9 ms·

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a repor

If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them. This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. If you're not willing to pay people for their time, and it's not an executive position, asking for days of a person's time is asinine. Also, if the homework isn't really real world, I still don't think it's of value. Making interview processes longer doesn't make them more rigorous. Only rigor makes a process more rigorous. What I tend to do is have people do contract work for me, and if they do good work and people like working with them, I'll offer them a full-time position. Another way that companies get at this is with internships. They are a low-cost way to scout talent. I find that a lot of companies are mistaking theater for rigor. If you ask someone to do a coding assignment, and it's not the kind of work that your company would actually do, how much value do you get out of it? Can someone work with your APIs? Are they comfortable with your languages and systems? I have also found that longer interview processes that have more people involved introduce noise, not rigor. This is why I generally try to be involved in the entire interview process for people I am hiring. Want to work on my team? I'll screen the resumes, I'll do the phone interviews and then I'll bring you in in person. I'll be in on all of the interviews you have with various people. It's my job to hire great people to work for me -- not recruiters, HR or random people at the company. I involve HR at the end to get a sense for a person's personality, not at the beginning. As a manager, hiring is arguably my most important skill. A manager that can't hire is going to have trouble building a good team that works well together. So, getting the hiring process right is critical.

zero_intp 9y ago
Thank you for an excellent write up of the duties of a hiring manager.
deepGem 9y ago
Exactly. Just a week or two of contract work will tell you if the candidate is a fit or not. A 30 minute phone screen will tell you if a candidate is worthy of a contract. I think companies don't do this because a. They don't want to pay and b. They don't get to gloat 'we have a super rigorous hiring process'
- mschuster91 9y ago
  There is an additional difficulty in many cases: the law. Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. To "hire" someone formally for a week, though, entails a lot of paperwork and has, depending on the country, legal consequences (e.g. voting rights in worker councils, minimum employment durations, right to sue for wrongful termination)... The optimal way would be if lawmakers could create some sort of "employed contractor", however I can think of a dozen ways for employers to screw over poor people with it...
  - theptip 9y ago
    Perhaps this is different outside the US, but this is not really a big problem inside the US from my experience. If you're doing "contract-to-hire" you do need to be somewhat careful that you don't treat them as employees before they are, e.g. don't give them equipment (laptop etc), don't require them to arrive at a certain time, probably don't buy them lunch, etc. IANAL (this is not legal advice), but it seems quite easy to keep a software engineer correctly classified. It's not like the job "Uber driver" where the fundamental nature of the job means you can't be a contractor.
  - learc83 9y ago
    >Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. At least in the US, this isn't a problem. You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year. No need to have any kind of established company/status, because by default anyone running a business without incorporating or organizing is operating a sole proprietorship--it's basically 1 extra form at tax time. As long as the person you're paying is doing business under their name, they generally won't even need to open a second bank account (they might want to if they do this more than occasionally).
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      > You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year. Wow, that's awesome. What happens, for example, if someone is unemployed, then doing work for you and either gets sick on his own or gets injured on the job? In Germany, for an employed person, the medical insurance would cover #1 and the Unfallversicherung (accident insurance) of the employer would cover #2. Let me guess: the (potential) employee is totally uninsured in the US during such an relationship?
falanjito 9y ago
“faggot 31 minutes ago | parent | on: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpa... If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them.” It’s not real work, just a small proof that you’re able to do real work.
j45 9y ago
Contract before hire is a practice that is slowly growing, and not fast enough. I find test paid projects are the best interview technique for detail oriented work, whether it's software or otherwise. It's far better to select a task that is simple enough for the potential candidate to be a pinball through the code base or problem domain, ideally to solve a small problem that will be directly transferrable into the project they will work on. I also make myself available to answer any basic questions or assumptions to save them time, because that would be the case on a normal team. This results in a far lower expenditure of time trying out different resources to find relationships that work. Unfortunately a lot of technical hiring is still done by non-technical people, or tech folks need to level up their hiring skills.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  I, for one, hope it doesn't really grow. There's a lot of abuse in the "contract-to-hire" space, where the company tends to dangle that carrot of getting the job at the end of the contract period to get the applicant to work lots of extra hours at lower pay, only to be told at the end, "nope".
  - j45 9y ago
    Employees don't deserve poor employers either. I wouldn't condone a practice like you've described. It's far better to engage a potential candidate at normal rates for a short period to see if it's a mutual fit.
dmoy 9y ago
How do you try to hire people who currently have jobs with strict anti moonlighting policies? (Or maybe the answer is just don't bother, and you can afford shrinking the applicant pool without any big adverse effects)
- pwthornton 9y ago
  If someone is experienced, you can talk through code and APIs and get a good sense for them. But if you can work with someone before you hire them full-time, you'll greatly increase your hit rate. This may not always work, and it may not even work 50% of the time, but the more people you can hire that you have worked with either through internships or contract work or from previous jobs, the better.
  - the-pigeon 9y ago
    > But if you can work with someone before you hire them full-time, you'll greatly increase your hit rate. Sure but you also filter out a ton of good candidates. I can't do my full time job plus family life stuff and work for someone else on a side project. And I'm not going to resign from a job for a "maybe" contract to hire type position. So it's just a non-starter. And most other programmers I've talked to are the same. It's different for younger people who don't have families but that's exactly my point. You filter out whole demographics with the contract to hire style.
- geofft 9y ago
  Has anyone tried offering to pay but permitting candidates to decline payment? (My current and previous jobs have these restrictions, but they also pay well enough that I care quite a bit less than I did when I was a college student / funemployed / etc.) It seems like it's likely to work similarly to bug bounties: it's not like you stop getting security reports from people who can't accept the bounties, you just don't get the benefit of the incentive, and maybe the money gets donated to a charity of their choice instead.
  - compiler-guy 9y ago
mavelikara 9y ago
> Want to work on my team? I'll screen the resumes, I'll do the phone interviews and then I'll bring you in in person. I'll be in on all of the interviews you have with various people. FWIW, if I were one of the interviewers on OPs team, I will find this to be micromanaging and will be uncomfortable.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Also, be very sure you understand what you can and cannot say, or ask, when talking with a candidate. HR (in theory) are trained to avoid the landmines.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    The main one for normal people is you can't ask them their age. Otherwise, be professional and only focus on the job requirements.
vinceguidry 9y ago
An offer of payment does not make silly time commitments palatable for me. I already have a job. If I wanted more cash, I'd just moonlight.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  If I was being given a code challenge/take-home, I'd be more inclined to do it if it came with payment. Even if it's trivial, like $200. That's a small price to pay in screening and it at least shows the company believes your time is valuable.
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    A lot of companies will reimburse you for travel and lodging where applicable during the interview stage. It's not a far stretch to think that they should do the same if they are having you do actual work on your own time, also during the interviewing process.
woolvalley 9y ago
You can't legally do this with people on a work visa.
CM30 9y ago
> This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. Doesn't journalism also have a lot of sites/publications/companies trying to get people to work for free full time? I know quite a few pass it off as working for 'exposure'...

