I should clarify — this isn't meant to undercut developer rates or normalize free work. It’s more of a signal: “I'm confident enough to put in a real day’s work before asking for anything in return.”

I’ve had great feedback on my past work, but getting through the hiring noise — especially as a solo dev — has felt increasingly broken. This felt like a cleaner alternative to long interview chains or speculative coding tests.

I’m especially interested in hearing from founders:

Does this help you move faster?

Or would you worry it’s too unconventional or even risky?

Totally open to pushback — I want to test the idea, not pitch it blindly.

I do this in a couple of different businesses, except I pay them for their time. Why is an applicant's time less valuable than an employer's time? I guess because we worship business and labor and money? Or the hiring process innately means that the business has more leverage? I don't know. But I can think of a few ways that an applicant's time is actually more precious and scarce. Often times, if I treat an applicant's time as valuable, they won't waste mine either.

Rather than do interviews or tests, I get coffee with them first to suss it out, them bring them in to do the "actual job" I'm hiring for, and pay them $100 for their time. I'm not losing $100 because they did something useful, and I gained knowledge of their ability and work ethic, and they're not out a day's worth of work cause they got paid.

For me, no. On the surface it might make sense, but just no. I want someone who values their time, their skills and they know their value. Offering to work for free, for a for profit company, shows me you don't value your skills and assign worth to them.

If you want to demonstrate your skills in a volunteer way, there are lots of open source projects that lack attention. Show me what you can do there, fix an outstanding issue or at least toss up a PR so I can see your work, if you're able to adhere to the projects guidelines etc... and you'll be contributing to something that benefits everyone.

I despise lengthy coding interviews, and this idea of working for a day for nothing... Any company that would do that is a big red flag. If they have a minor task that can be completed in a day or two without full onboarding then they can pay for that limited amount of time as well. As much as a prospective employee should want to demonstrate their work ethic, and employer should want you demonstrate how it values the time and skills of their workers... They do that not with pats on the back or pizza parties, they do it with money.

I'm a generalist web dev, I do something similar if I'm confident that it will work. In fact, it's something I learned from someone who calls that the "briefcase technique". But for most pitches I don't, for the obvious reason of limited effort to apply to all.

P.S: when I'm on the hiring side, if all someone has to offer is free work then it doesn't help the person's pitch. That has happened, didn't help the candidates, they just weren't a good fit and free work wouldn't change that. I didn't engage in the free work offer.

But I say this because for the needs I had I could quickly filter for the skills I needed without lengthy interviews.

It would help if you could describe exactly what work you are competent to perform.

In the majority of businesses I worked for, you would have difficulty in even understanding the requirements in a day. It is not just about your technical skills. In my experience, domain specific knowledge and expertise is absolutely essential.

I've tried this (limited to four hours) and haven't seen any additional traction. I think it might work with say, a small business owner looking to avoid waste, perhaps?

But the vast majority of tech jobs are gated by employees. Who've decided or been told that "everyone goes thru the process," (to avoid lemons). It's not their money they're wasting and therefore aren't particularly interested in snowflake distractions.