# Five Rounds. Eight Hours of Free Work. One Whiteboard.

**[TRUE STORY]** — by Senior platform engineer · mid-sized agency · via r/interviewhammer

A developer made it to the fifth and final round at a mid-sized agency. The recruiter had one more ask: a working trial day to "assess team fit."

The candidate showed up and spent eight hours fixing bugs that had been plaguing the company's dashboard for months. He also optimised a sluggish database query that nobody on staff had managed to untangle. Productive morning.

Around 4 PM, he walked past the breakroom and noticed a whiteboard. On it, in dry-erase marker: "HIRING FREEZES — THROUGH YEAR END."

The company had no intention of hiring anyone. They were using the interview pipeline to clear their sprint backlog.

He reverted every fix he had made that day. Every bug restored. Every query back to its original, glacial state. He left a note in the scratch file: "Trial period concluded." Then he walked out.

When the manager called later that day, the candidate declined the role and blocked the number.

The Reddit post — titled "They asked for a free trial day so I gave them exactly zero results" — drew over two thousand upvotes. One commenter suggested the candidate invoice them anyway: "Put them on blast on every hiring site." Another had the best counter-offer: "I'd ask for a trial payday first, just to see if the way they send me money is a good fit."

*Source: [r/interviewhammer · 2K+ upvotes](https://scoop.upworthy.com/candidate-undoes-work-after-his-free-trial-ends-fp)*
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