10 ms·

Everyone sucks at interviewing. Everyone.

292 points by jaf12duke 15y ago

hkarthik 15y ago
I really like the approach of "Contract-to-hire" developers but I've often found it to be difficult in markets where most good developers have multiple offers at any given time. Also it's tough to do this when you're boot strapping and literally every pair of available hands can make or break your first big deal that helps keep the lights on.
- jaf12duke 15y ago
  my experience has been that the very best developers often prefer this. I've had a few top-notch developer friends request recently that a startup allow them to work as 1099 contractors for a month first. They see their time as by far their most valuable asset and they want to learn more about a startup before committing. In reality, with work-for-hire employee contracts, anyone can leave and anyone can fire for whatever reason. And that's what Paul English does. Contract-to-hire just takes all the expectations and paperwork and emotions out of it.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Actually you can't fire for any reason, but for a lot reasons. For example, you generally can't fire someone due to gender, or race, or testifying in court for the public good, etc... I'd only take a 1099 if I was getting full benefits and equity, or paid accordingly. Although as a contractor on a one month contract I'd probably still consider my side project looking for a job. Whereas as an employee I will be a lot more vested in the company.
    - sedev 15y ago
      In practical terms, you can fire someone for any reason, just so long as you list an acceptable reason on the paperwork. The power of an employer to fire you at any time is definitely not equal to the average employee having the power to leave at any time, and that's part of why 'employment at will' is a crock.
      - kenjackson 15y ago
        In practical terms, you can fire someone for any reason, just so long as you list an acceptable reason on the paperwork. Very true. In practice the law is about what you can prove, not what happened.
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    I would add that it also takes out all of the benefits, which employers never mention. No benefits, no unemployment payments. Having hired many people over the years, I always get a kick out of this argument that they are the same. They aren't the same at all! Much easier and cheaper to hire contract employees. Much harder to get good employees. I don't hire contractors unless it really is a short term job. Contract work isn't for finding your long term employee partners. Contract work is for one-time or short term work. If I need a long term employee, I look for a long term employee and I don't pretend that I'm trying people out by using the guise of contract-to-perm.
    - hkarthik 15y ago
      I agree, using short term contract work to identify good long term employees sounds contradictory.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  As a developer, you'd have a hard time getting me to commit to a 3-week job (as suggested in the blog post) because I already have a job. And if I didn't, I'd be looking for a job, and looking to commit to a real job as soon as possible. At best, if I couldn't get a job at all, I'd take the 3 week job for the money, but I'd have no loyalty to you if someone else came along that was ready to commit. I'd finish the 3 weeks, and tell the other company I was in the 3 week contract, but I'd end up working for the other company. Programmers who aren't freelancing are about job stability, and a 3-week contract screams 'unstable'. Yes, there's a normal hiring process after it, but during that time, you haven't provided any measure of stability at all, and so anyone that comes along and promises it is going to be more appealing. I went through an interview process that had me write a simple CRUD app for free. It wasn't related to their business, and neither of us got anything out of it except qualification for an in-person interview. That is the most I'm willing to stick my neck out for a job, and I wondered if it didn't take a little too much of my time for what it was.
  - Tangurena 15y ago
    > you'd have a hard time getting me to commit to a 3-week job Here in Denver, there are a number of companies hiring through recruiters that try to say "this is a 3 month contract" but the job ends up lasting 2-3 weeks. So you are right, it is hard to get folks to agree to a 3 week "job" - you have to lie to them.
util 15y ago
How do you decide who you're going to court?
- ilcavero 15y ago
  you interview them?...oh, I see what you did there
- silverbax88 15y ago
  Apparently Jason lives in a world that's much like a giant cocktail party, where everyone is just milling about in one room looking for someone to work with.
yannickmahe 15y ago
I like the idea, but as a developer there is little chance I'll do contract work before getting a job when I'm looking for a "real" job. Right now, finding a job is easy enough that I don't think a lot of people will jump through a lot of hoops before getting the job.
- ctide 15y ago
  I don't look at it as jumping through hoops, it's just as much for your benefit as it is for the company. Yes, you can quit at any time (of course, in California, you can be fired at any time also) but it's much cleaner if you both go into a trial period trying each other out. Should you decide the company isn't up to your standards, there's no pressure you stay, and you have a clearer expectation at that point of what you'd expect from compensation.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  It's like accepting a lower starting salary hoping that, since you love doing what you do, you will prove it to everyone that you're good at it and that you will get a raise eventually. I got burned with this twice -- believe it or not, low starting salary coupled with uncertainty about whether there will be an eventual raise played a big role in me actually stopping loving my work (which at the time was a good thing since I acquired more productive interests, but that's besides the point).
  - hkarthik 15y ago
    I'm looking for Rails work now and I've been offered substantially low salaries compared to what I make now. I was thinking maybe I need to adjust my expectations but your post makes me think twice. Thanks!
    - artmageddon 15y ago
      I will repeat the parent's sentiment - do NOT accept a lower salary. I was nearly caught in this trap a year ago, trying to get out of my current job that's not exactly fulfilling. I was given an offer that would have forced me to take a 13-18% pay cut and nearly had my vacation time slashed in half. I politely declined. I stuck it out for a little more than a year and just got offered a position that's going to pay 55% over what I'm getting now. Keep plugging away and keep looking.. Edit: Not sure about the vacation thing with the new role, but this is on a 6-month contract. I'll assume long vacations are out in the mean time, but it'll pay well enough that I'll be living ok for a little bit if I don't go full-time after.
blauwbilgorgel 15y ago
I like this approach of really testing out the waters before committing. I find there is also a divide between HR/recruiting and the lead developers. Once I had two interviews at a company. The first one from HR and a second one from the lead developers. The attitude of the developers made me think they didn't have much say into the whole process. They did ask the best (read hardest) questions. This interview order seems fine, though questions like: how many lines of codes did you write in language X? If we ask you to build Y, could you, and how would you go about it? If there is a problem in the weekend, and we call you, would you come over to fix it? Could perfectly be asked in the first round of the interviews. And if you really want to be sure that a person will come to the office, if need be, then maybe plan the contract meeting at midnight on a saturday :) One thing I noticed while last searching for jobs is the apparent inconsistencies in job listings. Pre-requisites like: PHP and Ruby, Web standards and Flash, thorough understanding of javascript (jQuery plug-ins), Photoshop or Illustrator and version control, familiar with Linux and .net. At first I ascribed these pre's to unskilled job listers, but maybe this is the start of the negotiation process? - "I do know X, but have to work on Y" - "That is fine, have you thought about salary yet?" Is this really a thing in recruiting, or am I seeing things?
- pkteison 15y ago
  I interviewed with a firm that said the initially advertised salary was too high for my offer because I refused to describe myself as an expert in silverlight and opengl. If they find an expert in opengl, silverlight, c#, sql server, web services, c, and desktop applications, I wonder what they think that would be worth. So yes, I do think it's a negotiating strategy. I hope nobody good will fall for it, I'd like to see this behavior punished by only being able to hire bad developers.
