[temp667]

We give new hires a homework project that is directly work related. We don't consider it unethical. It's really a fantastic way to sort out who can deliver. We used to have it be part of the onsite interview - they could sit for a few hours and do it.

I like these because they are not games. If you want something done, you'd ask an employee to do it. So just ask someone to do something you need done.

In our case at least by the time it was something that was part of an interview, it had already been implemented on the business side. Our projects were usually 2 hours tops?

The idea that this is unethical is wild.

We also do paid internships and have folks actually work on stuff that way -> do a good job, pretty good line up for a full time position.

[jimhi]

You are misunderstanding. They are saying it is unethical to ask an interviewee to code for free and use that in production. In your case you are not doing that, although if I interviewed with you and saw the same feature added after I submitted the code I would definitely assume you did something unethical.

[temp667]

But is that what is happening? They said it was a work related project. That's exactly what we do.

Why would a place like google even use an interviewees code without careful copyright assignment and work for hire protections (ie, you need to pay someone in USA generally to own their code).

I've found some potential hires are randomly paranoid - and if they start giving you lots of hypothetical disaster / ripoff scenarios early, not worth the hire?

[jimhi]

Sometimes companies do illegal things that save them money. I would assume Google wouldn't do that. Not every company is Google.

A 6-person company in New York did that to me. I reviewed the interview project I did for them and their latest product update. I had to ask them a week after the interview if they used my code in production and if so - this is how many hours I worked on it and a fair rate. The CEO emailed me threatening legal action and then called me 10 minutes later apologizing and venmo'd me the amount I stated it was worth.

If your interview process works for you that is great.

But I could totally see why potential hires are paranoid if you are giving them a situation to be paranoid about. I hope you are being super clear with your process and giving assurance you aren't using their code. If it was me, I would show them the code our team wrote at the same time they submit their project and use that as part of the follow up interview.