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Comment by maxaf | Hacker News Reader

Would you feel better about providing work samples if you got paid fairly for each one?

This almost always comes up in work sample discussions. There is a fairly obvious reason those of us who advocate for them don't do that. It would rule out a large contingent of the candidate pool who have signed agreements not to work for money without prior approval or notification to their current employers.

It also opens the hiring company to potential liability with regards to IP laws if you are hiring in a similar industry.

Maybe this is a bit rant-y, but "Paid Fairly" is incredibly relative. Every time I've been asked about doing some sort of paid coding assignment in my free time, I've asked to be paid at my hourly consulting rate, which many people do regularly, which is $60/hr. This is really not that much for a consulting developer.

Every time this has come up, the company would not pay that rate, and offered something more like $20/hr.

It is just insane to me that if you are interviewing me for a position which makes $105,000 a year and cannot offer even close to equivalent compensation for the interview.

I have the same issue. It costs me hundreds of dollars to even agree to an interview, at my hourly rate. To further ask me to do homework is to bilk me for thousands. I cannot afford to apply for most jobs, as long as I have a consulting backlog. Which I almost always do.

Do you interleave full-time and consulting gigs? If so, how does that work in practice? Wouldn't doing a fulltime job for a while tend to dry up your client pipeline, as they find someone else for urgent work? With that in mind, when is it worth it to even try to find a fulltime job? I'm about to start my career, and wondering how hard it is to walk the line between consulting and "regular" jobs.

As you mention, having a client pipeline is the easiest way to find contracts. My last fulltime job came out of a contract - they wanted me on board. Worked for a few years, then they changed direction.

I thought work might have dried up. But I got a call the next day from somebody who had dug up my number in an old rolodex, desperate to get me to pick up the slack on a project. So, right back in the saddle!

That works better if you have 10 or 20 years of experience at different places. So there are people out there thinking of you.

Not everyone can or wants to take on the onus of basically being a part-time contractor just to switch jobs.

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