TheloniusPhunk 15y ago
I was once given thirty seconds to come up with synonyms for information, which I did. Then I was asked come up with antonyms for fast and furious starting with the letter p, I came up with pudgy and pleased. Then I was asked to tell my life story in twenty seconds. I refused. The interview ended.
- spottiness 15y ago
  That's funny. Are you serious? Was that all they asked you?
  - TheloniusPhunk 15y ago
    That's all I remember being asked. I guess they saw themselves as pioneers of creativity, but as they were something of an obscure start-up, this wasn't totally clear to prospective interviewees. So I went in there expecting a serious interview, but got nonsense. It's funny now, but I was pissed at the time. Drove eight hours, booked a hotel, and wore a suit for nothing.
    - spottiness 15y ago
      LOL. I wish the writers of South Park read this... This is material for a very hilarious episode...(Cartman would be the interviewer :)
    - anacrolix 15y ago
      This story made my day. I've been in similar situations where the questions are bizarre and inappropriate. Suddenly I feel like walking out.
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  Good on you for refusing to participate. Is this company still around? Did you say anything in your refusal besides, "No?" How did they react to your refusal?
desireco42 15y ago
I don't suck at interviewing, people who interview are usually as clueless as interviewee, so you can abuse this game from your side as well. I completely agree that people you hire most of the time have very little with what you need and want and that process is broken. Suggestion in this post is how I would go about it as well, give people 2 weeks to try it out and see if we work for them as well as they work for us.
chollida1 15y ago
> Sometimes, a talented person can't, for whatever reason, commit to a 3 week project. I would think this applies to pretty much anyone who is in demand. > Maybe he can take 3 days off his oyher job and work half a week and a weekend with us. Can someone else explain, why i'd take time off of work to do this job interview? Why not take a day off and interview with Google/Apple/Microsoft instead?
- dominostars 15y ago
  How can anyone expect a candidate to burn 3 vacation days to work for a company they are unfamiliar with? For people who only get 10 vacation days a year that's almost 1/3. The money you get may not even be enough to compensate for the money you lose by using that vacation (since accrued vacation is paid to you when you leave your job). This is a huge risk for an already employed candidate. Why take that risk when there are plenty of interesting job opportunities?
  - swalberg 15y ago
    The author says the person is paid "a reasonable contractor fee for the work", which I would hope is equal to or greater than the current salary. If not, it really doesn't make sense, as you say. I would be curious to know what happens before this 5 day test. Do people just walk in with resume in hand and sit down to work for 5 days? Probably not. There would have to be some sort of discussions-that-aren't-an-interview which would lead to a yea-nay decision on the work term. What sort of funnel is there? I agree there is a big commitment on both sides to do this 1-2 week work stage. There has to be more to the events leading up to the stage than what's in the article.
    - dominostars 15y ago
      What I was saying is that a 'reasonable contractor fee' would have to be about double your current hourly wage, since the first half would only compensate the cost of burning the vacation day.
    - franklindholm 15y ago
yangtheman 15y ago
For anyone looking for a job immediately (as I am), I don't think s/he has time to do multiple 3-months projects. I do believe current interview process is broken, and interview results are not indicative of job performance. I think that's why referrals work the best. Also, although much shorter, weekend hackathons are good ways to gauge working chemistry.
enjayhsu 15y ago
It's not just a time issue for the interviewee; the interviewer then needs to spend extra time checking the quality of the work, requiring extra technical expertise. Awesome idea; just not feasible in many situations.
agentultra 15y ago
Hiring is hard because understanding people is hard. There's also the problem of selection bias. Your technical interviewers are going to look for people that resemble themselves. In a broad sense this is because they think they're smart and everyone else is dumb (and rightly so). The problem is that this strategy can be far too successful and you will invariably turn away a perfectly suitable selection of candidates along with the unsuitable ones. It's human nature and difficult to detect. There is another form of selection bias in the interview process. You need to know that the candidate you're going to hire is going to be competent, assertive, and talented. However the exact match of skills, abilities, and personality traits that fulfill those broad categories are going to be based off of those skills, abilities, and traits you believe have helped you to be successful so far. When interviewing someone it is far too easy to check off the features a candidate is lacking and miss the ones they do have that you do not. A good hire, IMO, is someone who has some of the skills and abilities you already have and some you do not. Yet all too often, we look for people who have ALL of the skills we already have instead. I think strategies such as the one in the article would at least by-pass many of the definicies noted above. However I think it might be impractical in some scenarios (ie: when the candidate is already in a position at another company, or when they have received attractive offers from other companies). It's a start though and I think alternative strategies should be considered more often.
- btmorex 15y ago
  It's not just impractical. It's a complete nonstarter in any competitive job market (like the bay area). First, contract to hire is a pure negative for the employee. People can "try a company" out just fine with a full time offer and then quit if it's not a good fit. Second, it's far easier to find good people by poaching from other companies than it is by traditional means. No one is going to quit their job for a 3 week contract even if they're really unhappy at their current job. So, with this approach, you've just removed the biggest pool of talented prospects there is.
  - gdilla 15y ago
    agreed. But Yelp and Facebook do a micro version of this for job applicants. They give you a test - usually along the lines of, mock up something to make our platform better. You have 24 Hrs. Go. Since they're prol two of the hottest places to work, not least because they're two of the biggest pre-IPO joints out there, they can get away with this. Even if you get rejected (and I did), they get your idea (and mine were great, I tell you! Fully mocked up). Well, I bombed the intws but they did like my mocks. You feel like a cheap prostitute afterwards.
spottiness 15y ago
Finding great talent is hard but identifying talent is not difficult. Yet, finding and identifying talent is just half of the story. The other half is determining if the person can focus in what you need, be motivated, take the initiative, and deliver great work. That's the difficult part. More often than not, very talented individuals have a lot of stuff in their heads, such that mundane but essential work ranks low in their platonic priority list, and that affects their capacity to concentrate and deliver.
mpg33 15y ago
I like the idea of a "mini-internship" instead of an interview... An employer could take on a person for say 2 weeks non-paid and let that person prove themselves.
- eropple 15y ago
  Nobody who's any good would come work for you for free. Ever.
  - noarchy 15y ago
    I'd say that they don't even have to be good to turn their nose up at the idea of working for free. If you're doing work with real value, do you really want to do it for free, unless it is for charity?
- alnayyir 15y ago
  You exist in a different reality than the one where even mediocre engineers have their pick of the litter.
tomkarlo 15y ago
I'm not sure what the OP suggests is feasible in most situations. It's disruptive to the existing team and you have to have "throwaway" projects around for the person to do that won't cause problems if they're late or poorly implemented (and if that's the case, why do them?) Also, you're letting every guy who "interviews" learn about the internals of your systems, code base, security, etc to some degree, which is not something most companies want to do. Interviewing is hard, but it's clearly not totally broken, given that some companies obviously do a far better job of it than others. Do we really believe that the big consulting companies or banks don't know how to filter for the better candidates given how much their business depends purely on having the smartest people? Are Apple, Amazon and Google really just more lucky at hiring? One non-interview thing that I DO like to look at is publicly viewable work like open source contributions, blogging, social media activity, etc. If someone wants to work on web sites, and they're not doing anything web-related outside of their job, I have to wonder how passionate they really are about the domain.
