> If the same story had happened to a graphic designer then most would agree,as usual in that case, that you have to set limits and not work for free "just to see what you can do".
On the flip side, literally every interesting answer that you give folks in an interview process could potentially be considered to be free work. I used to work on recommendation systems. Say, I go interview at another company in the same space, literally any potential what-if machine learning problem can eventually get into the situation where it goes off text book fairly quickly. At that point, any information that I talk about has two values: 1) it helps the people understand that I can do this shit. 2) it also helps them maybe solve the problem based on my experiences from my previous job. In the case of 2), they are essentially getting free work. How do you resolve such a situation? Should we have an industry wide standard where people pay you a market rate for every hour you interview?
On the flip side, literally every interesting answer that you give folks in an interview process could potentially be considered to be free work. I used to work on recommendation systems. Say, I go interview at another company in the same space, literally any potential what-if machine learning problem can eventually get into the situation where it goes off text book fairly quickly. At that point, any information that I talk about has two values: 1) it helps the people understand that I can do this shit. 2) it also helps them maybe solve the problem based on my experiences from my previous job. In the case of 2), they are essentially getting free work. How do you resolve such a situation? Should we have an industry wide standard where people pay you a market rate for every hour you interview?