Are Unpaid Take-Home Interview Assignments Ethical? (opens in new tab)

I once had a take home API integration task that was time-boxed to 2 hours using the honor system. I handed it in but then the interviewers never mentioned it so I assumed nobody paid attention to it and was a bit annoyed. Then I got into the technical interviews and I was asked tons of questions about the APIs I was supposed to integrate with. It wasn't until after the interview that I realized the task itself was probably completely ignored, they just wanted to see what things I learned about the assigned API in a couple hours.

I know that has nothing to do with the question in the title, but I found it interesting.

95% of tech companies do not require 10-15 hours of take home interview work.

Edit: adding additional context, any company working with a recruiter will constantly be told by the recruiter repeatedly that the company should simplify and shorten the interview process because if you don’t, you risk losing candidates to other companies. Recruiters put extreme pressure on hiring managers to make the interview process as easy as possible. I’ve hired a lot of engineers via recruiters and none of the recruiters I’ve hired with would have allowed me to give a 10 hour assignment. They likely would have dropped me as a client.

At VMware while looking for systems level engineers our team would give out a take home programming assignment and it was the most accurate measure of how good someone was. We’d give everyone the same test so it was easy to compare and it was quite niche so you couldn’t google an answer or ask someone else to do it. Not everyone has time to do it, but enough were that we found great candidates and didn’t hire any duds.

There was never a question (by us) about it being ethical. There was an initial engineering phone screen before we asked people to do this so there was serious intent to move to the next stage before the ask. We were also so specialized that we’d only get a couple of candidates per month get to that stage.

From an employers perspective I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again, but now you have to find things chatgpt can’t easily do, which is getting harder to find. someone who knows how to use chatgpt/claude well could be a good find if they know the fundamentals underpinning it.

I've done a bit of research into this topic as my startup is building a platform that combines leetcode and traditional take homes. I have come to conclude that it's not only unethical, but it's not in the best interest of the company. We landed on 1h "take homes" as those that maximize the completion rate. It was also clear that take homes, or work sample tests, are amongst the most valid signals for future on the job performance. But companies abuse their power with extra long take homes and don't even have the bandwidth to review and provide feedback.

I think they are ethical but annoying if done properly, and likely give good signal as to a candidate's skill. Planning and (voluntary) time boxing to 1-2 hours make the argument stronger, as that time could equally be spent in a 1:1 synchronous interview which is worse IMO.

Leetcode-ish and strict timeboxing are awful and can't possibly provide useful signal beyond "can program in some manner". Nobody can do their best work in 1 hour timed and limited, only in the web IDE which isn't the same as their dev environment, no looking up anything, no progress on part 2 without completing part 1 and similar unrealistic restrictions.

They encourage the worst in coding. Globals, dumb temporary names, no comments and done-vs-maintainable style? Ship it. I only need to deal with this code for an hour and then it's thrown away. I'm not going to make my `important_thing_to_remember` variable anything longer than `i`, and I'm going to use `foo[0]` from that ridiculous regex I bodged together instead of splitting it up and building it from pieces where I name the capture group so Future Me can understand it.

I'd much rather have a test for 1h of reasonable work, and let me take 2h if needed to solve it and then refactor to make it maintainable.

I didn't see any mention of copyright.

In the US in almost all cases the interviewee will not be an employee of the company and writing the code within the scope of their employment, and so the code will not automatically be a "work for hire".

That means that the interviewee will own the copyright of the code they write. This is something you will want to think about if you are the employer and considering coding requirements during interviews whether take-home or in-person.

It could be bad news if some interviewee's code ended up in production (accidentally or on purpose) and you did not own the copyright.

If you want to own the code that interviewees write, there are two approaches. The most reliable approach would be to get them to sign an agreement assigning the copyright of anything they write for the interview to you.

This will require a contract so don't just wing it. Get your company's lawyer to write it.

The other approach is to try to make it a work for hire. If you succeed then the copyright is yours as soon as the interviewee writes it.

