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Comment by chucksmash | Hacker News Reader

Why do you feel the interaction was cruel? A brief "no" seems like all you'd get from most companies too.

My understanding is the policy is intended to avoid pointless debates and inadvertent legal liability (e.g. "when you told the candidate 'good luck with the new baby' at the end of the rejection convo, it created the impression they were not selected because they have kids.")

Why did he owe more feedback than "this isn't up to par?"

Based on past threads on HN I'm in the minority in preferring take-home projects and not feeling I'm owed compensation for the time it takes to complete them.

I like them because you have more of an opportunity to demonstrate your craft versus a standard leetcode whiteboard session where the 45 minute time constraint means you need to focus on pumping code out as quickly as possible. Also a good one can be an entertaining diversion in it's own right. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

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Why do you feel like you're not entitled to compensation for your labor? Where is the line?

I've experienced take home projects that were expected to take "10 hours". If I spend 10 hours on a take home instead of my consultancy I'm out thousands of dollars.

I understand preferring take home projects, I prefer it over whiteboarding too, but I don't understand why you wouldn't be owed compensation. In my opinion the best evaluation is to work with the team on an actual story, task, ticket, etc. where you are paid the listed salary pro-rated for your hours.

> If I spend 10 hours on a take home instead of my consultancy I'm out thousands of dollars.

My reasoning for not demanding I should be compensated:

1. Presumably something about the opportunity on offer is more compelling than your second best option of working on your own consultancy earning $200+/hour, otherwise why are you applying for the role in the first place? I'd argue that if the opportunity is otherwise compelling in the long term, demanding breakeven for one day's work is being penny-wise and pound foolish. Taking it to an extreme, if there was a job that paid $10 million/year but the interview process was so involved I needed to burn an entire year's worth of vacation time to interview for it, whether I'd do it would come down to expected value of the decision (i.e. probability of passing the interview), not the absolute investment I was making.

2. I'd consider this form of cost-analysis rationale a weak one because it can be applied to basically any decision in life yet it gets applied selectively, so it's kind of a roundabout way of saying "I don't want to do that." Nobody (probably?) is applying this analysis to sleeping 6 hours a night versus 8, yet that would yield 10 more billable consulting hours (per week!) too.

Because of how easy that is to scam.

Also the cost is prohibative. I'm not paying dozens or hundreds of applicants to spend 3 hours writing code when most of them are going to be utter shit.

If you want to deselect yourself by not doing it without pay, feel free.

I think the hurt of it made it feel cruel. But I don't think it was cruel. Just because I am hurt doesn't mean someone erred.

I can see it both ways. I initially thought the employer was already nice enough to give the applicant a chance, instead of denying at the outset.

But then I remembered my own experiences of putting in a lot of work to apply for an opportunity, and then getting a curt denial saying I wasn’t what the employer was looking for, or not up to the task at the time.

I think it’s important to remember the feelings of getting rejected like that. Later on, when I was in a position of rejecting candidates, I volunteered the time to send longer responses with minor feedback despite the opportunity cost, just because I remembered what it was like to be an applicant.

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