- dclowd9901 15y ago
  I think it's a slippery slope to assume that just because someone is involved in a community that they are necessarily a good employee, and conversely, if they don't involve themselves, that somehow deems them "not passionate enough" or not as talented. Just anecdotally, I have a friend who has a wife and two kids. He's not going to spend all his free time forking on Github. He does take on side projects, and is a very talented developer. Sometimes peoples' priorities are simply different, but it's hardly a reliable metric to look at. And I say this as someone who does see himself as an involved member of the community.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    I'm not saying you assume someone who doesn't have open source work / contributions isn't necessarily a going to be a good employee. I'm just saying it's materially harder to tell in comparison to someone with the same resume and a publicly-viewable history of contributions. Any time you have a choice between the unknown and known, it's going to favor the latter.
- 15y ago
cygwin98 15y ago
Perhaps Jason's approach may come out of his intuition, I'd like to explain it from a more "academic" perspective. In economics, the labor market is often suffered from information asymmetries where the employer has little means to determine the productivity of prospective employees. Therefore, if the employer is willing to pay average wage, it will obtain below average workers, as workers who has higher than average productivities won't accept the offer. Such a phenomenon is also called "the Market of lemons" in the context of used car market. The root cause of such a market failure is because workers' productivity is difficult to measure. A certain measure has to be introduced to indicate the worker productivity indirectly (often termed Signaling in economics). For decades HR/Recruiters have been addressing this problem by using different metrics as the signals/indicators. Popular signals include education (GPA, university prestige). Programming may be a bit more challenging as multiple factors can affect programmers' productivity, e.g., intrinsic intelligence, problem solving skills, the speed of learning. Our hard-working recruiters/interviewers have introduced some new signals --- brain teasers, coding tests, etc. What Jason proposed in this blog post is that we don't need all those signals, they are all inaccurate and can be fooled around by a well-prepared interviewee, why not directly measure their performance by working with them for a short period, say, three weeks. That does sound like a good idea. IMHO, that's basically what internship does for students, but not sure if that will work for full-time employees, as it will incur extra opportunity cost for them.
marksbirch 15y ago
Actually, I kind of rock at interviews...
kevinburke 15y ago
Work sample tests are the best predictor (p of 0.54) of success on the job. http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-talent-the-upshot-from-85-years-of-research.html http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Yes isn't p usually supposed to be less than 0.05 for the it to usefull?
  - Robin_Message 15y ago
    It (probably) refers to a measure of correlation being 0.54 on a scale of 0=no correlation to 1=perfect linear relationship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlation_coefficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlat...) rather than a confidence interval, which is what p<0.05 refers to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value)
  - kevinburke 15y ago
    Yes - sorry - r of 0.54, not p.
mattacurtis 15y ago
One issue that has been ignored is that of security / confidentiality. What happens if the individual you are "courting" works for one of your competitors? Any project that he would work on for you would likely require access to sensitive, proprietary data. Sure, you could force him to sign an NDA, but that puts him in a strange situation post-project. How do you balance giving the candidate access to your data such that he can work on a meaningful project (read: the results of which are actionable) vs. having him toil away with some dummy data just to see how he thinks?
- ericd 15y ago
  There are often projects that need to be done in a company that aren't related to the core product, so it's not usually that difficult to give a contractor something unrelated to work on.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ArchD 15y ago
IMO, an interview is to working at a company what speed-dating is to a long-term relationship. The interview process may get some measurements about someone's technical fundamentals, but very little can be gleaned about rapport with employees and in general how well an individual will gel with a company's goals and other team members. The success of a team is not just about the competence of each individual but how well the individuals work together as a team, and individual competence is not totally correlated to working well with a given team.
mangala 15y ago
After interviewing for months I basically memorized the answers to the main kinds of technical questions. After I started to hear the same sorts of questions asked over and over, I knew the process was completely broken and I would never ask stupid technical riddle questions to gauge someone's competence on the job. I think a brief conversation about software development and a longer conversation to determine how smart the guy is is what matters. Even someone who barely knows how to code can learn on the fly if he's smart/competent enough.
mhp 15y ago
Tl;dr try someone out part time before hiring them full time. Ignoring the link bait title of the post, I think the OP's suggestion is good. However, it's usually not possible. People are working full time and don't have extra time to work on your side project. Interviews should include the same activities the interviewee will be doing during their job. Programmers need to program. Designers need to design. Sales people need to sell. It's actually quite easy to do this effectively in an interview and plenty of companies do that quite well (i.e. They don't suck)
pkteison 15y ago
I don't understand contract to hire. I get it from the employer perspective, but why do employees agree to it? If I was willing to work contracts (e.g. had a wife I could get health insurance and maybe some income-in-case-of-layoff security from), why wouldn't I just always only contract so that I could make more and get paid for my overtime? If I wasn't willing to work contracts, wouldn't requiring me to contract up front take me out of the running? Or does this whole thing assume people will just go without health care for a while? I could understand that if there weren't other choices, but given that other full time employment is readily available, who does this?
- nostrademons 15y ago
  The article suggests that people who can't afford to take time off from their regular job instead contract on a project that can be done nights and weekends. He's not suggesting you quit your current job before the new job makes you a firm offer. He doesn't delve into the ambiguous IP ownership of the resulting contract at work - I know that if I did that, my current employer would likely own the rights to anything I did for the prospective employer. But I suppose the prospective employer can get around that by simply throwing out anything the contractor does for them. It's a pretty big cost, to eat 3 weeks or so of wages of a highly-paid contractor, but it's probably cheaper than an IP lawsuit or a bad hire.
  - kelnos 15y ago
    From the prospective employee's perspective, it also just doesn't scale. Most people I know are talking to multiple companies at the same time, often being in the middle of interviews at 4 or 5 companies. This just wouldn't work if each one required a consulting period, especially if you still have your primary job taking up your time.
- PonyGumbo 15y ago
  >why do employees agree to it? A lot of people take what they can get.
- adeaver 15y ago
  Because it gives you a chance to see if you like working for/with this company/person. Typically in an interview you don't meet with or talk to everyone you will be working with. You might find out 2 weeks in that the guy sitting next to you is someone you just can't work with long term. Better to do that knowing that you can leave anytime and continue the search than have to start all over from square one. By doing a contract basis for a bit it lets both sides 'test the waters'. With that said, it's not for everyone. I myself prefer it.
