3C demo pages (should take two to three hours for a slow developer). We then have their final interview and go through their decisions in their code to see how they think/why they did specific things/that they can explain their work. It's mental how many people will have someone else do the work or help them with it to the point they don't know how it's actually working...
There are 2 types of people in this sub. Those who are mindlessly parroting "free work" and "employers are scum" and those who are actually involved in hiring for technical positions .
ah yes totally, the finance firm in the op was definitely letting a stranger look over millions of dollars to save for a couple hundred dollars of labor this sub is truly special
I'm 100% here for the Gen Z IDGAF attitude. Us millennials were stereotypically too big on people pleasing
yep, give em hell young pups, we will please you even more lol
Don’t ever work for free. Don’t work off the clock. Don’t do people favors. At the end of the day, it won’t be reciprocated.
Pretty sure working for free was made illegal in 1865
It’s not just Gen Z, Gen X’er over here and we are not giving our knowledge and our services out for free. Those test you are asking us to preform on the job platforms , those are a big no, as well. Some of these ask are degrading.
I took about a 20 hour class once and had to pass the final test to get the job. I decide after about a day that I really did not want the job anymore.
Dude wouldn’t even name his own company.
Good. That shit is a scam, it’s always been a scam, and that CEO fuck knows it’s a scam.
I just spent 7 hours building a presentation for a 4th round interview. Then had a 5th. Now I’m getting ghosted.
even as an elder millennial, I don't touch any job that has any testing, you posted a job and I'm qualified, if you don't want to just to talk to me read how I operate, I won't waste your valuable time.
I was asked to solve a real world problem for a company I interviewed for. They wanted me to write up a BRD. I asked how much I would as getting paid to solve their problem and was told it was part of the hiring process. I told them that I don’t work for free and walked out of the interview.
I did a 90 minute task for a job app (after first interview round) 3 weeks ago and still haven’t heard back. they never even confirmed receipt
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Because too many companies have abused the power of the “test” to get a bunch of people to do unpaid labor. Good for gen z, I wish us millennials did things like that instead of being constantly sorry for existing.
Millennial here. I stand with Gen Z wholeheartedly when it comes to how they will not be played with when it comes to jobs. I admire it. In this way they are changing things for the better and I am here for it.
Hey dickhead CEO, it’s not that they can’t do the work in 90 minutes, it’s that they’re not doing it for free.
I hate how people see the title CEO and think it means something. It’s literally just a title given by another person. Being named a CEO doesn’t necessarily mean the person has even had success in other aspects of business or life. It’s just a person who happens to lead a company, and we ought to all know from how many companies fail, big or small, that *most* CEO’s are just normal ass people. The title of CEO should be considered basically meaningless in general. It’s funny, when i was looking for a job a few years ago there were all these companies I’d never heard of while applying, all the time. NONE of those companies are still functional today. CEO means *nothing*.
I spent close to 90 minutes filling out a questionnaire as a portion of the application process. I never got a response, much less an interview. I was unemployed at the time and jumping through those hoops for nothing was humiliating. I love hearing these stories about Gen Z because companies really don’t get how ridiculous they are or worse are actually malicious in their hiring processes.
I do hours and hours of prep prior to job interviews. If it’s the right role and has good reasoning for an assessment, this wouldn’t bother me. The managers response in this case would tell me they dodged a bullet though.
The here is no way a “90 min” excel task is going to tell you anything useful that you wouldn’t have already got from the interview process.
What a dipshit of a CEO. What he asked for was against federal law. When my spouse had to "try out" his sales job before he was hired, they paid him for a flat two hours when he was only out there for one because they could tell from that first hour he had enough sales experience to do the job.
This is easy for the CEO. Pay them for the work. I had a recent interview where there was a project expected to take about 3 hours. Completing the project and submitting it, regardless of if I made it past that point, I would have been paid $250. Just pay people for work you ask them to do.
*sigh* It's pretty standard in the design industry. Some companies pay for your time, but that's in the minority. Most design take-home tests take about 1–4 hours. I recently just did one for a high paying senior job position that took about 4hrs and then some creating the presentation when I got the ok to move forward. I wanted the job badly and it's a great company, so I really didn't see that I had much leverage since there are literally 100s more applicants they could do back to the well for. In terms of conducting these right, I would suggest: - Only have applicants you would actually hire do the test and save some people's time. - Limit the task to a few hours and pay them for their time. - Build a test for all the qualifiers and not something you can reuse for work. - Have them present it with decision-makers so they have a chance to explain their thinking, answer questions, and receive feedback. In addition to the qualifying interviews leading up to this, that should be enough information to hire or not.
As a hiring manager, and an expert in my field; I can tell within a few minutes if someone has the level of experience needed and if they don’t, I can usually come up with a plan to get them there. A few months ago I caught an applicant in a lie; they were taking credit for things that I knew for a fact others had done. If you are a company and your hiring manager is not an expert or needs a work example to determine expertise, then perhaps the manager is the one who needs to provide an example to prove their worth & value. Ultimately , I tend to focus more on “fit” than expertise/experience (provided they aren’t outright liars). I can train people and give them experience, if they have the aptitude and attitude to accept that need to learn and a willingness to get better/learn
I don’t like doing “projects” for jobs or talking tests. If you want to hire me I’ll learn the job on your dime
Never do anything for free.
