Are you going to pay me $250/hr for that time? If not, why would I spend 30 hours of my life vying for a chance for a full time job with your company? And what about my current job?
Those are some high standards, you value your time at 250×8×5×52= half a million a year?
I don't disagree that 30 hours is way over the top for an interview question unless you happen to find it as much fun as <insert your favorite hobby>, or if it's somehow usefully spent time for other reasons, but your response seems to be at an equally extreme end of the spectrum.
This isn't a guaranteed full time job. For all intents and purposes, it's a short term contract with very little notice. Dev time is like anything else, if you buy in bulk (say... 2000 hours a year) and on a regular schedule, you can get some pretty good discounts.
I'm in the mid-west, and that's a little under my rate for short-term low-notice (read: emergency) contract work. I can't imagine anyone on either of the coasts is going to jump at it.
> I can't imagine anyone on either of the coasts is going to jump at it.
So for clarity, they will jump to do 10 hours for 5-7 technical interviews at $0 but won't do 10 hours of paid contracting work where they get $2,000?
I can't speak for anyone other than myself but $200 / hour is pretty damn competitive for any contract work no matter where you live. That's $192,000 a year if you put in 20 hours a week (half the normal 40 hours that most folks put in). I wouldn't classify this as emergency work either. You're getting notified of a contracting opportunity in the form of an interview.
I spent ~20 years doing contract work. If someone messaged me on Wednesday, unless I'm really busy chances are I could start working with them the upcoming Monday. Sometimes I do find myself booked for weeks or months but if someone comes to me for an oddball job where I know it's only 5-15 hours of work and they're cool with me only putting in 1-2 hours a day then I can almost always find time to do it, even when I'm at near max "comfortable" capacity (~40 hours of contracting work a week).
> So for clarity, they will jump to do 10 hours for 5-7 technical interviews at $0 but won't do 10 hours of paid contracting work where they get $2,000?
It's a 30 hour contract, or at least the comment I was reading said that.
I would. I can just stop showing up to interviews if I don't like the company via the normal interview process. Once I agree to a contract, I have to do the whole thing (I take my contracts fairly seriously).
> That's $192,000 a year if you put in 20 hours a week (half the normal 40 hours that most folks put in).
192k presumably 1099 work. Which is roughly equal to 95k W2 work. Even with that it's not the same. They aren't offering me a guaranteed 20 hours a week of work ever week for a year. If they were, that might be something I would take (unless I particularly disliked the company for some reason).
Extrapolating out a short term contract to full or part time work is dishonest, it ignores all the work you have to put in to find that many short term contracts (lowering your effective hourly rate).
An average FAANG SWE (l4-l5 equivalent across all including msft) is pulling in 250-400K salaried. Convert that to hourly corp-to-corp rates and yeah you're looking at a billable rate of 200/hr or more for a lot of potential hires.