yumraj 15y ago
IMHO the title of the blog is incorrect. What he is saying is that he never hires anyone fulltime without at least working with the person on a project, and not that he doesn't interview. Since, think about it, how did he find the person who will do the project in the first place, especially if there were multiple applicants. Unless of course the blogger is also saying that he never posts a job and only works through reference, which defeats the entire argument anyway.
raffi 15y ago
Automattic followed this practice and I think it worked quite well. When I was there, the company grew fast, but at least it was growing with known goods. When I'm back with Raffi Inc one day, I expect that I'll follow this practice too.
mtogo 15y ago
| You should follow me on Twitter: @JasonFreedman. I should? Really? Actually, i think i'm just fine without signing up to be spammed by you. Thanks for asking so politely, though!
cypherpunks 15y ago
My experience has been the opposite. Best employees aren't desperate to work for you. They're gainfully employed, and you have to poach them. No one I know who is productive would give up this much time to something. Almost everyone I know who is unemployed and desperate would. The key to finding good employees is to do what Google does. Find successful people. Don't have them come to you -- go to them. How do you do this? Talk to professors and see who top students are. Read publications and books in your field. Hire whoever wrote them. Find neat free software projects, and hire the authors. The list goes on. People like that generally won't want to work for you, and the trick is to recruit them somehow.
pnathan 15y ago
I'm sorry. If I was currently gainfully employed and looking for a job, I don't think I'd be on board with your system. I appreciate the idea of getting to know a company, but, I'd be applying for several companies every day. Even given the current interviewing speed (several hours), it'd eat up time. Doing part-time contracting is just not going to cut it. I've done moonlighting before: no one was very happy with my work, including me. You can't hire me this way if I have a job already. If I was unemployed and looking, I'd be more interested, but you would not get a cut-rate from me: you'd get a full consulting rate & contract. In my opinion, if you want the best engineers, you need to know them and offer massive bait. Because they aren't just going to jump for anybody or any old normal reason. You have to offer them what they want - and more than their current job does.
- true_religion 15y ago
  The problem with articles like this is that they talk about practices that realistically (regardless of what they say) would be reasonably applied to the mass center of the bell curve. However, everyone who reads them gives criticisms as if this hiring strategy will only apply to the "best engineers". To make a music comparison---not everyone is a proven rock star. Some people are garage band singers who're dying to take loans to produce their record just for a chance to make it big.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    I am not a 'best engineer'. I am a semi-junior engineer who is quite likely in the 1st standard deviation of engineers. This article's company hiring practices would be very difficult for me to work with.
nathanfp 15y ago
I strongly agree that the try before you buy approach is incredibly important for determining difficult to predict cultural and team fit. That being said while it is essential for early-stage companies to get this right, as pointed out in the comments, it can be difficult to scale and can be inefficient to make-up projects for potential hires, give them access to code, etc. Some companies have found ways to bake cultural fit into their standard application process to great success. Twilio for example asks all applicants, business or engineering, to build telephony apps using the Twilio API before applying. This self-selects for people who are more willing to do research, be creative, and in general improves the likelihood that they will get along well with the team. I am a bit biased here, but another path I would definitely advocate for is using interns. This is similar to the contractor approach but with a number of benefits in terms of price, and the fact that a hiring decision is not implicit at the end of the term. We have seen many startups build a pipeline of early hires by taking on multiple interns and seeing who is the best fit over the course of a few months.
nathanfp 15y ago
I strongly agree that the try before you buy approach is incredibly important for determining difficult to predict cultural and team fit. That being said while it is essential for early-stage companies to get this right, as pointed out in the comments, it can be difficult to scale and can be inefficient to make-up projects for potential hires, give them access to code, etc. Some companies have found ways to bake cultural fit into their standard application process to great success. Twilio for example asks all applicants, business or engineering, to build telephony apps using the Twilio API before applying. This self-selects for people who are more willing to do research, be creative, and in general improves the likelihood that they will get along well with the team. I am a bit biased here, but another path I would definitely advocate for is using interns. This is similar to the contractor approach but with a number of benefits in terms of price, and the fact that a hiring decision is not implicit at the end of the term. We have seen many startups build a pipeline of early hires by taking on multiple interns and seeing who is the best fit over the course of a few months.
timedoctor 15y ago
I totally agree with this article. You can get much better information from actually working with people. You don't have to expose them to your system, you can create a small project for them that is related and tests their skills.
Tycho 15y ago
Some interview questions I want to say 'do you realise how awkward that is to answer?' like asking people how their former colleagues would describe them, or what their weaknesses are. You couldn't do that in a normal conversation so I'm not sure it's a good idea in interviews. But who knows. Maybe it's effective or maybe it's simply the done thing.
Tycho 15y ago
Some interview questions I want to say 'do you realise how awkward that is to answer?' like asking people how their former colleagues would describe them, or what their weaknesses are. You couldn't do that in a normal conversation so I'm not sure it's a good idea in interviews. But who knows. Maybe it's effective or maybe it's simply the done thing.
jacques_chester 15y ago
I know someone who could plausibly answer that interview question. She has a degree in English literature, undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in law (U. Queensland and Oxford, respectively), plus taking classics on the side while learning Scots / Civil law at Edinburgh. She's scientifically literate and active in various skeptical societies. She wrote an award-winning novel and has another on the way about an alternate history Rome where Archimedes was captured and not killed by the Romans. People like this are out there. Perhaps such "Hail Mary Non-Sequiturs" are actually worth including.
seanp2k 15y ago
@JasonFreedman That's great if it works for you, but personally I feel that you're just putting all the risk with the employee, which is shitty. If someone is out of a job, the last thing they want is a 3-week gig. Yeah, I get that "well if they're good, they'll probably be allowed to stay". I wouldn't even consider working for a contract-to-hire position with a "few weeks" of guaranteed work. As a business, the risk is on YOU to hire the right person. As an employee, you're offering me what, maybe a month of rent while preventing me from going on most other job interviews? That's not a risk I'm willing to take. I'd rather do 3 interviews every day and have 5 jobs to pick from at the end of a week. Also, the projects...I'd guess that the projects you have people work on aren't very beneficial to your company, or are so focused that they might not take advantage of the talents of the employee. On the flip side, I think working with someone is the best way to get to know how they are / can be as an employee, and sometimes I feel that otherwise good employees will stumble on inverviews, so giving them some time to really prove themselves can be a good option....but I think that by limiting yourself to people willing to risk a few weeks on a long interview are going to be the most desperate of the desperate.

