How do u deal with companies asking you to build entire MVP's on an interview assignment whats the best way to say no to building for free?

Say no and ask to be paid if it is any more than an hour's work

I would be very vary of such companies. Tests of some companies (Automattic for eg) last longer than most companies -- but if you are spending more than an hour and doing work which you feel is like an MVP, I would walk away from the company. They don't seem to respect the candidate's time right now and I don't think they will as an employee either.

I applied (and got rejected!) for Automattic back in early 2016, I applied for a Frontend Dev role and the assignment they gave me was a full-fledged Wordpress Plugin modification, and the whole thing required very less writing of JS (the skill which I have) and more of PHP (which I don’t have). It took me a couple of days to complete the assignment, I even went as far as putting all the best practices around Wordpress Plugin development which involved doing some advanced PHP stuff, and although I was given 5 days to finish the task, I managed to do it in 3 days, but they rejected me saying that I’m an amateur PHP dev and they’re looking for an experienced person. I wonder if they really went through my profile (or their own job description for

frontend engineer

) before moving ahead with my application. 😂 I’m sure they didn’t reject the changes I made to the plugin though (because I had my changes reviewed by a friend who’s a frequent Wordpress Core contributor).

Companies will also gaslight you into saying that ‘This is just an hour worth of work’. But they will working code + deployed + tests written + all coding practices followed.

I would rather reconsider to continue interviewing with such organizations..

Sometimes it helps in gaining strong hire status from hiring team, if you have bandwidth to spend some extra hours, A company asked me to build the logic for a tic-tac-toe game in a Frontend interview and I build the entire game and hired directly after the round - https://lastnamearya-tic-tac-toe.netlify.app/

Typical interview process takes atleast 3 hrs of our time for doing multiple rounds of interview and coding complicated DS, I rather find it comfortable to work on 3-4hrs of assignment than to go through a week long process of ramping up DataStructures and then doing these interviews. Generally speaking most companies who does the challenge will have less / no DS questions and that makes me feel very good. Unless they are asking you to spend days, I don’t mind at all on doing MVP’s as long as it doesn’t take more than 3-4hrs of my time.

Its a pretty long assignment https://loopkitchen.notion.site/Front-end-engineer-Take-home-interview-b679bdedc5bd4631a31bb7aa88eb59cb

Woah! That is like a $10K project requirement 😬 Hehe ... That is crazy. At my current org, we ask candidates to write a python script which does basic CSV handling on a CSV file (delete columns, some regex, etc). Takes less than 10m to do and gives a LOT of info on how the candidate thinks about writing code. These guys (loopkitchen) don't know what they are doing.

I know i was shocked 😂

🤯 it looks like they are building their website using interviews 🤦‍♂️

I appeared for a company once, where they had asked me to build REST endpoints for a very specific purpose, in Ruby, a language I did not know to code. I told them that I will have to spend some time getting hang of Ruby, and they seemed to be okay with it. They only required to see the basic functionalities. Cut to 2 days, and I submitted them a working code. They reverted back and asked me to add a few more complexities. I did that as well. They came back again, this time asking me to write unit tests around it! That was it. That was a huge red flag for me. They never saw me again!

I don’t think its very big assignment , it can be doable within 1-2 days efforts. If person is actively looking for job change then doing this 1-2 days work with be headache , but some one looking passively then it becomes fun to try new things. The only issue is companies won’t provide detail feedback if they are rejecting someone from assignment . - In 17-18 I gave interview with Thoughtworks this was assignment .

The above looks shorter and doable , I have 10 plus years experience asking me to build an entire MVP frankly is not worth my time 🙂 I would rather get paid for that

If you are actively looking for a job and if every company requires you to put in 1-2 days of effort in a very opaque process (you have no idea if you will qualify, why are rejecting you, etc), then to apply to 100 jobs, you are spending 200 days of effort. Conversion rates - as you become more experienced tend to be in the 5-10% range (usually). So it is a lose-lose for the candidate in which they can spend considerable time and still not qualify. If the company was serious, they would offer a paid internship - even a small amount like $25 per hour / $250 - $500 for someone to attempt their assignment (putting your money where your mouth is). Have lots of 1:1 interviews initially to make sure the candidate is qualified and then offer them a $500 project. Not a lot to ask. Or, you are hiring for "aptitude" and not particular skill sets -- and if you get smart people, they will pick and figure out stuff easily. So need for these assignments either ways.