
Normal for companies to 'interview' to receive free consulting? (Facebook) - cyanno
One of my good friends recently interviewed with Facebook. For background, he has massive amounts of experience in the audio&#x2F;visual industry, and has worked for some of the top companies in the world setting up their AV systems.<p>So he goes through 3 rounds of video chat interviews, and each subsequent one resulted in them asking more and more direct questions about where he saw the industry going, what was going to be the new technology, what people were going to be moving away from and his thoughts on what the smart moves were.<p>Facebook did not end up hiring him. Instead they used him as a free consultant, under the guise of hiring him, and wasted hours of his time because Facebook could not be bothered to actually pay him for his consulting time. They took his advice and followed it to the T. We are certain this was an odd move for them, a move they would not have made without his input. We learned about this through the grapevine that is the small AV world.<p>We realize this is a bold claim, but a month or two after his interviews, Facebook was suddenly pivoting from one process to another. They were moving away from a tech he was sure was going to die soon, a tech that Facebook loved and was in bed with for years, to something else he saw that was going to be ubiquitously the future.<p>Sorry that I cannot be more specific, but it disgusted me to hear that a company like Facebook, with so much money, would do something so underhanded. Guess I’m naive.<p>Companies that do this need to be called out. Name and shame!
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seattle_spring
I've seen this happen countless times. More specifically, I've seen companies
use contrived but domain-specific questions for interviews, and have either
junior or overconfident candidates assume they were duped into a free
consultation under the guise of an interview.

No, a $100B+ company that regularly pays $500k/yr to mid level engineers is
not trying to save a few thousand dollars by dancing around a consultation
fee.

I worked for a data heavy company a few years back that would use a domain
relevant but extremely contrived and simplified dataset for interviews. Our
Glassdoor was _filled to the brim_ with identical accusations.

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sloaken
Although I agree large companies would not need to, and probably have very
strong rules against it. I can also see various unscrupulous lead engineers /
middle managers doing exactly this.

I had a similar experience back a number of years ago. They did offer me a
job, but it was not a good offer.

