6 ms·

This isn't a viable approach for much of the hiring pool, as a majority of working engineers have contracts which explicitly forbid work for contract for other

This isn't a viable approach for much of the hiring pool, as a majority of working engineers have contracts which explicitly forbid work for contract for other employers. As such, if you hire any of those, you're hiring somebody with a proven willingness to ignore their contract, which is a strong anti-pattern.

zaroth 10y ago
IANAL, but that's not what this is. "Work for contract for other employers" could literally mean I can't help my neighbor mow his lawn in exchange for a beer. In this case what it really means is a non-trivial amount of work done for meaningful profit. If I fix a friends computer in exchange for a nice meal, I am using my relevant skills to perform work, but I'm not actually violating a contract forbidding outside work in a way that could ever possibly result in damages or firing for cause. For a potential employee to be so rule-stricken as to concern themselves with performing a coding interview, that would be the potential red flag for me. So this could actually be another positive outcome of this approach.
- nolite 10y ago
  You perfectly verbalized what was bothering me about this reply
- mcpherrinm 10y ago
  I fear deportation, being unable to ever enter - never mind work in this country again. You can call that a red flag, but it is the reality I live in. Maybe most of your candidates don't have that problem, but I would definitely be eliminated.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    I mean, you could always just ask that the payment be donated to a charity instead, right? But since almost everything we do is in some way technically illegal, it is important for everyone to be able to function under that premise. I mean, just to cut the check technically the employer would need a W-9, a work for hire contract, and who knows what else. Let's call the lawyer and spend $5k deciding whether we can do this, and then decide 6 months later it's too risky.... Or, we do it, get better hires, execute on our plans better, meet revenue targets, and succeed in the market, by not following all the rules, just the rules that matter. Knowing the rules to follow and the rules to forget is the hardest part, but a crucial skill in life and business. The more you push the envelope, the faster you can run, and the more likely you are to combust. See Zenefits...
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    You are an edge case. There should be a workaround for you, but just because something doesn't work for you doesn't mean it doesn't work in general.
- FireBeyond 10y ago
  Ever hear of tortuous interference? When one party induces another to break their contract with a third party. For as realistic as your example is (no employer is going to sue because you mowed your neighbors lawn), plenty of employers can, have and will sue when they realize you have hired away one of "their" people, regardless of your rights and theirs. Learning of your little deal to pay them for software development work will be the stick they use to hit you with that interference suit.
- jkingsbery 10y ago
  Certainly you don't want to hire people that are rule stricken. At the same time though, if someone signs a legal contract saying they won't do something and does it anyway, isn't that a red flag?
sillysaurus3 10y ago
It's possible to not pay them. Most candidates will do this for free, as it's far better than traditional ineffective hiring practices. The thing is, there are always reasons why this method isn't viable. It's not till you try it that you notice huge gains.
- rizzom5000 10y ago
  That only makes sense if you're talking about people who are unemployed. As someone who is already employed full-time, I simply don't have the time to solve your problems for free just to see if you'd like to invite me over for an interview. I avoid these problems like the plague and very much prefer to whiteboard. If you pay me consultant rates, I can more easily justify the effort.
  - thinkmassive 10y ago
    Even when I was between jobs a couple months ago I neglected to complete a take-home interview exercise, because the opportunity cost still exists. The advantage to interviewing in person is that the conversation goes both ways. I was interviewing daily, so I still valued my spare time for personal activities. Edit: I most likely would have completed it if I were offered some type of compensation, even below market. They claimed it was an exercise and they wouldn't use it, but this was a startup with about 10 employees, and the deliverable was definitely something they could have used. That alone rubbed me the wrong way.
  - developer2 10y ago
    >> much prefer to whiteboard Who would have thought? Maybe - just maybe - not everyone has the same strengths and weaknesses. The real answer here is obvious: present the interviewee with options. Forcing all potential hires to whiteboard is a terrible idea. Forcing all potential hires to do a take-home project is a terrible idea. It's extremely short-sighted and a little pompous to assume that any single interview format one chooses is going to magically sort everyone into neat little buckets of "good" and "bad". If you force the whiteboarding approach, you are only going to wind up hiring social butterflies who have absolutely no nerves standing up in front of complete strangers and having all the answers on the spot. If you force the take-home project approach, you're turning off a lot of people who can nail a first impression presenting themselves and their skillset in person. People are different. Applying the same interview type to everyone is going to target a specific set of strengths, and a specific set of weaknesses. And frankly, no business should be composed entirely of one type of person. Some diversity does wonders when assessing the overall strength of a team.
wpietri 10y ago
