[viraptor]

> work for free on someone else's proprietary software and there is a very real risk of companies trying to abuse this practice to extract free labour from candidates

This may happen in some places, but in practice I've never seen a task which actually could be applied anywhere. Most of the time these were toy projects, or simple exercises.

I think you'd easily notice if giving you the test was worth more to the company than all the recruitment time spent on taking to you. It's not free labour if you end up spending hours with each candidate, splitting up real work into "exercise chunks", integrating wildly different styles, validating results, etc.

[sj4nz]

I've seen this when the company switched the "exercise" as a no-wait-solve-this-one-instead which was fairly obvious it was a work-related task that was being farmed out to candidates.