The worst part was, you wouldn't even know how long the trial period was -- they'd just ask you, last minute, if you could come in again for another trial. If it's a place you wanted to work at eventually, you'd say yes.
That sounds illegal, at least here in Canada.
The food service industry in the US has never had much interest in labor laws I guess
You act like no one's been fired after their first day at Starbucks.
There are a few ways to approach a job interview. The one I like is to say, "I'm a professional working in this area; those people are professionals working in this area; I should learn what they're up to and we should see if it makes sense for us to work together right now" and right now is key, because sometimes the timing or the particular projects aren't a good match, but the people are and you'll want to stay in touch in the future.
One nice non-coincidental advantage of treating it this way is that "success" is a lot easier to achieve, so the interview's going to be a lot less stressful.
So now approach it from that perspective. You could spend a day (or two hours, or two days, or whatever interview duration) chit chatting, talking to HR people about benefits, describing past projects and whatever. But time is really short and the important questions are: what are you actually going to be working on? and are the people you'll be working with any good? Are their experience, personality, skills, etc. going to set you up to do well, help your career, get stuff out the door, and whatever other concerns you have. How are you possibly going to learn any of that without talking to them at length and in detail about their projects? And the best way to "talk in detail" is to pretend you have the job for a day and get up to speed.
So are you now "working a day for free?" Not really. Because, if the people you're interviewing with are people you'd want to work with, they've had a lot longer than you to think about their problems and know a shitload about them. If you contribute anything of value that day, they probably would have gotten as much value from talking their sticking points over with any bright, engaged outsider to get a fresh perspective.
In the rare occasions where the applicant really does provide high value consulting for free for a day, he or she should have known better than to interview there in the first place. If there really was no way to know in advance, just accept that you had a dud of an interview and go on with your life. You've still learned whether that particular company is one you'd want to have a business relationship with in the future, which is valuable, and whether any of their employees are particularly good or bad, which is also valuable; and, if the company has the right values, there's a good chance that they'd want to hire you for contract work. So even those interviews still tend to work out.
tl;dr - when you interview for a job, no matter what, you're working. You'll get the most out of it as an interviewee if you take it seriously as work and try to get as close to the day-to-day job as you possibly can. If the company materially benefits as well, even better.
Puzzles, whiteboard coding, and so on don't tell me whether or not somebody can actually build software.
If the goal was to get free work, we wouldn't sacrifice staff time on the interviews. We'd give the applicant a challenging "homework" assignment and ask them to do it on their own time.
I'm in academia. I've had job interviews where I've literally gone office to office discussing people's research projects and helping them come up with ideas. It was fun, and it never occurred to me that I was being taken advantage of. Worst case scenario, they might think of me as a potential consultant down the line.
Yep. That basically amounts to an application fee.
Plus they will spend time before and after the interview discussing your qualifications, performance etc. It comes out about even.
If the job doesn't work out, they lose small% of potential productivity, while you will lose 100% of your income.
Companies have numerous employees, but you only have one employer. You bet everything on your employer, they only bet a small part of their hand on you.
What if a company gave you an itemized bill after your interview? You're still exchanging something of value for their time; is that reasonable or ridiculous?
Of the three job interviews I've traveled for in the last year, all were paid by the company 100%.
A company would have to be pretty damn unique in order to justify having candidates pay for their own travel + lodging.
Regardless, companies across just about all industries that hire from remote talent pools will pay for travel (consulting, finance, government, NGOs, banking, accounting, manufacturing, insurance, you-name-it).
Whether or not a given company expands its talent search to include workers in distant locations is bound by several factors, none of which are unique to "SV and Microsoft".
I doubt there would be anything wrong with saying "we maintain open source project X and we only hire people who have made submissions in this project that we have accepted. If you want to be considered for employment, you must first get involved in the community."
That being said, I've never done any pairing so maybe it would work better in that type of environment.