The Bench

👨‍💻 I'm a contractor / freelance developer

🏢 I hire or manage contractors at a tech company

Role

PA-Q1 — Years Experience

PA-Q2 — AI Tools in Your Work

🚀 Essential - I'm meaningfully faster and better with them

👍 Useful - I use them regularly but they don't change the fundamentals

🫤 Situational - helpful sometimes, more noise than signal other times

🙅 I mostly avoid them - I prefer to work without

How central are AI coding tools (e.g. Copilot, Cursor, Claude, Codex) to your day-to-day engineering work?

PA-Q3 — AI-Assisted Technical Assessment

🔥 Love it - that's how I actually work, test me on the real thing

👍 Like it - AI fluency is a legitimate skill worth assessing

🤔 Unsure - I'd worry others are just prompting their way through it

👎 Don't like it - fundamentals should be tested separately

PA-Q4 — Your Biggest Hiring Frustration

👻 Getting ghosted - companies go silent after interviews with no feedback

🕳️ Wasting time on roles that weren't what was advertised (rate, scope, stack)

📋 The process drags on - weeks pass with no clear timeline or decision

🌀 Too many steps before finding out if it's even worth pursuing

PA-Q5 — Company Visibility

😌 Usually thorough - rate, stack, team, and company culture are all clearly laid out

🫤 Hit or miss - role details sometimes, but company context is rarely shared

🙄 Usually lacking - I'm always chasing basics about the company and the role

😤 Almost never useful - listings tell me almost nothing about the company I'd actually be joining

When you browse contract listings, how much real visibility do you get into the role and the company behind it - rate, tech stack, team structure, working culture?

PA-Q6 — Rate Transparency on Your Own Profile

✅ Do it without hesitation - filtering by rate saves everyone time

🤔 Be okay with it - but I'd want to understand who can see it

😬 Be uncomfortable - rates are negotiation leverage, not public info

❌ Not join - that's a dealbreaker for me

If a platform required you to publicly display your rate band on your profile before you could be contacted by companies, would you:

PA-Q7 — Communication & Ghosting

😊 Rarely - I usually get some kind of follow-up

🤷 Once or twice - but nothing I'd call a pattern

😔 It happens more than it should - demoralising every time

😩 Constantly - it's one of the worst parts of contracting

PA-Q8 — Enforced Response Times

🙌 Finally - companies should be held accountable too

👍 Good idea - as long as the rules are clearly defined

😬 In theory yes, but hard to enforce fairly in practice

❌ Feels heavy-handed - real hiring doesn't work like that

PA-Q9 — Two-Way Ratings

🌟 Extremely useful - this is the missing piece on every platform

👍 Useful - good signal when evaluating whether to apply

🫤 Somewhat - only if the reviews are verified and can't be gamed

🚫 Not particularly - too easy to abuse, I wouldn't trust it

PA-Q10 — Current Platform Usage

PB-Q2 — AI in Engineering Roles

🚀 Critical - AI proficiency is now a baseline expectation, not a differentiator

👍 Important - it's a significant hiring signal and increasingly non-negotiable

🫤 Neutral - we care about output quality, not which tools they use

🙅 Cautious - we have concerns about AI use in our codebase or IP

PB-Q3 — AI-Era Technical Assessment

🔥 More — this tests what actually matters in a real role

👍 About the same — I care about the outcome, not the method

🤔 Less confident — it's harder to evaluate individual capability

👎 Less — I still want to see raw problem-solving without AI as a crutch

If a platform assessed contractors using real-world engineering problems - where candidates were encouraged to use AI tools - would you trust those results more or less than traditional coding tests?