One phone call, and one zoom interview were pleasant enough. The take home “coding exercise,” however, was a straight dump of their entire monolith. The challenge? Isolate and unit test a private component. Not only is this incredibly disrespectful of candidates’ time, this is a bad faith grab to get free work done. I’ve never seen a company do this before and was shocked. The exercise itself was technically impossible because of the dependencies of their seemingly randomly selected class and method weren’t available on an external network. The base class required a SQL connection to instantiate, which is a requirement of compilation, which is a requirement to even run MS Test. What this company should understand is that highly qualified candidates will pass on them because of this practice. Even though everyone is positive due interview decorum, as engineers, we can tell when we’re being taken advantage of and typically align our energy accordingly.