292 points by jaf12duke 15y ago

I really like the approach of "Contract-to-hire" developers but I've often found it to be difficult in markets where most good developers have multiple offers at any given time. Also it's tough to do this when you're boot strapping and literally every pair of available hands can make or break your first big deal that helps keep the lights on.

jaf12duke 15y ago
my experience has been that the very best developers often prefer this. I've had a few top-notch developer friends request recently that a startup allow them to work as 1099 contractors for a month first. They see their time as by far their most valuable asset and they want to learn more about a startup before committing. In reality, with work-for-hire employee contracts, anyone can leave and anyone can fire for whatever reason. And that's what Paul English does. Contract-to-hire just takes all the expectations and paperwork and emotions out of it.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Actually you can't fire for any reason, but for a lot reasons. For example, you generally can't fire someone due to gender, or race, or testifying in court for the public good, etc... I'd only take a 1099 if I was getting full benefits and equity, or paid accordingly. Although as a contractor on a one month contract I'd probably still consider my side project looking for a job. Whereas as an employee I will be a lot more vested in the company.
  - sedev 15y ago
    In practical terms, you can fire someone for any reason, just so long as you list an acceptable reason on the paperwork. The power of an employer to fire you at any time is definitely not equal to the average employee having the power to leave at any time, and that's part of why 'employment at will' is a crock.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      In practical terms, you can fire someone for any reason, just so long as you list an acceptable reason on the paperwork. Very true. In practice the law is about what you can prove, not what happened.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  I would add that it also takes out all of the benefits, which employers never mention. No benefits, no unemployment payments. Having hired many people over the years, I always get a kick out of this argument that they are the same. They aren't the same at all! Much easier and cheaper to hire contract employees. Much harder to get good employees. I don't hire contractors unless it really is a short term job. Contract work isn't for finding your long term employee partners. Contract work is for one-time or short term work. If I need a long term employee, I look for a long term employee and I don't pretend that I'm trying people out by using the guise of contract-to-perm.
  - hkarthik 15y ago
    I agree, using short term contract work to identify good long term employees sounds contradictory.
wccrawford 15y ago
As a developer, you'd have a hard time getting me to commit to a 3-week job (as suggested in the blog post) because I already have a job. And if I didn't, I'd be looking for a job, and looking to commit to a real job as soon as possible. At best, if I couldn't get a job at all, I'd take the 3 week job for the money, but I'd have no loyalty to you if someone else came along that was ready to commit. I'd finish the 3 weeks, and tell the other company I was in the 3 week contract, but I'd end up working for the other company. Programmers who aren't freelancing are about job stability, and a 3-week contract screams 'unstable'. Yes, there's a normal hiring process after it, but during that time, you haven't provided any measure of stability at all, and so anyone that comes along and promises it is going to be more appealing. I went through an interview process that had me write a simple CRUD app for free. It wasn't related to their business, and neither of us got anything out of it except qualification for an in-person interview. That is the most I'm willing to stick my neck out for a job, and I wondered if it didn't take a little too much of my time for what it was.
- Tangurena 15y ago
  > you'd have a hard time getting me to commit to a 3-week job Here in Denver, there are a number of companies hiring through recruiters that try to say "this is a 3 month contract" but the job ends up lasting 2-3 weeks. So you are right, it is hard to get folks to agree to a 3 week "job" - you have to lie to them.

util 15y ago

How do you decide who you're going to court?

ilcavero 15y ago
you interview them?...oh, I see what you did there
silverbax88 15y ago
Apparently Jason lives in a world that's much like a giant cocktail party, where everyone is just milling about in one room looking for someone to work with.

yannickmahe 15y ago

I like the idea, but as a developer there is little chance I'll do contract work before getting a job when I'm looking for a "real" job. Right now, finding a job is easy enough that I don't think a lot of people will jump through a lot of hoops before getting the job.