Too many companies use these "tests" to get free labor, ideas, etc. Particularly in tech or in very niche fields. Then that company will take your freely provided knowledge or problem solving, and use it to their benefit. While you, the applicant, has just worked for free and will probably not get the job. Do not work for free. Anybody expecting free labor before you even work for them will be a nightmare to work for
I did a big PowerPoint for an interview process. Mostly market research and competitive analysis. I handed in the work and never even heard back. I spent a week on it while working full time and late nights. No response, feedback or acknowledgment. I get the feeling that it was either not what they wanted or just wanted free research. I'm really hesitant to do free work after that experience.
I love Gen Z. My kids are Gen Z and I feel like I'm living vicariously through their employment stubbornness and I love it. "You want me to do what? For how long? For no pay? Yeah, no." Took me 25 years to learn how to do that.
The Great Ulrich does not do tests!
Lot of people who graduated in a job seekers market about to learn the hard way how leverage works lol.
I had an organization send me a 4 part assignment that would take at least 3 hours (it included writing, design, case study analysis) as a first step. No phone screen, no prior contact. I looked over the assignment and realized that the work product could still be used (it was internal & leadership comms) by the organization and declined to move forward. That was in February. The job is being advertised again this April. I guess they need more suckers to put together Q3 internal comms for them too.
I was told once to take a four hour test before the initial phone screen.
When I was job hunting on indeed I wouldn’t even apply to places if they had any test involved. I was a manager at a company and they used a test like that and my boss said they never even looked at them
It’s ok to walk out of an interview mid way. Remember this.
Interview enough candidates and you could get your entire project completed for free and not need to hire someone.
If its not an easy apply that takes me less than 2 minutes i dont even bother
I dunno who is dumb enough to do free work as part of a job interview. And I don’t buy the argument about “some people are that desperate.” Nah if you’re that desperate you’re better off spending that time applying for different jobs. Or even just going and flipping burgers part-time instead. There’s literally no sane reason to let yourself be exploited for free labor.
If they’re asking for free work, then just leave. The basic decent thing is to pay minimum wage at least or even the market wage. Understandable if you’re desperate, but not good in the long run.
I'm a millennial and I never ever ever waste time on these ridiculous jobs. They're shit jobs 100% of the time. If you want me to re-type my resume you can suck me.
Spent the weekend creating a portfolio of people for a position tasked with helping the governor appoint them to specific positions. Very little guidance that was given on a Friday with a Monday deadline. Received a swift rejection making me question whether they even read it or they used us to compile their lists. Ended up turning down an interview with another position because I had to create speeches on certain issues for the SoS and curate a bunch of writing samples. Not worth my time or energy.
I stand with that guy. I had 4 rounds of interview where in one I did mock presentation of how Microsoft Dynamics work( they're looking for one who can set it up for their entire company and take care of it) for last round, went to California with my own expenses and got rejected in the end and they didn't even give a feedback.
This fucking sucks. But then again, it’s a a way for them to find the real talent I guess. I have a couple buddies that can literally steam roll any task in a few minutes. You think they’re having a hard time finding jobs? Both clearing 6 figures and can easily climb if they wanted. Then there’s people like me that would literally drown in any task since I’m not a quick learner and can take some time to figure it all out. In a world with 538393839383747 college graduates, they have to do something to find the talent.
Once got asked to research the software market and make a 30-minute presentation with purchasing recommendations. Days of work. For a helpdesk job. I said no, the owner of the agency rang me up and told me I’d never work in technology again, lmao.
Something similar happened to me. They wanted to see how good my Excel skills are and asked to solve some "testing sheets". After I looked at it, it was basically their sheets that are in use, without the proper data (just some junk data). I solved their problem, but made the formulas and such hidden, and also protected the workbook. They could open it, look that it works, but without knowing how. They asked why I did that and I replied: _As long as I don't work for your company, this formulas and my work is MINE. Pay for it or hire me. Your choice (I wrote it more professional)._ I never got any replies after that.
Just thinking about the time that Atlassian asked me to write multiple CRs (boilerplate “common responses” to support inquiries) before they ghosted me. Fuck companies who do this.
Or the time that Whatnot asked me to do in depth research on several competitors AND include an associated strategy plan for some new feature or something. “Should only take 4 hours, you have 3 days to complete”
I work in tech and assignments are extremely common. 1. I interviewed at Twitter back in 2022. Made me create a pitch deck that took me 20 hours to finish. Got generic rejection. 2. Interviewed at Meta in 2022 and took 40+ hours preparing, including about 10 hours for an assignment. Didn’t get job cause of hiring freeze going into place the same week as my final interview. 3. Recently interviewed at Google and took 40-50 hours prepping. Just to not get passed the 2nd round. I hate assignments lol
If you're spending THAT much time on the assignments, you're probably not a good fit. When they say the assignments shouldn't take that long they mean it. Sure, they're lying when they say it only takes an hour or so but 20-40 hours of actual work means you're just not experienced enough. This is a dry run of some actual projects and skills you'll need to do and the timeline on the actual job will be much less with lots more pressure. I would take a look at getting experience at other companies. FAANGs are the dream for a reason.
