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I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Are you asking if they should be? Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team

I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Are you asking if they should be? Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates? If I were betting on this I would wager that something like 95% of the time, the existing employee would be able to solve the project or problem much faster without the candidate's input at all, but the point is to try and approximate a more realistic work experience and environment. I think that's a reasonable goal and I don't think CircleCI should be vilified for it.

Analemma_ 9y ago
> I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Not at all. > Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates? Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 That was on the front page three days ago. The GP's concern is legitimate; job interviews should not be an excuse for unpaid labor.
- rrdharan 9y ago
  > Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time That's fair. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible, and especially given what I've heard from friends who've worked in freelance web development there's a huge long tail of scummy opportunities out there. I more meant to suggest that it was unlikely this was CircleCI's motivation. Also an important distinction between these two situations is that in the example you point out, someone is being assigned a specific task to produce some new IP which the company can then simply steal, whereas in the CircleCI case I am assuming the "problem/projects" they have you pair on are something in the neighborhood of e.g. "let's go analyze some page load performance data together and see if we can fix some low hanging fruit" or "let's figure out how to set up an alert in our Slack channel for this signal we have in some logs". Yes it's still true that a candidate could come up with some brilliant insight that saves CircleCI real money in this scenario, but it just seems unlikely and not something they could profitably build a development strategy around.
wongma 9y ago
I don't see any vilification in that question.
vbezhenar 9y ago
The same could be said about many junior positions. Should they pay for privilege to work for this respectable company?

Analemma_ 9y ago

> I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Not at all. > Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates? Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 That was on the front page three days ago. The GP's concern is legitimate; job interviews should not be an excuse for unpaid labor.

rrdharan 9y ago
> Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time That's fair. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible, and especially given what I've heard from friends who've worked in freelance web development there's a huge long tail of scummy opportunities out there. I more meant to suggest that it was unlikely this was CircleCI's motivation. Also an important distinction between these two situations is that in the example you point out, someone is being assigned a specific task to produce some new IP which the company can then simply steal, whereas in the CircleCI case I am assuming the "problem/projects" they have you pair on are something in the neighborhood of e.g. "let's go analyze some page load performance data together and see if we can fix some low hanging fruit" or "let's figure out how to set up an alert in our Slack channel for this signal we have in some logs". Yes it's still true that a candidate could come up with some brilliant insight that saves CircleCI real money in this scenario, but it just seems unlikely and not something they could profitably build a development strategy around.

wongma 9y ago

I don't see any vilification in that question.

vbezhenar 9y ago

The same could be said about many junior positions. Should they pay for privilege to work for this respectable company?