zero_intp 9y ago

Thank you for an excellent write up of the duties of a hiring manager.

deepGem 9y ago

Exactly. Just a week or two of contract work will tell you if the candidate is a fit or not. A 30 minute phone screen will tell you if a candidate is worthy of a contract. I think companies don't do this because a. They don't want to pay and b. They don't get to gloat 'we have a super rigorous hiring process'

mschuster91 9y ago
There is an additional difficulty in many cases: the law. Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. To "hire" someone formally for a week, though, entails a lot of paperwork and has, depending on the country, legal consequences (e.g. voting rights in worker councils, minimum employment durations, right to sue for wrongful termination)... The optimal way would be if lawmakers could create some sort of "employed contractor", however I can think of a dozen ways for employers to screw over poor people with it...
- theptip 9y ago
  Perhaps this is different outside the US, but this is not really a big problem inside the US from my experience. If you're doing "contract-to-hire" you do need to be somewhat careful that you don't treat them as employees before they are, e.g. don't give them equipment (laptop etc), don't require them to arrive at a certain time, probably don't buy them lunch, etc. IANAL (this is not legal advice), but it seems quite easy to keep a software engineer correctly classified. It's not like the job "Uber driver" where the fundamental nature of the job means you can't be a contractor.
- learc83 9y ago
  >Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. At least in the US, this isn't a problem. You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year. No need to have any kind of established company/status, because by default anyone running a business without incorporating or organizing is operating a sole proprietorship--it's basically 1 extra form at tax time. As long as the person you're paying is doing business under their name, they generally won't even need to open a second bank account (they might want to if they do this more than occasionally).
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year. Wow, that's awesome. What happens, for example, if someone is unemployed, then doing work for you and either gets sick on his own or gets injured on the job? In Germany, for an employed person, the medical insurance would cover #1 and the Unfallversicherung (accident insurance) of the employer would cover #2. Let me guess: the (potential) employee is totally uninsured in the US during such an relationship?