ctide 15y ago
I don't look at it as jumping through hoops, it's just as much for your benefit as it is for the company. Yes, you can quit at any time (of course, in California, you can be fired at any time also) but it's much cleaner if you both go into a trial period trying each other out. Should you decide the company isn't up to your standards, there's no pressure you stay, and you have a clearer expectation at that point of what you'd expect from compensation.
bluekeybox 15y ago
It's like accepting a lower starting salary hoping that, since you love doing what you do, you will prove it to everyone that you're good at it and that you will get a raise eventually. I got burned with this twice -- believe it or not, low starting salary coupled with uncertainty about whether there will be an eventual raise played a big role in me actually stopping loving my work (which at the time was a good thing since I acquired more productive interests, but that's besides the point).
- hkarthik 15y ago
  I'm looking for Rails work now and I've been offered substantially low salaries compared to what I make now. I was thinking maybe I need to adjust my expectations but your post makes me think twice. Thanks!
  - artmageddon 15y ago
    I will repeat the parent's sentiment - do NOT accept a lower salary. I was nearly caught in this trap a year ago, trying to get out of my current job that's not exactly fulfilling. I was given an offer that would have forced me to take a 13-18% pay cut and nearly had my vacation time slashed in half. I politely declined. I stuck it out for a little more than a year and just got offered a position that's going to pay 55% over what I'm getting now. Keep plugging away and keep looking.. Edit: Not sure about the vacation thing with the new role, but this is on a 6-month contract. I'll assume long vacations are out in the mean time, but it'll pay well enough that I'll be living ok for a little bit if I don't go full-time after.

blauwbilgorgel 15y ago

I like this approach of really testing out the waters before committing. I find there is also a divide between HR/recruiting and the lead developers. Once I had two interviews at a company. The first one from HR and a second one from the lead developers. The attitude of the developers made me think they didn't have much say into the whole process. They did ask the best (read hardest) questions. This interview order seems fine, though questions like: how many lines of codes did you write in language X? If we ask you to build Y, could you, and how would you go about it? If there is a problem in the weekend, and we call you, would you come over to fix it? Could perfectly be asked in the first round of the interviews. And if you really want to be sure that a person will come to the office, if need be, then maybe plan the contract meeting at midnight on a saturday :) One thing I noticed while last searching for jobs is the apparent inconsistencies in job listings. Pre-requisites like: PHP and Ruby, Web standards and Flash, thorough understanding of javascript (jQuery plug-ins), Photoshop or Illustrator and version control, familiar with Linux and .net. At first I ascribed these pre's to unskilled job listers, but maybe this is the start of the negotiation process? - "I do know X, but have to work on Y" - "That is fine, have you thought about salary yet?" Is this really a thing in recruiting, or am I seeing things?

pkteison 15y ago
I interviewed with a firm that said the initially advertised salary was too high for my offer because I refused to describe myself as an expert in silverlight and opengl. If they find an expert in opengl, silverlight, c#, sql server, web services, c, and desktop applications, I wonder what they think that would be worth. So yes, I do think it's a negotiating strategy. I hope nobody good will fall for it, I'd like to see this behavior punished by only being able to hire bad developers.

TheloniusPhunk 15y ago

I was once given thirty seconds to come up with synonyms for information, which I did. Then I was asked come up with antonyms for fast and furious starting with the letter p, I came up with pudgy and pleased. Then I was asked to tell my life story in twenty seconds. I refused. The interview ended.

spottiness 15y ago
That's funny. Are you serious? Was that all they asked you?
- TheloniusPhunk 15y ago
  That's all I remember being asked. I guess they saw themselves as pioneers of creativity, but as they were something of an obscure start-up, this wasn't totally clear to prospective interviewees. So I went in there expecting a serious interview, but got nonsense. It's funny now, but I was pissed at the time. Drove eight hours, booked a hotel, and wore a suit for nothing.
  - spottiness 15y ago
    LOL. I wish the writers of South Park read this... This is material for a very hilarious episode...(Cartman would be the interviewer :)
  - anacrolix 15y ago
    This story made my day. I've been in similar situations where the questions are bizarre and inappropriate. Suddenly I feel like walking out.
mattdeboard 15y ago
Good on you for refusing to participate. Is this company still around? Did you say anything in your refusal besides, "No?" How did they react to your refusal?

desireco42 15y ago

I don't suck at interviewing, people who interview are usually as clueless as interviewee, so you can abuse this game from your side as well. I completely agree that people you hire most of the time have very little with what you need and want and that process is broken. Suggestion in this post is how I would go about it as well, give people 2 weeks to try it out and see if we work for them as well as they work for us.

chollida1 15y ago

> Sometimes, a talented person can't, for whatever reason, commit to a 3 week project. I would think this applies to pretty much anyone who is in demand. > Maybe he can take 3 days off his oyher job and work half a week and a weekend with us. Can someone else explain, why i'd take time off of work to do this job interview? Why not take a day off and interview with Google/Apple/Microsoft instead?

dominostars 15y ago
How can anyone expect a candidate to burn 3 vacation days to work for a company they are unfamiliar with? For people who only get 10 vacation days a year that's almost 1/3. The money you get may not even be enough to compensate for the money you lose by using that vacation (since accrued vacation is paid to you when you leave your job). This is a huge risk for an already employed candidate. Why take that risk when there are plenty of interesting job opportunities?
- swalberg 15y ago
  The author says the person is paid "a reasonable contractor fee for the work", which I would hope is equal to or greater than the current salary. If not, it really doesn't make sense, as you say. I would be curious to know what happens before this 5 day test. Do people just walk in with resume in hand and sit down to work for 5 days? Probably not. There would have to be some sort of discussions-that-aren't-an-interview which would lead to a yea-nay decision on the work term. What sort of funnel is there? I agree there is a big commitment on both sides to do this 1-2 week work stage. There has to be more to the events leading up to the stage than what's in the article.
  - dominostars 15y ago
    What I was saying is that a 'reasonable contractor fee' would have to be about double your current hourly wage, since the first half would only compensate the cost of burning the vacation day.
  - franklindholm 15y ago

yangtheman 15y ago

For anyone looking for a job immediately (as I am), I don't think s/he has time to do multiple 3-months projects. I do believe current interview process is broken, and interview results are not indicative of job performance. I think that's why referrals work the best. Also, although much shorter, weekend hackathons are good ways to gauge working chemistry.

enjayhsu 15y ago

It's not just a time issue for the interviewee; the interviewer then needs to spend extra time checking the quality of the work, requiring extra technical expertise. Awesome idea; just not feasible in many situations.

