My last company was accused of this constantly. We would ask a very contrived, simplistic problem that was themed along with the domain of our business. Most good candidates would know this and solve it quickly. Many awful candidates would accuse us of using candidates for "free labor," and threaten to report us to whatever agency they think deals with this sort of thing.
I've seen this accusation thrown around dozens of times. I'm convinced that it's not really an actual issue, and just another way for bad candidates to transfer blame elsewhere.
That would be hilarious. Most of the value of a developer doesn’t straight out come from the code they wrote, but everything around that (design, maintenance, hardening). Getting free code isn’t actually that helpful without a lot of other stuff around it.
Not that you are wrong, but you are underestimating the dumb assholes who assume they would be cruising right on path only if someone could solve this tiny niggling problem for them.
I had to tell one moron on phone interview that they are looking for free consulting or what because they keep harping a very specific project (Java/xml etc) setting that they were struggling with. It could of course be solved in hour or so by closely looking at product documents instead of endless googling.
I think you misunderstand the definition of hilarious. This is not an attack, but an observation.
When you are the guy who has to meet payroll for your team, and some (insert appropriate NSFW description here) person/company deprives you of pay for the work they are taking advantage of to further their goals ... think how that makes you feel.
There are many adjectives. None of them are synonymous with hilarious.
I don't know if you are joking or serious. How much work do you think you can extract out of a normal developer in an hour or less, especially when he/she hasn't seen the codebase before? And how much effort do you think it would take to schedule the interview in the first place, starting with posting an ad, then screening resumes, scheduling time...? Not to mention someone has to vet/test the bug fix ...
This doesn't seem reasonable to me at all.
On the other hand, I can believe if this happens with those "take home assignments". Those tend to be larger (few hours to a few days) amount of work.
BTW, at least in this case, I did get the offer as they promised, within 48 hours. So I don't think they were doing anything shady. My guess is that they simply got tired of normal style interviewing and found this to be an efficient way to hire.
I gave 4 examples of this in an above comment. Yes, it happens. Yes, its wrong. No, people and companies don't care.
At the end of the day, this is what sucked the optimism out of me at my previous company. We had lots of people trying to steal from us. Even after I closed it down, I had two people in particular, ask me to help them design something, or give them detail domain/design knowledge, for free.
Yes, it happens. Far too often. Makes people like me jaded.
I had this happen in a previous life, when I was working on designing/building/selling HPC and storage systems. Two of the worst offenders were universities, one was a prop-shop, one a semiconductor processing firm.
One uni called me up to tell me they liked my bid, but they wanted me to teach another company how to to what we could do, so they could buy from the other company.
The second uni issued an RFP, required that they get to keep all the docs, including detailed design specs. After interviewing all the companies, mine included, they selected 2 finalists, us and someone else. They probed us hard for details. Wound up buying our design from the other guys.
The prop shop did a similar thing, though we won the RFP. But then custy went silent while working on PO. They then awarded it to our competitor, as long as they used our design.
The semiconductor firm had a problem they claimed they could solve internally (they couldn't), and wanted to see what we could do. We met all of their (aggressive) performance, capacity objectives. But they kept pumping us for "free work" with the promise of a very large contract later. Against my business partner's recommendation, I called them on it, indicating that we'd be happy to work on the project with them. But not for free. So they "fired" us, as in asked us to stop working on it. Now, 4 years later, they are still struggling with the task.
These seem to be contract negotiations rather than tech interviews, and you learned important lessons about protecting yourself from unscrupulous actors in the process.
> they wanted me to teach another company how to to what we could do
Here one might triple? their rate for a much shorter hourly design contract and leave implementation to someone else. The other two examples might have creative solutions as well.
How is this useful? The interviewer still needs to evaluate the code and conduct the follow-through questionnaire. They could just spend that time fixing the bug instead.
I've seen this accusation thrown around dozens of times. I'm convinced that it's not really an actual issue, and just another way for bad candidates to transfer blame elsewhere.