I've been doing assignments as part of my job applications to join tech startups in past weeks and I've noticed a lot of times they don't even get back to me with a feedback. This has happened so frequently to me and people around me, that got me thinking if it's a new trend for companies, especially tech startups, to just outsource their projects for free.
I might appear skeptical but that's because based on my experience most of these assignments are closely related to their app like integrating something to it / integrate it to some other services and etc.
As an example this is taken from the last assignment I received last week:
It’s important that this is a standalone and framework-independent library so that we can use as a third party library in any framework we like.
This whole thing, if true, is very frustrating and I'm keen to find out if they can actually use my project without my permission and if I can do something to prevent it? I'm aware in most cases it's even impossible to find out whether they are using my piece of work since they are based on close-sourced projects.