Some companies abuse this style of interview to get free work done by interview candidates and then reject them.
I've seen this accusation thrown around dozens of times. I'm convinced that it's not really an actual issue, and just another way for bad candidates to transfer blame elsewhere.
I had to tell one moron on phone interview that they are looking for free consulting or what because they keep harping a very specific project (Java/xml etc) setting that they were struggling with. It could of course be solved in hour or so by closely looking at product documents instead of endless googling.
When you are the guy who has to meet payroll for your team, and some (insert appropriate NSFW description here) person/company deprives you of pay for the work they are taking advantage of to further their goals ... think how that makes you feel.
There are many adjectives. None of them are synonymous with hilarious.
This doesn't seem reasonable to me at all.
On the other hand, I can believe if this happens with those "take home assignments". Those tend to be larger (few hours to a few days) amount of work.
BTW, at least in this case, I did get the offer as they promised, within 48 hours. So I don't think they were doing anything shady. My guess is that they simply got tired of normal style interviewing and found this to be an efficient way to hire.
I'll take that module that auto-completes code with Stack Overflow answers first, thank you very much.
At the end of the day, this is what sucked the optimism out of me at my previous company. We had lots of people trying to steal from us. Even after I closed it down, I had two people in particular, ask me to help them design something, or give them detail domain/design knowledge, for free.
Yes, it happens. Far too often. Makes people like me jaded.
One uni called me up to tell me they liked my bid, but they wanted me to teach another company how to to what we could do, so they could buy from the other company.
The second uni issued an RFP, required that they get to keep all the docs, including detailed design specs. After interviewing all the companies, mine included, they selected 2 finalists, us and someone else. They probed us hard for details. Wound up buying our design from the other guys.
The prop shop did a similar thing, though we won the RFP. But then custy went silent while working on PO. They then awarded it to our competitor, as long as they used our design.
The semiconductor firm had a problem they claimed they could solve internally (they couldn't), and wanted to see what we could do. We met all of their (aggressive) performance, capacity objectives. But they kept pumping us for "free work" with the promise of a very large contract later. Against my business partner's recommendation, I called them on it, indicating that we'd be happy to work on the project with them. But not for free. So they "fired" us, as in asked us to stop working on it. Now, 4 years later, they are still struggling with the task.
Sadly, this is far too common.
> they wanted me to teach another company how to to what we could do
Here one might triple? their rate for a much shorter hourly design contract and leave implementation to someone else. The other two examples might have creative solutions as well.