$500 is too low - good developers will often charge $200+/hour freelancing, there is little incentive for them to deal with a take home test for that price with all of the time & stress that come with take home tests.
A choice is better than no choice though, but too many companies fumble through handling take home tests to make it worthwhile to a quality developer with any sense of value.
Yes, they charge $200+/h - when they actually do the work. This is my pet peeve lately when I see people throwing that number around. You're not actually working 24h. You likely don't work on the weekends. You take time to organise new work in between. Neither of the breaks are actually paid.
You get paid that much as a freelancer when you produce value for the company. So by doing an extra assignment, especially one that is a useless piece of code, no - $200/h is ridiculously high price.
> Yes, they charge $200+/h - when they actually do the work.
Agreed.
Annual billable hours for consultants, be they developers, management, lawyers, et al, are considered huge if near 1500. That roughly works out to just under 30 billable hours per work week when vacations/holidays and non-billable time are taken into account.
As you surmise, just because someone _can_ bill X/hour doesn't mean that each hour they breathe commands the same remuneration.
But when comparing the difference, and considering a code project for an interview has a tendency to be even more stressful, which would a person rather spend their time on? It certainly is not the code project - I have heard & experienced too many stories where companies vastly underallocate time, or not respect that job seekers have other things that keep them busy typically, including less bureaucracy/time wasting (especially if a candidate has significant open source contributions), or not looking at the project, or even rejecting candidates for non-code related reasons (happened to someone I know today).
I'd much rather freelance for that type of stress & when having to compare the economics time-wise, which a take home test simply does not match - that is the whole point.
If a company does not want to pay that much, maybe they should respect the prospective employee's time, especially since it is a job seeker's market.
True but I am not hiring a freelancer. I don't think anyone spent a few hours interviewing to try and make $500 off me. I am just trying to be considered of their time, and make it clear I am not giving a giant programming assignment to 100 developers and only picking the 1 best, as that stinks for those doing the homework.
If you get to the paid homework step, we are ready to hire you, pending successful homework.
A choice is better than no choice though, but too many companies fumble through handling take home tests to make it worthwhile to a quality developer with any sense of value.