[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.