Will they? I've seen contracts saying you can't work for competitors, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one that forbids all other employment. In California, it's illegal to prevent employees from moonlighting: https://californiaemploymentlaw.foxrothschild.com/2015/03/articles/wageandhour/can-california-employers-prohibit-moonlighting/ https://californiaemploymentlaw.foxrothschild.com/2015/03/ar...
elchief 10y ago
Or a $200 donation to their fave charity
- RexetBlell 10y ago
  This is a great idea, no legal issues. The important thing is that since the candidate loses 2 hours of his time working on the problem, the employer has to lose something equivalent of that too. I would be much more willing to do the project if I knew the employer would lose $200. Among other things, this shows that I'm valued.
- laksjd 10y ago
  That's a great idea! Not only does it just 'feel right', it also prevents some of the legal mess people were seeing with effectively moonlighting for the hiring company.
- arethuza 10y ago
  That is a really good idea.
inopinatus 10y ago
IANAL but I took business law 101, which taught me that courts almost universally lean strongly towards the employee when considering restraint clauses. Moreover, if you have a current employer that is sufficiently disrespectful of their employees that they'd even consider enforcing an anti-moonlighting clause in this circumstance, with the preposterous assertion that it qualifies as employment - run away now. The law is not a programming language.
- vostok 10y ago
  It is a requirement of my country's regulators that I ask for my employer's approval before I do any other work for compensation.
  - moyta 10y ago
    Damn, what country is that? Sounds like a very controlled, restrictive environment.
    - AtomicOrbital 10y ago
      I worked at a top investment bank in NY which had/has that policy
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kabdib 10y ago
  If you're involved in the court system while looking for employment, you've already lost.
moron4hire 10y ago
>> a majority of working engineers have contracts which explicitly forbid work for contract for other employers. Well that was very, very dumb of them. Maybe we engineers ain't so smart after all.
- walshemj 10y ago
  Custom and practice - you need to read your company handbook /contract some time.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    Work agreements are really easy to modify before you sign them. And I don't have an employee handbook. I own my own business.
    - walshemj 10y ago
      Only if your Beyoncé and can demand a bucket of kittens in you dressing room before a show - the rest of us less so?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
quicklime 10y ago
On top of this, many candidates have visa-related restrictions that would prevent them from doing this legally.
dimino 10y ago
I don't agree that it's a string anti-pattern whatsoever. It's a clear signal that the person can interpret the meaning of a rule and adhere to it in a way that makes sense for the person who made the rule as well as the contractor.
majormajor 10y ago
I don't understand the paid part at all. If I'm working full time, $200 isn't going to swing me one way or the other on deciding if I want to do your homework assignment. And if you come up with a ten-hour problem, then we're talking more of a chunk of cash, but you're also asking me to burn a lot of free time. I'd much rather travel and meet you in person and do stuff there, but if you don't have the budget for it, we could figure other stuff out (shared docs, skype, whatever, I've done a few of these on both ends with some luck). "Since the candidate is getting paid" seems like far weaker motivation than "since the candidate wants the job you're offering," which is what's going to determine my level of effort. The "not a real problem" thing is key, though. I've tried testing out a few different "this is one of our real problem" things but there's almost always more hidden business rules or assumptions in there than you think.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >I don't understand the paid part at all. There's a concept around a lot of preliminary engagements between two entities called "skin in the game." The idea is that when something is completely free the other party will take advantage of it without any real serious intent to follow through on anything. Mostly this seems a reaction to the homework-type assignments where candidates are expected to spend a lot of time on some interview assignment with very little real cost to the company--which raises the possibility that it's effectively a cattle call.
  - majormajor 10y ago
    I get this in theory, but the numbers sound too low for that to make a difference still. I could run 50 candidates through a $200 problem for 10K. That's still a pretty large mismatch between "amount of work done by the candidate" and "amount of work done by the interviewer," and is cost-of-doing-business money for recruiting for a lot of companies currently. Compare that to the cost of me flying people out (which is still done in this approach), or even the cost of spending an hour of mine or someone good on my team's time on the phone with them. I guess it's just down to the difference between trying to hire fresh-out-of-college (or still in) free-time-to-spare junior devs and experienced people. That's actually a topic I should write a blog about somewhere myself, one day - I pushed pretty hard at my current company for moving towards a different process for industry candidates, and are extremely pleased with some of the people it's helped us hire.
elcct 10y ago
I think person who is either very well compensated for that or with slave mentality would sign such a contract. Either way I don't think those people are a target group of this post.
st3v3r 10y ago
Non-competes are worthless clauses that should never have existed in the first place. I am perfectly ok with someone ignoring that blatantly anti-employee clause.

