# Fifteen to Twenty Hours of Unpaid Work. Forty-Eight Hours to Finish. No Stipend.

**[TRUE STORY]** — by Full-time employed job seeker · tech · via r/jobs

A company sent a take-home assignment estimated at fifteen to twenty hours of work. No stipend was offered. The deadline was forty-eight hours — functionally impossible for a candidate already employed full-time. The job seeker asked Reddit: "At what point do you guys just say no to these massive assignments?" The post surfaced data points that have become routine in 2026 hiring discourse: fifty-eight percent of engineers believe they deserve payment for take-home work, but only four percent ever receive it. Well-designed take-homes correlate thirty-five percent better with job performance than whiteboard interviews — but scope creep has turned many into unpaid consulting engagements.

*Source: [r/jobs via Glassdoor Community · 1.5k upvotes](https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Community/job-hunting-in-tech/a-company-just-sent-me-a-take-home-task-that-looks-like-it-would-take-at-least-15-20-hours-of-work-they-arent-offering-a-stipend-and)*
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