[casual_games] TOW: Free Work At Interviews

[Corey Cole]

"Free work" has a lot of levels.  I've been asked to provide game ideas and
game proposals while interviewing for game design positions.  Eventually I
made a rule that the company would pay a small amount ($500 - $1,000
typically).  Ideas I provide for free (typically one or two paragraphs each,
they usually ask for five or ten).  I've done a couple of consulting
projects where there is a very small initial budget (typically billed
hourly), with the hope of a larger contract if the prototype is successful.
But I do (usually) get paid for those.

I've had two programming interviews that involved an hour or two of free
work done at the time of the interview.  In one, the programming manager
said that they had just implemented a certain feature in their computer
operating system.  He asked how I would go about designing and implementing
that feature.  I did a whiteboard brainstorm session.  I got the job, and my
first assignment was to implement that feature, which actually they didn't
have yet. :-)

In the other interview, they told me they had a pesky programming bug and
asked me to look at it.  I sat down with their source code for a couple of
hours, and made pretty good headway on solving the problem.  I got that job
also.

Generally companies do not ask for more extensive free work... or maybe I
just tune out the ones that do.  A friend worked for a startup company for
several months for equity, but no pay.  I've frequently been told I need to
"prove myself" at a job before receiving a raise or promotion, but that
generally involves a low salary rather than none.  It's very insulting, but
I've done it a couple of times when I found the project sufficiently
interesting.

If you're going to do free work, you might as well do it on your own and
make exactly the game (or project) you want to make.  Once you have a
prototype, you can shop it around to developers or publishers if you need
funding or more people to complete the game.  It doesn't make much sense to
do free work on someone else's project, unless you are doing it for an
equity share... which isn't really free.