Is it appropriate to ask for an hourly compensation for take-home interview tasks which exceed a certain time limit?

Question

I work in the software industry and a lot of companies send take-home tasks to complete as a part of the interview process. Some of these take-home tasks can take a long time to complete, especially if you want to polish your solution.

I was wondering if it's appropriate to ask for an hourly compensation for take-home tasks which exceed a certain time limit (let's say, 2 hours)? So any take-home task that takes more than 2 hours to solve should be compensated with some hourly rate. That hourly rate can be symbolic (well below the market value of a software engineer's hourly rate), but the point is is that all the time spent on the take-home task which exceeds the time limit is paid by the company to the person completing the take-home task.

In my opinion, I think this is more than appropriate. In general, take-homes consume much more time compared to technical interviews, so if the company isn't willing to revise its hiring processes so that they don't include a take-home, they should at least compensate candidates for any time over a certain time limit they spend on the take-home task. Especially if it's a symbolic rate well below market software engineer hourly rates.

Answer 1

Is it be appropriate to ask for an hourly compensation for take-home tasks which exceed a certain time limit?

Realistically, no company is going to pay you for a take home task that is part of the interview process. The companies that assign tasks that potentially can take hours to complete either don't have realistic expectations, do not value the time of their potential candidates, or are trying to use potential candidates as free labor. It could also be some combination of these but either way it is a red flag and a glimpse at what working for this company can be like.

I would just thank them for their time and consideration and move on to the next opportunity.

Answer 2

I'll put in a view from the other side. I hire for roles in my team and my peer group of managers help each other out. Our hiring process involves take home work; maybe around 2-3 hours, and if you asked to be paid your application would be binned. Sounds harsh? Let me explain why.

Hiring is really, really hard. For every position we advertise there are hundreds of applicants. Anything from 50-80 percent are utterly unsuitable. They don't have any of the skills and likely don't even understand the specifics of what we are asking in the job requirements. It is common for us to get people applying for senior developer or business analyst jobs and their entire software industry experience can be boiled down to word processing and spreadsheets. We have a multi-stage process to sift through and try to get to the best person for the job. Hiring someone costs a lot of time, money and effort so we want to do it right; hiring someone unsuitable can cost us tens of thousands of dollars in lost time, fees, etc. Worse still, if we hire someone and they mess up it can cost a lot more. Recruitment agencies charge between 20-40 percent of the candidates salary as a fee. If we hire someone that an agency has introduced on a $100,000 salary then we pay the agency $40,000 when the applicant turns up on their first day. We don't get that back if they fail their probation.

By the time you have been given our take home task, then congratulations! You've probably already passed several stages, including the first round interview. You are on a shortlist of 2 or 3 and so far everything we see is good. If you get this far, it's really worth the effort as you are at the final stage.

We're not trying to get free work. Far from it, we put a lot of hours ourselves into creating a standardised scenario and everyone gets the same task. We prep questions and discussion points to try and understand your thinking. It is designed to probe your knowledge, experience and character. You might spend 2-3 hours doing the task but we've spent hundreds of hours designing and preparing it, and we spend 4-6 hours per candidate reviewing the answers. Our investment is double what yours is, and it's from skilled and experienced people who absolutely know what they are doing. If our goal was to get work from you then the financials simply don't add up. Why would we spend 6 hours getting you to do something that we could do ourselves in 2 hours.

Of course other companies might not use the same process as ours. If the task is given to you without having gone through other steps, like an initial interview or even a phone screen, then maybe they're trying to get you to do work.... but I highly doubt it. It's just too risky. By the time they've documented tasks, sent them over, got them back, reviewed them and checked them... it's almost certain that the company could simply have done the task themselves quicker and cheaper. Don't forget that if they are creating individual tasks for every applicant, then most of the "work" that comes back will be totally wrong and worthless, because most of the applicants aren't able to do it.

Answer 3

I was wondering if it's appropriate to ask for an hourly compensation for take-home tasks which exceed a certain time limit (let's say, 2 hours)?

No, it's not.

Your choice regarding a take-home task is to either do it, or decline. There is no negotiating compensation for the interview process. If you aren't willing to perform the take-home task, someone else will.

You could choose to give the task whatever time you are willing to commit for free (two hours?) and then just stop at that point. Perhaps in some cases, the company would value a partially completed task. Perhaps not.

I never gave take-home tasks during interviewing for any positions I was trying to fill. But some of my peers did. For all of them, asking for compensation would mean you would have no chance to get that compensation, and almost certainly no chance to get the job.

Decide ahead of time what you are willing to do and not do. If you decide the job opportunity isn't worth your time, just politely decline and move on to other job possibilities.

Answer 4

This answer is based on a comment from @KateGregory, but I think it's ultimately the correct answer and should be available as such.

If it was easy for the company to pay you, they probably wouldn't mind. Interviewing costs them a fortune anyway, they don't care about $100 either way. On the other hand, you're probably interviewing for a salaried position anyway, so there is no "hourly wage" to be compensated.

But the real issue is that paying you is hard. They have to have tax paperwork for you (they don't have any of the information required to do that). It has to go through their accounting system, which means you would have to be entered into that system. Blah blah blah. It would be a huge problem! Imagine doing that for every candidate!

