8 ms·

I was just speaking with a co-worker about how I consider this interview culture to be a race to the bottom in how much unpaid work companies are getting from p

• bgribble 8y ago
  At my startup we pay interviewees a decent hourly consulting rate for take-home problems or full-day followup onsites (after the first interview). We only do them when we are pretty excited about a candidate but need more information to make a hiring decision. It's cheap, really, considering the cost of sourcing candidates and the cost of making a bad hiring decision.
  • rrdharan 8y ago
    Interesting and the first I’ve heard of this and the first confirmation I’ve heard that cost-wise it’s not egregious to do so. It still seems strange to me to pay for throwaway work but I can also see how that’s really just my personal sentiment / bias and this is probably a pretty good and balanced approach.
    • pc86 8y ago
      Except some of us already have full-time jobs and don't want to spend the weekend working on quizzes, whether it's paid or not. And unless you're very generous with timing taking a day off of work can be a logistical issue, not just a pay issue. This type of interview self-selects for people with fewer family/non-work obligations, who are willing and able to spend their free time still programming.
      • pault 8y ago
        Sometimes you might have to inconvenience yourself to improve your career.
        • Clubber 8y ago
          Ya, if you paid double market rates, I'd do it. I suspect most people who do this sort of thing probably pay market or worse.
      • dfee 8y ago
        Cost of doing business. Not willing to put in your free time? No need to worry about getting a new job. Are you also job hunting at work, doing interviews on your employers time, etc?
        • gamblor956 8y ago
          You're ignoring the context of the comment you're replying to. That guy already has a good job. Another company is trying to poach him. Why would he, or any other qualified and gainfully employed candidate go through that unnecessary homework bullshit for a company that's trying to recruit them? The company has its priorities misplaced. They should be trying to convince the candidate to join them, not putting up barriers to their most qualified candidates.
          • ryandrake 8y ago
            I would totally do homework bullshit for a company/opportunity/compensation that I saw as “better” than what I have currently, but would not do so for anything else.
            • Clubber 8y ago
              So your salary + $1? How much better? I'm curious. I'd probably go through this for maybe 50% above market rates.
    • bgribble 8y ago
      We aren't paying for the work-product, we're paying for the time and inconvenience. It's more to show respect for the candidate's time than to actually "hire" them to do an interview. I mean, even "discount" recruiting platforms like Hired and Vettery will cost 5-figures when we make a hire through them, and traditional recruiters often charge 20% or more of the new-hire's first year salary. A few hundred bucks to get some more information about a prospective coworker is cheap.
  • Clubber 8y ago
    I'd recommend dropping the full day onsite. I mean what the hell do you talk about for a full day? The small talk must be unbearable after the first 30 minutes.
    • doorbumper 8y ago
      So you want a company to hire somebody after talking them for 30 minutes? Based off of what? You honestly can't imagine talking about technical software problems for more than 30 minutes? That's a pretty big red flag to me.
      • Clubber 8y ago
        I'm assuming you are technical yourself, otherwise please disregard. What you are unintentionally implying is that you can't spot a fraud by talking to them about your chosen profession within 30 minutes. If you can't, you shouldn't be doing the interviewing. If you can, why waste 5.5 hours of the company's time per candidate?
        • varjag 8y ago
          Plenty of people are great talkers about profession, big picture, architecture blabble and so on. It does not correlate with coding ability.
          • Clubber 8y ago
            I disagree. You aren't asking the right questions or probing enough.
            • varjag 8y ago
              When you start probing enough it quickly becomes practical/coding interview we all come to detest. Sure enough, that way you might not even need 30 minutes. But shop talk alone doesn't cut it.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    When I'm looking for a job, I usually have 3 or 4 strong prospects and looking back on my spreadsheets that I keep when I am looking, it usually takes about 2 weeks from the time I reach out to my network of recruiters and I have an offer (the shortest was 4 days from looking to having an offer from what was then a top 10 Fortune 500 company). Why would I go through that trouble? I have 20+ years of experience that I can explain how I architected and developed from the website, to the middle tier, to the database to multiple VPCs on AWS and dev ops. I'm not going to do homework. When I was first starting out I might, but living in a major metro area that's not on the west coast, there are more openings for senior devs/architects than people to fill them. If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three weeks between employment.
    • noahc 8y ago
      > If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three weeks between employment. What does that number look like? 10k a week?
      • scarface74 8y ago
        For a 1099 contract where I'm responsible for my own self employment taxes.... 2080 - hours in a work year -80 Paid Holidays -120 Paid Time off -120 Gap between employment (based on my history) = 1760 work hours per year FTE Salary * .028 (Employer Medicare Contribution) + $7967 (maximum social security amount - 128500*.062) = minimum salary minimum salary/1720 hours = pay rate. Take a reasonable salary for my market as $140,000, that is about $152000/1720 = $88.37/hour minimum. Adjust the number based on market, skill set, and the amount of time you estimate between jobs. I'm also not taking into account health benefits that you would need to pay yourself because I'm covered under my wife, or 401K matching. I would add 4% to the hourly rate to cover 401K matching.