agentultra 15y ago

Hiring is hard because understanding people is hard. There's also the problem of selection bias. Your technical interviewers are going to look for people that resemble themselves. In a broad sense this is because they think they're smart and everyone else is dumb (and rightly so). The problem is that this strategy can be far too successful and you will invariably turn away a perfectly suitable selection of candidates along with the unsuitable ones. It's human nature and difficult to detect. There is another form of selection bias in the interview process. You need to know that the candidate you're going to hire is going to be competent, assertive, and talented. However the exact match of skills, abilities, and personality traits that fulfill those broad categories are going to be based off of those skills, abilities, and traits you believe have helped you to be successful so far. When interviewing someone it is far too easy to check off the features a candidate is lacking and miss the ones they do have that you do not. A good hire, IMO, is someone who has some of the skills and abilities you already have and some you do not. Yet all too often, we look for people who have ALL of the skills we already have instead. I think strategies such as the one in the article would at least by-pass many of the definicies noted above. However I think it might be impractical in some scenarios (ie: when the candidate is already in a position at another company, or when they have received attractive offers from other companies). It's a start though and I think alternative strategies should be considered more often.

btmorex 15y ago
It's not just impractical. It's a complete nonstarter in any competitive job market (like the bay area). First, contract to hire is a pure negative for the employee. People can "try a company" out just fine with a full time offer and then quit if it's not a good fit. Second, it's far easier to find good people by poaching from other companies than it is by traditional means. No one is going to quit their job for a 3 week contract even if they're really unhappy at their current job. So, with this approach, you've just removed the biggest pool of talented prospects there is.
- gdilla 15y ago
  agreed. But Yelp and Facebook do a micro version of this for job applicants. They give you a test - usually along the lines of, mock up something to make our platform better. You have 24 Hrs. Go. Since they're prol two of the hottest places to work, not least because they're two of the biggest pre-IPO joints out there, they can get away with this. Even if you get rejected (and I did), they get your idea (and mine were great, I tell you! Fully mocked up). Well, I bombed the intws but they did like my mocks. You feel like a cheap prostitute afterwards.

spottiness 15y ago

Finding great talent is hard but identifying talent is not difficult. Yet, finding and identifying talent is just half of the story. The other half is determining if the person can focus in what you need, be motivated, take the initiative, and deliver great work. That's the difficult part. More often than not, very talented individuals have a lot of stuff in their heads, such that mundane but essential work ranks low in their platonic priority list, and that affects their capacity to concentrate and deliver.

mpg33 15y ago

I like the idea of a "mini-internship" instead of an interview... An employer could take on a person for say 2 weeks non-paid and let that person prove themselves.

eropple 15y ago
Nobody who's any good would come work for you for free. Ever.
- noarchy 15y ago
  I'd say that they don't even have to be good to turn their nose up at the idea of working for free. If you're doing work with real value, do you really want to do it for free, unless it is for charity?
alnayyir 15y ago
You exist in a different reality than the one where even mediocre engineers have their pick of the litter.

tomkarlo 15y ago

I'm not sure what the OP suggests is feasible in most situations. It's disruptive to the existing team and you have to have "throwaway" projects around for the person to do that won't cause problems if they're late or poorly implemented (and if that's the case, why do them?) Also, you're letting every guy who "interviews" learn about the internals of your systems, code base, security, etc to some degree, which is not something most companies want to do. Interviewing is hard, but it's clearly not totally broken, given that some companies obviously do a far better job of it than others. Do we really believe that the big consulting companies or banks don't know how to filter for the better candidates given how much their business depends purely on having the smartest people? Are Apple, Amazon and Google really just more lucky at hiring? One non-interview thing that I DO like to look at is publicly viewable work like open source contributions, blogging, social media activity, etc. If someone wants to work on web sites, and they're not doing anything web-related outside of their job, I have to wonder how passionate they really are about the domain.

dclowd9901 15y ago
I think it's a slippery slope to assume that just because someone is involved in a community that they are necessarily a good employee, and conversely, if they don't involve themselves, that somehow deems them "not passionate enough" or not as talented. Just anecdotally, I have a friend who has a wife and two kids. He's not going to spend all his free time forking on Github. He does take on side projects, and is a very talented developer. Sometimes peoples' priorities are simply different, but it's hardly a reliable metric to look at. And I say this as someone who does see himself as an involved member of the community.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  I'm not saying you assume someone who doesn't have open source work / contributions isn't necessarily a going to be a good employee. I'm just saying it's materially harder to tell in comparison to someone with the same resume and a publicly-viewable history of contributions. Any time you have a choice between the unknown and known, it's going to favor the latter.
15y ago

cygwin98 15y ago

Perhaps Jason's approach may come out of his intuition, I'd like to explain it from a more "academic" perspective. In economics, the labor market is often suffered from information asymmetries where the employer has little means to determine the productivity of prospective employees. Therefore, if the employer is willing to pay average wage, it will obtain below average workers, as workers who has higher than average productivities won't accept the offer. Such a phenomenon is also called "the Market of lemons" in the context of used car market. The root cause of such a market failure is because workers' productivity is difficult to measure. A certain measure has to be introduced to indicate the worker productivity indirectly (often termed Signaling in economics). For decades HR/Recruiters have been addressing this problem by using different metrics as the signals/indicators. Popular signals include education (GPA, university prestige). Programming may be a bit more challenging as multiple factors can affect programmers' productivity, e.g., intrinsic intelligence, problem solving skills, the speed of learning. Our hard-working recruiters/interviewers have introduced some new signals --- brain teasers, coding tests, etc. What Jason proposed in this blog post is that we don't need all those signals, they are all inaccurate and can be fooled around by a well-prepared interviewee, why not directly measure their performance by working with them for a short period, say, three weeks. That does sound like a good idea. IMHO, that's basically what internship does for students, but not sure if that will work for full-time employees, as it will incur extra opportunity cost for them.

marksbirch 15y ago

Actually, I kind of rock at interviews...

kevinburke 15y ago

Work sample tests are the best predictor (p of 0.54) of success on the job. http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-talent-the-upshot-from-85-years-of-research.html http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...

tomjen3 15y ago
Yes isn't p usually supposed to be less than 0.05 for the it to usefull?
- Robin_Message 15y ago
  It (probably) refers to a measure of correlation being 0.54 on a scale of 0=no correlation to 1=perfect linear relationship (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlation_coefficient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlat...) rather than a confidence interval, which is what p<0.05 refers to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value)
- kevinburke 15y ago
  Yes - sorry - r of 0.54, not p.

