What the hell is with startup CTOs thinking dev applicants are willing to do an "8 to 10 hour" take home coding test before even a first in person interview?! Seriously?

Free labor I guess

Weekend task after first interview... maybe. Not a 8 hour project though.

@TheDane Nah, it's a lead role and it's just parsing JSON and building a UI for an app. It's just a ridiculous amount of data and depth for that kind of a task. Normally it's an hour or two but to even get this all parsed and tested is several hours. Yawn. Also 8-10 hours was their estimate :)

Any employer mandating *any* home coding test, especially before a first interview, is always going to miss out on the best applicants.

Agreed, it's filtering, but not in the way they intend.

Haha 8 to 10 hours yeah sure. I'd invite them to take a look in a reference project instead because that wouldn't cost my time, but theirs.

Now if they're too lazy, they surely will miss out the best candidates.

I did one and didn't really think it was that big of a deal. I don't think it took me 8 hours though. In general I like programming but don't have ideas that motivate me to work on in my spare time, so I thought it was a good exercise. Plus it gave us something to discuss at the interview.

IMO it's unreasonable to expect someone to have that kindle of free time if they have a family and a full time job.