The way a company signals their respect for my time is by either compensating me for the time I spent on them instead of literally anything else, or by demonstrating that they are spending an equivalent amount of time on me rather than anything else.
If I am doing a project that takes me 8 hours, that company should either be writing me a check (for somewhere between $100 and $500, probably) or planning the mother of all individual sales pitches to convince me to not just work there, but also to go the entire distance through their interview process.
No company has ever done this for me. Every last one of them has expected the candidates to spend as much of their own time (and even money) as necessary. Several (all of them in Denver, possibly by coincidence) have even reneged on paying travel expenses. Tyler Tech in Lakewood, CO, tried to get out of paying for my hotel room, declined to spring for a rental car, and remains to this day the most hostile interview I have ever suffered through.
Reneging on paying for interview expenses is the most scummy thing that companies regularly try to get away with (well, OK, no it isn't, but in this industry it is, mostly).
That's exactly why I tattle on this particular company--Tyler Tech, in Lakewood--at every available opportunity. (In the U.S., truth is sufficient defense against defamation.)
They also had me drive my own car from Madison to Milwaukee, to catch a flight that actually stopped in Madison after the first leg, just so they could save a few bucks on the airfare. And then they refused to pay for the mileage between Madison and Milwaukee, after promising earlier to reimburse all my travel expenses.
I put up with an awful lot of inconvenience from interviewers without comment, but every little slight is ratcheting up the minimum acceptable offer from that company. And if you act like sleazebags at the interview, you had best be prepared to lose any candidates with an ear to the grapevine.
Of course not, but it is (or at least should be) a two-way process. If the interviewer wants you to invest hours of your time this should be respected; either by paying for it, or at least by being sensitive to the fact that people generally apply to jobs while already employed somewhere. So don't give them a 24-hour deadline on a programming task that takes 4-5 hours, things like that.