zaroth 10y ago

IANAL, but that's not what this is. "Work for contract for other employers" could literally mean I can't help my neighbor mow his lawn in exchange for a beer. In this case what it really means is a non-trivial amount of work done for meaningful profit. If I fix a friends computer in exchange for a nice meal, I am using my relevant skills to perform work, but I'm not actually violating a contract forbidding outside work in a way that could ever possibly result in damages or firing for cause. For a potential employee to be so rule-stricken as to concern themselves with performing a coding interview, that would be the potential red flag for me. So this could actually be another positive outcome of this approach.

nolite 10y ago
You perfectly verbalized what was bothering me about this reply
mcpherrinm 10y ago
I fear deportation, being unable to ever enter - never mind work in this country again. You can call that a red flag, but it is the reality I live in. Maybe most of your candidates don't have that problem, but I would definitely be eliminated.
- zaroth 10y ago
  I mean, you could always just ask that the payment be donated to a charity instead, right? But since almost everything we do is in some way technically illegal, it is important for everyone to be able to function under that premise. I mean, just to cut the check technically the employer would need a W-9, a work for hire contract, and who knows what else. Let's call the lawyer and spend $5k deciding whether we can do this, and then decide 6 months later it's too risky.... Or, we do it, get better hires, execute on our plans better, meet revenue targets, and succeed in the market, by not following all the rules, just the rules that matter. Knowing the rules to follow and the rules to forget is the hardest part, but a crucial skill in life and business. The more you push the envelope, the faster you can run, and the more likely you are to combust. See Zenefits...
- st3v3r 10y ago
  You are an edge case. There should be a workaround for you, but just because something doesn't work for you doesn't mean it doesn't work in general.
FireBeyond 10y ago
Ever hear of tortuous interference? When one party induces another to break their contract with a third party. For as realistic as your example is (no employer is going to sue because you mowed your neighbors lawn), plenty of employers can, have and will sue when they realize you have hired away one of "their" people, regardless of your rights and theirs. Learning of your little deal to pay them for software development work will be the stick they use to hit you with that interference suit.
jkingsbery 10y ago
Certainly you don't want to hire people that are rule stricken. At the same time though, if someone signs a legal contract saying they won't do something and does it anyway, isn't that a red flag?

sillysaurus3 10y ago

It's possible to not pay them. Most candidates will do this for free, as it's far better than traditional ineffective hiring practices. The thing is, there are always reasons why this method isn't viable. It's not till you try it that you notice huge gains.

rizzom5000 10y ago
That only makes sense if you're talking about people who are unemployed. As someone who is already employed full-time, I simply don't have the time to solve your problems for free just to see if you'd like to invite me over for an interview. I avoid these problems like the plague and very much prefer to whiteboard. If you pay me consultant rates, I can more easily justify the effort.
- thinkmassive 10y ago
  Even when I was between jobs a couple months ago I neglected to complete a take-home interview exercise, because the opportunity cost still exists. The advantage to interviewing in person is that the conversation goes both ways. I was interviewing daily, so I still valued my spare time for personal activities. Edit: I most likely would have completed it if I were offered some type of compensation, even below market. They claimed it was an exercise and they wouldn't use it, but this was a startup with about 10 employees, and the deliverable was definitely something they could have used. That alone rubbed me the wrong way.
- developer2 10y ago
  >> much prefer to whiteboard Who would have thought? Maybe - just maybe - not everyone has the same strengths and weaknesses. The real answer here is obvious: present the interviewee with options. Forcing all potential hires to whiteboard is a terrible idea. Forcing all potential hires to do a take-home project is a terrible idea. It's extremely short-sighted and a little pompous to assume that any single interview format one chooses is going to magically sort everyone into neat little buckets of "good" and "bad". If you force the whiteboarding approach, you are only going to wind up hiring social butterflies who have absolutely no nerves standing up in front of complete strangers and having all the answers on the spot. If you force the take-home project approach, you're turning off a lot of people who can nail a first impression presenting themselves and their skillset in person. People are different. Applying the same interview type to everyone is going to target a specific set of strengths, and a specific set of weaknesses. And frankly, no business should be composed entirely of one type of person. Some diversity does wonders when assessing the overall strength of a team.