      • walshemj 8y ago
• sb8244 8y ago
  Is the implication that they're using your code in production after an interview?
  • ddtaylor 8y ago
    No, I don't think any of the code is of any value, it's the time and energy up-front investment is increasing significantly. I understand they are trying to protect their investment (2 years at Facebook would have been over $500K in cost to that company all things considered) but when is it too much and how would we stop it before it gets there?
• some_account 8y ago
  I recently interviewed at a company who wanted to be as hot as Google and Spotify and had copied their interview process and their organization schema. I said no thanks and moved on to other companies. Felt good. I just avoided working in a culture where there will be high pressure to always perform. :)
  • Clubber 8y ago
    Yes, companies don't realize people can get incredibly wealthy working for places like Google. That's why people tolerate that as well as the prestige of having a place like that on the resume. They are so self centered, they think Acme Trucking holds the same allure with "market rates" and shitty benefits.
• Nasrudith 8y ago
  Reminds me of the old joke about a scam company who breaks up all of their problems into interview questions and never actually hires anyone. Obviously the composition, decomposition work and quality control would be more labor for worse results but it is easy to see how frustrated interviewees got the concept.
  • nlowell 8y ago
    I've seen companies that maintain open source projects have interviewees work on that actual open source project for 4hrs as an interview.
• pc86 8y ago
  Do you think Facebook is taking pictures of whiteboards after interviews and putting the code into production? I agree day-long interviews are a problem, and homework problems are offensive (plenty of folks refuse them btw), but it's a stretch to say companies are using interviews as a way to get unpaid work.
  • newfoundglory 8y ago
    Man, it would serve them right to have tried using my whiteboarded regular expression parser. /still bitter
  • strken 8y ago
    The premise is not that they're getting unpaid work in the form of programming, just unpaid work in general. If they replace 8 hours of reviewing a candidate's open source contributions and/or side projects with 4 hours of random walks through an undergrad CS textbook, then they're using the candidate's unpaid work to cut down on their HR spending. "How many round piano tuners are there in Fizzbuzz" isn't programming, but it is HR.
    • linkregister 8y ago
      Do most programmers have significant amounts of open source contributions? I only had a couple of years of life when I had the luxury of enough time for that sort of thing.
• skybrian 8y ago
  I'll just point out that companies are spending a lot of employee time doing these interviews, and if they're picky, that greatly increases the cost. Every day of interviews of someone they don't hire is money down the drain. They can afford it, but still, it's far to say that the wasted effort isn't entirely one-sided. Hiring is an expensive and inefficient transaction. Figuring out how to make this both more fair and more efficient is a really tough problem.
• autotune 8y ago
  Having gotten contacted by Facebook, I eventually refused when I realized they were going to ask about algorithms for a technical role that is in no way relevant to that on the job. Skilled candidates can refuse just fine and wait for something better and more realistic that comes along.
• lclarkmichalek 8y ago
  So the standard FB onsite interview loop is 5 * 45 min, with a 45 min break at some point. Those aren't all whiteboard interviews. It might vary from role to role, but I don't think homework problems are common.
  • ddtaylor 8y ago
    I did get the 45 minute lunch break and dined with another FB employee during that time, but I was in the room doing whiteboard problems the entire time otherwise minus them showing me the office space as we went up a few floors when I first arrived. This was in Seattle, if that matters. I think the room was labeled Occam's Razor and was super small, barely enough room for 3 people to stand.
    • scruple 8y ago
      So not only are you dealing with the standard fare interview nervousness, etc..., but you're also feeling claustrophobic the entire time. Brilliant process they've got up there. People look at me sideways when I tell them that I have no interest in working for places like Facebook or Amazon or Google and these sorts of anecdotes are some real high-quality validation after having had to justify that stance for years.
      • Clubber 8y ago
        I would never work for one of those large companies. You really only need one household company on your resume during your career, then you can ignore them.
        • ddtaylor 8y ago
          That is exactly why I applied. I run a startup and we wanted to get the clout I was going to spend a year at FB as "time served" for the startup.
        • linkregister 8y ago
          Those companies are the most visible places to get a high-paying job. They pay at the top of the market. Sure, a niche software company may pay its senior engineers higher, but even well-connected developers may never get any exposure to them. If you want to get that first house downpayment for the Bay Area, I'd say it's almost essential at this point.
• baby 8y ago
  I think a lot of these reactions (and this website) are bitterness following a rejection. I'm not sure why people take it so personally when a company doesn't accept them. I've done whiteboard interviews and got a rejection before, and I thought it was fine. Maybe if you're putting all your eggs in the same basket and want THIS company to accept you, that might be annoying. But that's not a very good life strategy.