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.
#hacker-news
5 stories
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.