One of the major things I find irritating about looking for a job as a developer is that some companies ask you to make demo projects for them (and some of those projects can take days to make..).

It annoys me I have to spend energy on something that may result in nothing. And this gets more annoying if several companies ask it. It's like I'm working for free. I don't feel productive. lol

We do have a demo project we ask applicants to do but only if they are still of interest after the first interview.

And its very few that get rejected at that stage and if we do it its for good reasons and never just because of the test but rather because they fail the second interview where we among other things ask about the test.

You do not even have to present something that runs or even compiles as long as there is some code indicating that you at least understood the problem and have some basic grasp on a viable solution.

It does not even have to be a good one. But if its to bad we will ask more questions ;)

sure, i'll make you a demo project, if you make me a demo salary payment.

I usually have fun with interviews (not 100% of cases, but most likely more than the usual), but i skip any possible employer that wants me to build something in own personal time

Online tests are 50/50, depends on the questions, company, motivation

I get why companies don't want to do a 1:1 interviews upfront, but still, they should get why i don't wanna do work upfront for them

We give applicants who've passed 2 interviews (1 to check personality/fit, and 1 to get an overview of their technical knowledge) an assignment and tell them to spend no more than 4hrs on it

They get 3 days to return it to us

We also encourage them to add some notes saying "if I'd had an extra hour then I'd have done xyz instead", which is basically a way for them to demonstrate greater understanding without having to spend ages actually writing out the code

I once had one potential employer ask me to knock out a proof of concept, which I did in a couple of hours. They then asked me to expand it with realtime functionality, and I told them that would likely take a week. They backed down on that fairly quickly, fortunately, but it was something of a yellow flag, and when I got another offer I jumped at it.

@Voxera @Ezard - see, it's not that we are worried we won't get accepted, it's that we're looking at different options in parallel.

So you giving us a test at stage 2,3 or 4 doesn't help - we might go elsewhere at contract negotiation.

And everybody gives a test that is "simple, easy, quick, just to see you understand the basics".

But u know what? it adds up. having five simple tasks sucks. am I suppose to do one every evening this week?

Some companies I'll just drop once I feel "tested-out". and that's a lose-lose.

@Nihil75 I understand you position but to be blunt, if you feel that way, you might not be the type of person we are looking for.

We work within a heavily regulated area with lots of special conditions that our developers need to understand and we estimate that it takes at least 3-6 months before a new employee it net positive in terms of work accomplished.

Some foreign person might even need more since they need to learn a lot of things people living here just take for granted.

That takes dedication and not everyone will stand to learn so much non developer related things.

So if our test it to much you probably go nuts within a few months ;)

And ai have so far not seen one single prospect that refused to make the test, even the ones with other options did it.

So it does not seem to be a deal breaker for us so far.