For this you need three things:

1. A written agreement signed by the interviewee and the company saying that the code will be a work for hire.

2. The code must be specifically ordered or commissioned.

3. It must fall into one of 9 specific categories of works.

#1 should be easy, but get your lawyer to write the agreement. #2 should also be easy if you do a decent job of specifying the assignment you give the interviewee.

#3 might be difficult. For a long time software was not thought to fall into any of the categories and so could not be a work for hire unless developed by an employee. But a few years ago some courts decided that it could fall into a couple of them. I haven't kept up with developments since then and so don't know if this is now settled.

The usually recommendation I've seen is to have your work for hire agreement also include a copyright assignment agreement in case the work turns out not to be a work for hire.

Interviewees rightly complain that whiteboard coding exercises are unfair -- some people don't perform under pressure. A take home exercise is the solution for that. Make it time boxed (say 2 hours) and the interviewee can use any resources that they want (which is what happens anyway when working).

In our experience, not everybody gets the code correct (at least according to our test cases). It then turns into an interesting exercise to ask the candidate how they would fix the code to deal with the failing case.

When I was in a startup consulting company, candidates were asked to prepare a talk on a topic of their choice for 20 minutes and allow another 10 minutes for questions. I suspect that many candidates did not realize why they were being asked to do this -- we need to know whether they could get their message across in a limited amount of time, and be able to manage an audience that was throwing them off track. The smarter ones would realize when they were being side tracked and ask the question "Can we deal with these questions later as I'd like to be respectful of your time?"

I think that all candidates should realize that in nearly all cases, they are being asked questions, and to do things, for a reason. It may not be the reason that it appears to be on the surface.

I still prefer take home over everything else for interviews.

I do have one serious question: how to decide what good code is for an interview? It's already highly opinionated, but I can write code that's all dependency injection to the extreme and it would be considered overengineered. I could write a single file project with no DI and it would be ok (one off, 2 hours max), but it would not simulate a real situation. These two things are both valid approaches but they pull the code in opposite directions.

In a real scenario, we have a fixed deadline so it is possible to determine how many design points are available and work on those.

Is there any other industry that does this? Acting/showbusiness maybe? Is it because the industry can't decide on a curriculum/certifications that attest to competence? Surely on-boarding at most small - medium sized tech companies is less expensive than other industries that require uniforms/equipment etc. And the positions generally require higher education/substantial relevant work history requirements, so that would assume general training is not necessary besides training in specific platforms/tools your company uses. Why is it so much more important to vet tech workers so intensely than any other industry? Honestly it seems a lot like employers abusing their positions. I've worked in offices with annoying people you just deal with it, assuming they can competently do their work. Trying to hard to get a "culture fit" or whatever other soft requirement at the applicants expense is not OK.

They really are not because of the asymetric effort. It takes minutes for a company to assign a week of work.

A fair system would be a test-employment contract of some kind, where it's understood there are no rights beyond payment for the assessment task.

We used to do technical interviews with a live coding exercise, but this made many candidates extremely nervous to the point that we were still guessing whether this candidate could do actual coding.

We’ve had more success with a simple timeboxed coding exercise for junior developers. Developers are supposed to implement a simple wireframe design of a single page that downloads some weather data from an API an shows it. Developers may create it in their favorite library/framework.

When I was a CTO, we paid for it.

Canonical in particular has gravely committed this offense.

In an instance for one of their engineering positions, they requested ~40 hours worth of work via a combination of system administration, development in C/Golang, and uploading to a git server where they could review the work.

At the time, I was a full-time student and declined given time constraints.

No. They are not. In fact, paid or unpaid, take-home assignments are unethical. They are built on the power imbalance between the employer and the job candidate.

The test is easy: the person who is giving the assignment would themselves be annoyed, inconvenienced, and feel pressurized if they got given a similar assignment when looking for a job themselves. You know "do onto others..."

I worked in a company who put the candidates to work the entire day on the code base

It’s unethical to you assign real work as a take-home interview for free labor

No. Only if they are asking the candidates to do free work.

Send an invoice to the company for 500$ per hour.

No.

Next question?