4 ms·
Giving them the weekend / take home is a bad idea. You might get some enthusiastic fellow who spends 10 hours on something but claims to have done it in 2 hour
by blazespin 11y ago
Giving them the weekend / take home is a bad idea. You might get some enthusiastic fellow who spends 10 hours on something but claims to have done it in 2 hours. You really don't want that. You want someone who can do it in 2 hours and not lie about it, otherwise you end up with a workaholic who will burn out in short order trying to live up to unrealistic expectations.
Give them a cube and pay them to work in the office. Stop by to see how they're doing and interact with them.
- enraged_camel 11y agoUnless you pay your programmers by the hour, how long they take to complete a project should not matter (within reason, i.e. a weekend). Judge the quality of their code, not their coding speed. In fact, intense time pressure has a very adverse affect on cognitive tasks.
- jacalata 11y agoIf two people say "yea I spent two hours on this" and one of them shows something that they actually spent 40 hours on, you're probably going to get the impression that they are the better developer because their code should be better. Is that a useful comparison to make between the two of them?
- Ensorceled 11y agoWell, except for the fact that taking 10 hours to perform a 2 hour task doesn't scale when I want them to do 40 hours of work a week. I really, really do want to judge people, in part, by their coding speed.
- pc86 11y agoWell in that case you won't be hiring anyone with a job.
- blazespin 11y agoLots of people take the day off to interview. Day long interviews are pretty standard these days.
- animal531 11y agoI agree somewhat with what you're trying to do, but I really dislike the way you're doing it. For example, I'm one of those developers that customise my development environment heavily and that have spent 99.99999% of my life using a regular keyboard (ie. not on a laptop). Now you want me to use a vanilla environment + laptop keyboard, which combined roughly means that you're going to divide my development speed somewhere by 4 to 10. Nevermind that the laptop you're going to give me will probably be a half-broken extra that's both underpowered and unmaintained... Of course all interviews are a negotiation, so the onus would have been on me to inform you of these factors.
- ksk 11y agoHow much code do you type out daily that a change in keyboard reduces your productivity by half?