Fifteen hours. Twelve Jira tickets. One invoice. Zero response.

A software engineer applied to a company whose name they have not disclosed publicly. The screening call went fine. The technical interview went fine. Then came the take-home. The hiring manager sent over twelve Jira tickets and asked the candidate to treat them as a 'real-world assessment of their problem-solving approach.' The candidate spent fifteen hours across a weekend working through the tickets. Midway through, they noticed the ticket IDs matched the company's public backlog — this was not a simulated exercise. It was actual production debt the team had not gotten around to. They submitted the work anyway. The response was silence. No feedback. No rejection. No nothing. After two weeks of waiting, the candidate documented every commit, calculated a freelance rate, and sent a formal invoice to both HR and the engineering manager. The company never replied — not even an automated acknowledgment. In a follow-up post, the candidate wrote: 'I will never do a proprietary unpaid take-home project again.' The post has since been amplified by campaigners who estimate candidates collectively lose thousands of pounds in unpaid interview labour every hiring cycle.