In a less bureaucratic system, which is not the system we live in in the US, or Europe, or any other jurisdiction I'm even vaguely familiar with, I could absolutely imagine the manager saying "we expect this to take two hours, the low end of our pay scale is $x/hour, so here's a check for $2x dollars." But paying people isn't that simple, and honestly, you should already know that.

On the other hand, if you go in person to the interview, sometimes they'll buy you a nice lunch. That's sort of like compensation.

Answer 5

You definitely can ask, you are very likely to not even get a reply, and even less so a positive one. Whether it's appropriate or not I don't think it's answerable directly, but let me frame reframe the question a bit.

I imagine your annoyance is that you do the tasks, put the effort in, just to then possibly get zero feedback and just hear "no thank you", if even that. You are not down 2 hours, more than that actually, and that's uneven to the few minutes company had to put in. But at the very same time, that's the point - it's there to weed out the candidates who otherwise would take hours of company times to weed out. And as long as the company gets enough quality candidates through this interview process it will continue doing so, as clearly they offer good enough jobs that enough qualified candidates sees it as worth taking the 2h+ test gamble.

There is something you can ask for which should be much easier to get, and that's time. Instead of asking for the money ask that you will be guaranteed a call after the test, and at the very least some adequate feedback on the solution, ideally in form of even a 20 minutes call, longer if they like what they hear. You will still mostly hear no, companies and people tend to be very unwilling to break a working process for just one person, but that's much more palatable offer than asking for money. And ultimately that's what it is about for you - getting the consideration for putting the time needed to complete the task, not some token amount of coins in your pocket.

Mind that this applies to early interview stages, we are talking first few hours at the very most. The longer the process takes, and the deeper you go, the more you can start requesting money to continue interviewing as it passes the point of a reasonable ask. There's no fixed number though, and it generally is a good check of how invested the company really is in your candidacy, or just dragging you along for whatever reason.

But of course if it's worth doing, that's up to you and how easy it is for you to get offers. Ultimately you can afford to lose possible jobs when you are under no pressure to move, but in the opposite sometimes all you got is time and have to be very careful to not loose potential leads.

Answer 6

In my experience, companies either pay for take home tasks or they don’t. Mostly the latter.

You asking is highly unlikely to change that. And especially unlikely to change it in the couple of days you have before they’ll simply drop you from consideration.

So I’d say either do the tasks or don’t. And if you don’t, feel free to say why. But don’t expect it to change anytime soon.

Answer 7

I an in the group that says don't do one of these take-home projects. The consensus of this group is that the employers who give applicants homework don't respect their employee's time. The request is all you need to know about how they will treat you in the future.

You are suggesting that candidates should request that they be compensated. A request for compensation is showing that the candidate will always ask to be compensated for everything that involves extra effort. That might be enough to get your application rejected.

Remember the goal is to get a job offer, asking for money is unlikely to get you to that goal.

Answer 8

To answer your question directly: you can ask for anything you want. You're welcome to ask for compensation, and this could be a bridge to a discussion about how you estimate projects, appropriate comp, etc. I wouldn't outright reject a candidate who asked about how to value their time. I've also been paid multiple times for travel to/from interviews and for coding time on take-home projects. In my experience it's always been a flat fee and/or mileage reimbursement, not an hourly rate. This isn't as impossible to find as some answers make it seem.

That said, there's a missed opportunity here to both demonstrate your project management skills and help companies improve their interview process: agree on a maximum time investment up front. I have received and completed many take-home projects. Sometimes you receive a "build this thing and let us know when you're done" mandate, and I +1 many other community members who suggest avoiding that sort of assignment entirely. There is no equity in an interview process that compare what one person does in 20 hours with what another person does in 2. However, most of the take-homes I've received have some rough time estimates associated with them. If it's not clear as the project is assigned, ask!. "Sure, I'm excited to show what I can do with this project - would you expect this to be a 2 hour or 2 day investment?"

Setting clear expectations up front lets you align expectations, decide whether the project fits into your schedule, and determine whether you can afford to complete the assignment for free. It also sets the stage for the follow-up when your project is reviewed: "Here's what I was able to complete in the 2 hours we agreed upon, and here's what I would do with an additional 2 hours" (or "what I planned vs. what I accomplished", etc, etc).

Answer 9

Like other answers say, nobody will pay you for doing a coding exercise.

But if the assignment doesn't fit into the time you have available, you could try pointing that out and offer an alternative. The alternative here would be a public project you made in the past that is relevant to the job. Of course, provided you have one and the code is presentable.

I had said in the past: "Sorry, but I won't have time to complete this in the near future, but I worked on something similar, would that suffice?"

No guarantees but it is not rude to ask this.

Answer 10

It Depends

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The way I see it, there are two types of take-home tests that are like this:

1. A task that definitely holds no value to the company beyond demonstrating your skills (developing a prototype to-do app or something).
2. A task that's related to what they do and could either be directly, or with a little tweaking, be used by them in a production capacity.

If it's the former, while I don't think it's inappropriate to ask, I very much doubt that you'll get the answer you're hoping for from the vast majority of companies. That being said, it's not unheard of and it's becoming increasingly common.

If it's the latter, then I absolutely think it's appropriate. More-so, you absolutely should insist on being paid an hourly rate for that work. Unfortunately, the kind of slimy company that pulls this crap almost certainly isn't going to pay you for it. That, however, is probably a good thing because if they won't pay for your time, you probably don't want to work there anyway.