I charge 100$ an hour to do coding challenges. Recruiters guffaw when I tell them (of course they do), but I don't do the ol' jazz hands routine with the money makers for free. Really, the positions they're seeking to fill pay > 100k. What's a few hundred to a candidate if you really want them to demonstrate a skill? Pay that and I don't care if I'm actually closing a real ticket for you as part of the interview process.
Once I wavered on that for a data science position. They had me do some predictive analytics on a dataset. I've built a pipeline for problems like that so I figured I'd spend the 20 minutes spinning it up... I ended up spending an hour creating a rather detailed writeup about methods used and my analysis. The stake holder got back to me asking for changes to minor format things with my output data. (headings, serialization of booleans.. minor shit like that) I came to the cynical conclusion they were getting free data science work and the position was an illusion. I asked if that was the case and never got a response.
Quite a few. I've been a full time self employed consultant for 3 years now. Yes, I'm being cute -- but the distinction between customers and recruiters who trick me into answering the phone by spoofing my area code is irrelevant to where I draw my lines. I like the internal consistency in my handling of either situation.
Once I wavered on that for a data science position. They had me do some predictive analytics on a dataset. I've built a pipeline for problems like that so I figured I'd spend the 20 minutes spinning it up... I ended up spending an hour creating a rather detailed writeup about methods used and my analysis. The stake holder got back to me asking for changes to minor format things with my output data. (headings, serialization of booleans.. minor shit like that) I came to the cynical conclusion they were getting free data science work and the position was an illusion. I asked if that was the case and never got a response.
Learned my lesson I guess.