[D] Do you feel like companies are scooping / abusing researchers for ideas during hiring for researcher roles?

After having gone through at least 3 rounds where I had to present research solutions for problems, I get the feeling that I’m doing free labour for these guys. They usually give you a week and given the current glut of candidates, it feels like this could easily be happening in the background. This includes Mid tech companies (not FAANG) and startups. Is there some truth to this suspicion?

For the most recent one, I purposefully chose not to dive into the advanced literature heavy stuff even though I did do the work. The scope of the task was pretty vague (“design an ML system blah blah”) and as soon as I started my presentation, one of my interviewers immediately questioned me about whether I had read the literature and wasn’t interested in older approaches to the same problem. The rest of the interview was spent getting grilled, as is usual. My motivation was to work bottom up and demonstrate strong fundamentals. Perhaps, I’m missing something here