We said $30 because that's what we used to pay
The posted wage was not a mistake, and not out of date. The interviewer explained, out loud, that it was bait.
Stories
An open archive of what candidates go through: the ghosting, the seven-stage processes, the take-home tests nobody read, the roles that were filled internally before the advert went up.
Some are found in public. Some are sent in. Contributors choose whether to be named.
Ten hours for a four-hour task, then nothing
Told it would take about four hours. It took ten, across two days. Then two weeks of the silence they'd asked him to wait through — and more after that.
The company that said it pays candidates, and didn't
Fifteen-odd requirements sold as a couple of hours, which took days — from an employer that had publicly stated it pays for every stage regardless of outcome.
A plan they could implement without hiring him
Six or seven hours of unpaid work producing a full performance-improvement plan — code review, staff conversations, engineering changes.
He capped it at two hours, as instructed
The brief said spend no more than two hours. He spent two hours, flagged what he'd left out, and was rejected for leaving it out.
Three hours, six endpoints, and a frontend from scratch
A recruiter sent a zip file with a three-hour budget for work that could not be done in three hours. He worked out what the exercise was really measuring.