Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is active in the community running CFE.dev and Orlando Devs.
I have had some experiences like that as well. One company asked me to write a blog post about their product and, should I not get an offer, even said they'd pay for the time. I think that a blog post or presentation is perfect for a DevRel role, but if it were used for a standard developer role, I'd think you'd have to ensure it isn't graded on writing or presenting skills that are likely not part of the job requirement.
I am definitely not opposed to relatively short, relevant homework even for developers. I don't equate these with coding quizzes and whiteboarding. However, I do think companies need to be aware of the time demands of their homework and make sure they are reasonable. I also don't think companies should use this as an opportunity for some free labor by making the developer do actual job work (like fix an issue on a repo) as homework without compensation.
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I have had some experiences like that as well. One company asked me to write a blog post about their product and, should I not get an offer, even said they'd pay for the time. I think that a blog post or presentation is perfect for a DevRel role, but if it were used for a standard developer role, I'd think you'd have to ensure it isn't graded on writing or presenting skills that are likely not part of the job requirement.
I am definitely not opposed to relatively short, relevant homework even for developers. I don't equate these with coding quizzes and whiteboarding. However, I do think companies need to be aware of the time demands of their homework and make sure they are reasonable. I also don't think companies should use this as an opportunity for some free labor by making the developer do actual job work (like fix an issue on a repo) as homework without compensation.