Severe threat of being fired? He wasn't even working for them. If he wrote a bug and it made it into production, it would be 100% the fault of his mentor.

I am warming up to the concept of a very short paid contract to do the code interview, btw.

The point is that he would be working for them. That's why he was so aggressive in his posted rant. He'd be writing production code going live that very same day, and then (one may safely presume) he would be relieved of any further development duties, not allowed in the building again, and not paid for his work. The situation as described was indistinguishable from obvious deceptive practices (persuade person to do work under guise of "interview" with no intention of paying or hiring).

If you want to argue that he should be paid for his time I agree.

If you want to argue that he should be paid for the value of his work product, realize that in almost all cases that value is likely negative. Slowing down a developer for a day to work with a candidate is in no way beneficial to a company.

You're missing the big picture. If all it was doing was slowing down a developer for a day then the company wouldn't bother interviewing anyone that way because all it is just a cost and there is no benefit to the company. However, the company does that because they decided there is a positive value, an actual benefit to hiring a needed developer and knowing that they can do the job.

There is always a cost to hiring. When a company decides that the value of having that dev is greater than the cost of hiring them, then it makes sense to hire someone. It may not be an immediate monetary value, but the company decided they needed the dev. So they decided that slowing down a developer for a day to work with a candidate _is_ beneficial to the company.

Plus, like others have said, it really sounds like he was being asked to work on something that was adding value. If a company has decided a particular bug or feature is worth prioritizing then it obviously has value. That means that if a potential candidate comes in and does it, they are adding value (though whether the net value is positive or negative varies case by case).

Sounded like the change had to go out same day. You don't handle a short-term real deadline by slowing down a developer and releasing a candidate's code in production. To a lot of us, this didn't sound like an interview, this sounded like getting someone to do needed work for free. Yeah, maybe we're wrong and it really was a genuine interview question, problem is that's indistinguishable from the "free programmer for a day" interpretation.

Isn't the fact that the company is looking for employees an implicit statement that they would find it beneficial to have one? The corollary is that interviews to find employees, being currently The Way Hiring Is Done, must therefore also be of at least some benefit to the company. Whether this benefit outweighs the benefit of having the company's developers in their seats writing code instead of interviewing is at best subject to opinion.

I was talking about the marginal work product for that one day of work. We have to remind managers that developers are not cogs that can be slid in and out of a machine, and that's true.