Considering the discourse of the past two years and personal experience, I am afraid to say that yes, those are most likely very real people who very openly ignore 50% of the context and generalize their hate towards a whole population of a single country. In addition (and that's from, sadly, day to day experience) those are the same people who extrapolate their hate on one particular ethnical group.

I would have expected HN readers at least check on some context before starting beating their drums. Haaretz is a propaganda outlet that has been stocking the fire under everything related to Israel, for decades now.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I have heard a lot of good things about Facebook before - and my totally opposite experience was one of the reason for exaggerated reaction.

I agree that there are jobs where I would love to spend days, weeks and months of free coding and other efforts - all just to get them. But I have very different expectations of pre-interview process - when I saw it was 'do all this and mb we ll talk to you' thing.

Again - and I think post's update should explain it - what happened to me was an exception. I would just never expect to get such an exception from Facebook.

Understood. Hiring is a two way street, it needs to work for both sides. It's unfortunate how this turned out. But hey, everything happens for a reason right? Maybe it was not meant to be because something else awesome is right around the corner. If you are actively looking, I hope you find something that makes you happy! Take it easy.

Thanks :)

An update was published after Facebook's representative contacted me. Let's hope I was the only guy who was treated in such an ugly way.

Voluntarily - it's awesome. I'm trying to code out of office as much as possible - doing toy projects or checking on interesting open-source code. The problem, from my point of view, is that they think it's acceptable to demand those hours without even talking to a real person, but rather as a trivial part of pre-evaluation. It's ugly.

But they automatically send this without even talking to person. They already assume that it's fine and I should be happy to do so. That's why I call it sweatshop approach.

I think you cheapen the seriousness of what the term "sweatshop" means for people unfortunate enough to actually work in sweatshops.

I was born in one of the poorest countries in Asia, so I can imagine rather low quality of life and working conditions. And I know pretty well that people who work in real old school sweatshops will never read this article. By other hand, inhumane treatment and faceless exploitation were ones of reasons that lead to existence of sweatshops in the first place. When people start to accept this way of treatment as a norm, when agree to humiliate themselves, even a bit, to get a position - with time it all will lead to the next generation of sweatshops - in Western way, with white collars. The reason behind my writing - to warn people and raise the question as soon as possible - before 10h of free work will be included as a demand for sending CV.

I don't see how the procedure you described is at all humiliating. You were sent a programming challenge and asked to complete it. How is that humiliating?

If it would be a real time interview - for sure. But after sending CV I just got that mail with task. Let me underline it - they never TALKED to me. They asked if I want to send them CV - and right after I got this. I don't have any problems with recruiter - I'm more than sure it could be a great person - but if the company gives her such a workflow - it's, from my point of view, is scary at the least.

Facebook is an odd company. When I applied they sent me a page of information about how all the people saying the work environment was bad are wrong. Oddly defensive and sensitive. I live in New Zealand not near SV was unaware of any bad press until they send me a page of defensive articles unprompted.

Thanks. Yeah, I understand how it seems to be childish, but I couldn't expect this behavior and approach from Facebook, known for it's great open culture. It rather reminded me too strongly about my employer (tiny tech sales company from 10 years ago) who ended up loosing all his tech department - 5 guys just left the office one day and never got back.

10 hours. It's the time I have spent last week for some open-source coding. I was happy to give my time for free to those projects I supported. It's about 10 hours that I have spent with a friend of mine who visited me from other city this week.

I can't imagine spending this time for someone I don't know, someone who never ever bother to talk to me but demanded them.

Few years ago I have spent few days of work planning project with people with whom I had interview - just because I started to like them in 10 minutes of the interview. I ended up working for them for the next few years and some of them are still my close friends.

I could ignore the offer, decline it (as I did) and live on. But if nobody will tell those guys in fat cat corporations that they are wrong - they will continue to think and treat people as "resources", not persons.

You could be ok with that - they do have great salaries, career opportunities etc. But accepting this treatment as a norm is unthought to me. It's not about ego, it's about some tiny respect of a human being for a human being.

I seriously doubt that the problem here is that Facebook is trying to make you a cog in their wheel (at least not with respect to the coding puzzle). Rather, I think it's just because they feel that requiring this work will lead to better candidates. If you don't like doing this, vote with your feet and just tell them "Thanks but no thanks". If enough people do that, they'll probably stop offering those kinds of questions.

I'm afraid that Facebook will make a precedent that will turn 10 hours free coding in a standard, moreover - before even a phone interview.

It's simple supply and demand. Facebook no doubt have hundreds of applicants beating down their door every single day.

Some of these people will be great, some will be ok and some will be useless.

Throwing up a filter like this weeds out people who have no chance of a successful interview or those who don't want the job all that badly.

You would seem to fall into the latter camp.

8 - 10 hours for a prestigious job like FB isn't all that much. I have heard of people doing weeks of unpaid work for a chance at a minimum wage job.

Yup, agreed with this completely. But it doesn't mean this is a right way. I definitely don't want end up in a future 10 years later where every company asks for unpaid work as an interview taking example from the Big Guys. Do you remember how many companies started mind blowing puzzles in 90s after Microsoft made it famous?