
I billed companies for 2 out of my last 3 take homes and they paid me - starpilot
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/bprxxc/i_billed_companies_for_2_out_of_my_last_3_take/
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clay_the_ripper
I had 2 take homes in a late stage interview, but up front they told me I
would be paid a reasonable hourly wage to complete them. honestly the practice
of doing lots of take homes seems like a waste of everyone’s time. Companies
should only do it for their final few candidates and pay them to do it. In the
grand scheme it costs the company basically nothing - think about the enormous
profit these companies make on a good employee for a few years.

At my company I do trial projects (real actual work we need done) for
prospective employees. We pay them to do it. It’s never anything that would
cost more than $500. The point is not to test how committed they are or how
above and beyond they are. The point is to see if they know what they are
doing in the simplest, fastest, cheapest way possible for everyone involved.

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solipsism
Why does it matter if it's real work, versus just resembling real work?

At some companies the work may be of a nature that it's easy for someone to
jump right in and do $500 worth of work in a reasonable time. At other
companies, identifying the work, scoping the work, vetting to work, finding an
owner for the work, etc adds up to enormous effort and is not even close to
worth it. For those companies (by far the majority I would guess), it's going
to pay off to have one or a few projects that they give everybody.

To the candidate, it doesn't matter. Whether they see it as a waste of time or
an investment depends only on whether they end up getting the job.

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blablabla123
Unless I'm almost certain that I really want to work at the place and it's
just a last step of the interview process I'm fine with coding for a few
hours, be it on-site or at home.

But otherwise, if it's more than 2 hours, there is no way I gonna do that
again, such a waste of time. The longest one I did was more than 10 hours and
I didn't even get _any_ feedback about the code. Billing is smart though, I'll
always ask for that from now on.

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thorwasdfasdf
it's worth noting, the only 2 companies that paid out were willing to take the
next hiring step with him. In the grand scheme of things, paying out a couple
thousand is nothing compared to how much those companies will pay out to the
recruiters, so it makes sense if they want to hire the guy. i mean they
already spent 50k or so on the recruiter, what's another 1-5k for an
assignment.

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pyb
He said that, being from a consultancy background, it hadn't even occured to
him that they might want the work done for free.

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dahdum
He billed these companies without first confirming the rate, estimate, or if
he would receive any payment. I wonder if these invoices were sent to the
hiring manager or just sent to AP directly hoping they’d pay it out
accidentally.

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starpilot
...and, it's gone. Guy deleted his reddit account as well. Tl;dr he billed
three companies for the time spent on take-home assignments, with his normal
hourly rate. Two of three companies paid, around $8,000 total, and one of them
hired him fulltime.

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phamilton
> $8000

Assuming an hourly rate of $250/hr, that's a lot of hours. Split evenly
between the two companies, that's 16 hours for a single take home.

My expectation on a take home is more on the order of 4 hours, but maybe I'm
off on that? And maybe this guy was a deep expert who charged $1000/hr?

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praneshp
WHen it was up, the commment said one of the take homes was 35 hours of work
(ended up being the company they signed with)