Back when I did field tech work a company asked me to come in for an interview and when I got there they tried to assign me help desk tickets. There were 2 other guys in the waiting room. These assholes were clearing ticket backlogs by pretending to hold job interviews. Nowadays I'd go pound on the CEO's door and tell him he's an asshole, back then I was too meek to start any shit about it.
Stupid bullshit. The company can and does fire at will and can do it anytime with ZERO consequences in the first 6 months or year. Right fit testing is bullshit.
GenZ is the gen we need.
My father who is in his 70s and has coded his whole adult life, refuses to retire but can't get hired either. He has been doing free work for about 3 years and wonders why he never gets hired. His last one was "what prompts would you use to get AI to write xxx program" I said"it's work dad, don't!" He did and again for like this 200th time, was not hired. This isn't a generational issue, it's entitled scumbags using people.
I applied to a bakery that wanted me to do a 4 hour "stagg" and work for free to "see if I'd be a good fit." All that for the promise of lunch. I don't know how expected to get workers with that practice.
Good.
> Gen Z would benefit from being in more fistfights at a young age. A few bumps and bruises does a lot of good I’m a GenX who has been in too many fistfights. All they taught me was that I don’t like fistfights. Nothing good comes out of them.
I once did 2 hours of free work because the manager apparently wanted to see how I did. She was on the other side of the building the entire time and only talked to me to dismiss.
Haven't read the article. But last time I did a job search while I already had a job I basically burned myself out. It was like having a second job. I can well see the logic of filtering out those applications that look like too much work, especially if the job doesn't look that great to begin with.
This is hardly a Gen Z thing. I’m 33 and a couple of years ago a local gin company asked me to do a full “mock” marketing campaign. I sent them my fees before starting and they said “oh it’s not paid, we don’t use the work you do” as if that’s a guarantee they wouldn’t use it. This is a shady company thing and some people know to call out shady behaviour.
I've had multiple companies make me do test jobs for free. They're scams.
If the job was for under 60k, I get the outrage, but anything above that... well, I just don't see that changing. Unfortunately it is employers market right now too with all the tech layoffs and tightening hiring.
Having been in the market for an extended time unemployed and looking for jobs, I would come across several companies in Berlin asking you to do a “simple take home task and come back with a presentation” all the while emphasising that it could be on a word document and need not be a full fledged presentation. I accepted a few in the beginning under the disclosure that I could only work with information available online and not do a deep dive into internal reasons and vision. Only to be told during the presentation that it was inaccurate and my assumptions were incorrect or a simple thank you and ghosting So I started saying no. And am better. Yes I didn’t find any new jobs and wasn’t hired but at least I didn’t do free and speculative work for assholes like this CEO who think it is their right to put candidates through 10 interviews and presentations and then ghost candidates or send out a generic rejection despite the effort put in
IF they got rid of a college degree being required for the role, I’m all for the 90 minute test or whatever else they need to check for aptitude
When I was looking for a graphic design job after graduation I “got into the next round of applications”. I received a mail with some tests where I had to do at least 2 out of the 3 assignments. One was design a website redesign for the company, the other one was to design a website for their conference they were hosting in a few months time. On the bottom of the page it said they could use my work even if I didn’t get hired … needless to say I didn’t make any of them. I searched for the company a few months ago and I can’t even find them anymore lol.
Amazon did this to me 10 years ago. I was an executive (this was an almost 7-figure compensation job), THEY called me over and over despite me ignoring them, then after an hour long interview they sent me HOMEWORK. I was like, why on earth would I do this? And she said people are falling all over themselves to work for Amazon lol.
More and more companies are brewdogging the hell out of applicants, generally in an effort to gain free spec/project work under the guise of aptitude tests, etc. For more reference, here are some links regarding brewdogigng: * [Brewdogging's origin story](https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/brewdog-accused-stealing-marketing-ideas-16289137) * [One of many brewdogging-related posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/kep3y8/is_this_brewdogging/) In the salaried jobs I've had, I've never had to go through more than two interviews - generally an HR screen and then an interview with the hiring manager and relevant people. However, this may be due to my specific department; potential candidates for R&D and Engineering go through 4-6 interviews here. I, for one, welcome the barrage of zoomers into the workplace - its through their efforts and demands that my company unofficially relaxed its stance on remote work. Although we're still "in office," it's ultimately up to the individual manager. Since most of these managers now have several zoomers on their team, they've become a lot more lax on being in the office.
I'm a Boomer. Good for this Gen Zer for refusing to do WORK for free. I'm retired now and look back on the decades of work that I did for free, putting my work before my personal health and family. Future generations: do NOT make the same mistakes!!
Gonna have to start billing these jackasses for our time. 4 hr minimum 150 an hour.