wpietri 10y ago

Will they? I've seen contracts saying you can't work for competitors, but I'm not sure I've ever seen one that forbids all other employment. In California, it's illegal to prevent employees from moonlighting: https://californiaemploymentlaw.foxrothschild.com/2015/03/articles/wageandhour/can-california-employers-prohibit-moonlighting/ https://californiaemploymentlaw.foxrothschild.com/2015/03/ar...

elchief 10y ago

Or a $200 donation to their fave charity

RexetBlell 10y ago
This is a great idea, no legal issues. The important thing is that since the candidate loses 2 hours of his time working on the problem, the employer has to lose something equivalent of that too. I would be much more willing to do the project if I knew the employer would lose $200. Among other things, this shows that I'm valued.
laksjd 10y ago
That's a great idea! Not only does it just 'feel right', it also prevents some of the legal mess people were seeing with effectively moonlighting for the hiring company.
arethuza 10y ago
That is a really good idea.

inopinatus 10y ago

IANAL but I took business law 101, which taught me that courts almost universally lean strongly towards the employee when considering restraint clauses. Moreover, if you have a current employer that is sufficiently disrespectful of their employees that they'd even consider enforcing an anti-moonlighting clause in this circumstance, with the preposterous assertion that it qualifies as employment - run away now. The law is not a programming language.

vostok 10y ago
It is a requirement of my country's regulators that I ask for my employer's approval before I do any other work for compensation.
- moyta 10y ago
  Damn, what country is that? Sounds like a very controlled, restrictive environment.
  - AtomicOrbital 10y ago
    I worked at a top investment bank in NY which had/has that policy
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kabdib 10y ago
If you're involved in the court system while looking for employment, you've already lost.

moron4hire 10y ago

>> a majority of working engineers have contracts which explicitly forbid work for contract for other employers. Well that was very, very dumb of them. Maybe we engineers ain't so smart after all.

walshemj 10y ago
Custom and practice - you need to read your company handbook /contract some time.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  Work agreements are really easy to modify before you sign them. And I don't have an employee handbook. I own my own business.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    Only if your Beyoncé and can demand a bucket of kittens in you dressing room before a show - the rest of us less so?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]

quicklime 10y ago

On top of this, many candidates have visa-related restrictions that would prevent them from doing this legally.

dimino 10y ago

I don't agree that it's a string anti-pattern whatsoever. It's a clear signal that the person can interpret the meaning of a rule and adhere to it in a way that makes sense for the person who made the rule as well as the contractor.

majormajor 10y ago

I don't understand the paid part at all. If I'm working full time, $200 isn't going to swing me one way or the other on deciding if I want to do your homework assignment. And if you come up with a ten-hour problem, then we're talking more of a chunk of cash, but you're also asking me to burn a lot of free time. I'd much rather travel and meet you in person and do stuff there, but if you don't have the budget for it, we could figure other stuff out (shared docs, skype, whatever, I've done a few of these on both ends with some luck). "Since the candidate is getting paid" seems like far weaker motivation than "since the candidate wants the job you're offering," which is what's going to determine my level of effort. The "not a real problem" thing is key, though. I've tried testing out a few different "this is one of our real problem" things but there's almost always more hidden business rules or assumptions in there than you think.

ghaff 10y ago
>I don't understand the paid part at all. There's a concept around a lot of preliminary engagements between two entities called "skin in the game." The idea is that when something is completely free the other party will take advantage of it without any real serious intent to follow through on anything. Mostly this seems a reaction to the homework-type assignments where candidates are expected to spend a lot of time on some interview assignment with very little real cost to the company--which raises the possibility that it's effectively a cattle call.
- majormajor 10y ago
  I get this in theory, but the numbers sound too low for that to make a difference still. I could run 50 candidates through a $200 problem for 10K. That's still a pretty large mismatch between "amount of work done by the candidate" and "amount of work done by the interviewer," and is cost-of-doing-business money for recruiting for a lot of companies currently. Compare that to the cost of me flying people out (which is still done in this approach), or even the cost of spending an hour of mine or someone good on my team's time on the phone with them. I guess it's just down to the difference between trying to hire fresh-out-of-college (or still in) free-time-to-spare junior devs and experienced people. That's actually a topic I should write a blog about somewhere myself, one day - I pushed pretty hard at my current company for moving towards a different process for industry candidates, and are extremely pleased with some of the people it's helped us hire.

elcct 10y ago

I think person who is either very well compensated for that or with slave mentality would sign such a contract. Either way I don't think those people are a target group of this post.

st3v3r 10y ago

Non-competes are worthless clauses that should never have existed in the first place. I am perfectly ok with someone ignoring that blatantly anti-employee clause.