A software developer reached the fifth and final round of interviews at a mid-sized agency when the recruiter asked for one more thing: a “working trial day.” They agreed, and spent eight hours fixing bugs and optimising a database query that had been slowing the company's dashboard — real client tickets, not a toy problem.
Around 4 p.m. they walked past a whiteboard in the break room. It listed hiring freezes through the end of the year.
The trial, they realised, was never an evaluation. The agency had no intention of hiring anyone; it needed its backlog cleared before the sprint ended. So the developer reverted every fix they had made that day, left a note in the scratch file saying the trial period was over, rejected the job, and blocked the manager's number.
The manager called five minutes later. The number was already blocked.
Posted to r/interviewhammer under u/Mandalore_X1, the story drew more than 2,000 upvotes and one running theme: companies now treat interviews like gig-economy tasks, extracting a day of production work under the label of evaluation.