falanjito 9y ago

“faggot 31 minutes ago | parent | on: The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpa... If you're going to expect people to do real work, you need to pay them.” It’s not real work, just a small proof that you’re able to do real work.

j45 9y ago

Contract before hire is a practice that is slowly growing, and not fast enough. I find test paid projects are the best interview technique for detail oriented work, whether it's software or otherwise. It's far better to select a task that is simple enough for the potential candidate to be a pinball through the code base or problem domain, ideally to solve a small problem that will be directly transferrable into the project they will work on. I also make myself available to answer any basic questions or assumptions to save them time, because that would be the case on a normal team. This results in a far lower expenditure of time trying out different resources to find relationships that work. Unfortunately a lot of technical hiring is still done by non-technical people, or tech folks need to level up their hiring skills.

s73v3r_ 9y ago
I, for one, hope it doesn't really grow. There's a lot of abuse in the "contract-to-hire" space, where the company tends to dangle that carrot of getting the job at the end of the contract period to get the applicant to work lots of extra hours at lower pay, only to be told at the end, "nope".
- j45 9y ago
  Employees don't deserve poor employers either. I wouldn't condone a practice like you've described. It's far better to engage a potential candidate at normal rates for a short period to see if it's a mutual fit.

dmoy 9y ago

How do you try to hire people who currently have jobs with strict anti moonlighting policies? (Or maybe the answer is just don't bother, and you can afford shrinking the applicant pool without any big adverse effects)

pwthornton 9y ago
If someone is experienced, you can talk through code and APIs and get a good sense for them. But if you can work with someone before you hire them full-time, you'll greatly increase your hit rate. This may not always work, and it may not even work 50% of the time, but the more people you can hire that you have worked with either through internships or contract work or from previous jobs, the better.
- the-pigeon 9y ago
  > But if you can work with someone before you hire them full-time, you'll greatly increase your hit rate. Sure but you also filter out a ton of good candidates. I can't do my full time job plus family life stuff and work for someone else on a side project. And I'm not going to resign from a job for a "maybe" contract to hire type position. So it's just a non-starter. And most other programmers I've talked to are the same. It's different for younger people who don't have families but that's exactly my point. You filter out whole demographics with the contract to hire style.
geofft 9y ago
Has anyone tried offering to pay but permitting candidates to decline payment? (My current and previous jobs have these restrictions, but they also pay well enough that I care quite a bit less than I did when I was a college student / funemployed / etc.) It seems like it's likely to work similarly to bug bounties: it's not like you stop getting security reports from people who can't accept the bounties, you just don't get the benefit of the incentive, and maybe the money gets donated to a charity of their choice instead.
- compiler-guy 9y ago

mavelikara 9y ago

> Want to work on my team? I'll screen the resumes, I'll do the phone interviews and then I'll bring you in in person. I'll be in on all of the interviews you have with various people. FWIW, if I were one of the interviewers on OPs team, I will find this to be micromanaging and will be uncomfortable.

ams6110 9y ago
Also, be very sure you understand what you can and cannot say, or ask, when talking with a candidate. HR (in theory) are trained to avoid the landmines.
- Clubber 9y ago
  The main one for normal people is you can't ask them their age. Otherwise, be professional and only focus on the job requirements.

vinceguidry 9y ago

An offer of payment does not make silly time commitments palatable for me. I already have a job. If I wanted more cash, I'd just moonlight.

djsumdog 9y ago
If I was being given a code challenge/take-home, I'd be more inclined to do it if it came with payment. Even if it's trivial, like $200. That's a small price to pay in screening and it at least shows the company believes your time is valuable.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  A lot of companies will reimburse you for travel and lodging where applicable during the interview stage. It's not a far stretch to think that they should do the same if they are having you do actual work on your own time, also during the interviewing process.

woolvalley 9y ago

You can't legally do this with people on a work visa.

CM30 9y ago

> This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication. Doesn't journalism also have a lot of sites/publications/companies trying to get people to work for free full time? I know quite a few pass it off as working for 'exposure'...