mattacurtis 15y ago

One issue that has been ignored is that of security / confidentiality. What happens if the individual you are "courting" works for one of your competitors? Any project that he would work on for you would likely require access to sensitive, proprietary data. Sure, you could force him to sign an NDA, but that puts him in a strange situation post-project. How do you balance giving the candidate access to your data such that he can work on a meaningful project (read: the results of which are actionable) vs. having him toil away with some dummy data just to see how he thinks?

ericd 15y ago
There are often projects that need to be done in a company that aren't related to the core product, so it's not usually that difficult to give a contractor something unrelated to work on.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ArchD 15y ago

IMO, an interview is to working at a company what speed-dating is to a long-term relationship. The interview process may get some measurements about someone's technical fundamentals, but very little can be gleaned about rapport with employees and in general how well an individual will gel with a company's goals and other team members. The success of a team is not just about the competence of each individual but how well the individuals work together as a team, and individual competence is not totally correlated to working well with a given team.

mangala 15y ago

After interviewing for months I basically memorized the answers to the main kinds of technical questions. After I started to hear the same sorts of questions asked over and over, I knew the process was completely broken and I would never ask stupid technical riddle questions to gauge someone's competence on the job. I think a brief conversation about software development and a longer conversation to determine how smart the guy is is what matters. Even someone who barely knows how to code can learn on the fly if he's smart/competent enough.

mhp 15y ago

Tl;dr try someone out part time before hiring them full time. Ignoring the link bait title of the post, I think the OP's suggestion is good. However, it's usually not possible. People are working full time and don't have extra time to work on your side project. Interviews should include the same activities the interviewee will be doing during their job. Programmers need to program. Designers need to design. Sales people need to sell. It's actually quite easy to do this effectively in an interview and plenty of companies do that quite well (i.e. They don't suck)

pkteison 15y ago

I don't understand contract to hire. I get it from the employer perspective, but why do employees agree to it? If I was willing to work contracts (e.g. had a wife I could get health insurance and maybe some income-in-case-of-layoff security from), why wouldn't I just always only contract so that I could make more and get paid for my overtime? If I wasn't willing to work contracts, wouldn't requiring me to contract up front take me out of the running? Or does this whole thing assume people will just go without health care for a while? I could understand that if there weren't other choices, but given that other full time employment is readily available, who does this?

nostrademons 15y ago
The article suggests that people who can't afford to take time off from their regular job instead contract on a project that can be done nights and weekends. He's not suggesting you quit your current job before the new job makes you a firm offer. He doesn't delve into the ambiguous IP ownership of the resulting contract at work - I know that if I did that, my current employer would likely own the rights to anything I did for the prospective employer. But I suppose the prospective employer can get around that by simply throwing out anything the contractor does for them. It's a pretty big cost, to eat 3 weeks or so of wages of a highly-paid contractor, but it's probably cheaper than an IP lawsuit or a bad hire.
- kelnos 15y ago
  From the prospective employee's perspective, it also just doesn't scale. Most people I know are talking to multiple companies at the same time, often being in the middle of interviews at 4 or 5 companies. This just wouldn't work if each one required a consulting period, especially if you still have your primary job taking up your time.
PonyGumbo 15y ago
>why do employees agree to it? A lot of people take what they can get.
adeaver 15y ago
Because it gives you a chance to see if you like working for/with this company/person. Typically in an interview you don't meet with or talk to everyone you will be working with. You might find out 2 weeks in that the guy sitting next to you is someone you just can't work with long term. Better to do that knowing that you can leave anytime and continue the search than have to start all over from square one. By doing a contract basis for a bit it lets both sides 'test the waters'. With that said, it's not for everyone. I myself prefer it.

yumraj 15y ago

IMHO the title of the blog is incorrect. What he is saying is that he never hires anyone fulltime without at least working with the person on a project, and not that he doesn't interview. Since, think about it, how did he find the person who will do the project in the first place, especially if there were multiple applicants. Unless of course the blogger is also saying that he never posts a job and only works through reference, which defeats the entire argument anyway.

raffi 15y ago

Automattic followed this practice and I think it worked quite well. When I was there, the company grew fast, but at least it was growing with known goods. When I'm back with Raffi Inc one day, I expect that I'll follow this practice too.

mtogo 15y ago

| You should follow me on Twitter: @JasonFreedman. I should? Really? Actually, i think i'm just fine without signing up to be spammed by you. Thanks for asking so politely, though!

cypherpunks 15y ago

My experience has been the opposite. Best employees aren't desperate to work for you. They're gainfully employed, and you have to poach them. No one I know who is productive would give up this much time to something. Almost everyone I know who is unemployed and desperate would. The key to finding good employees is to do what Google does. Find successful people. Don't have them come to you -- go to them. How do you do this? Talk to professors and see who top students are. Read publications and books in your field. Hire whoever wrote them. Find neat free software projects, and hire the authors. The list goes on. People like that generally won't want to work for you, and the trick is to recruit them somehow.

pnathan 15y ago

I'm sorry. If I was currently gainfully employed and looking for a job, I don't think I'd be on board with your system. I appreciate the idea of getting to know a company, but, I'd be applying for several companies every day. Even given the current interviewing speed (several hours), it'd eat up time. Doing part-time contracting is just not going to cut it. I've done moonlighting before: no one was very happy with my work, including me. You can't hire me this way if I have a job already. If I was unemployed and looking, I'd be more interested, but you would not get a cut-rate from me: you'd get a full consulting rate & contract. In my opinion, if you want the best engineers, you need to know them and offer massive bait. Because they aren't just going to jump for anybody or any old normal reason. You have to offer them what they want - and more than their current job does.

true_religion 15y ago
The problem with articles like this is that they talk about practices that realistically (regardless of what they say) would be reasonably applied to the mass center of the bell curve. However, everyone who reads them gives criticisms as if this hiring strategy will only apply to the "best engineers". To make a music comparison---not everyone is a proven rock star. Some people are garage band singers who're dying to take loans to produce their record just for a chance to make it big.
- pnathan 15y ago
  I am not a 'best engineer'. I am a semi-junior engineer who is quite likely in the 1st standard deviation of engineers. This article's company hiring practices would be very difficult for me to work with.

nathanfp 15y ago

I strongly agree that the try before you buy approach is incredibly important for determining difficult to predict cultural and team fit. That being said while it is essential for early-stage companies to get this right, as pointed out in the comments, it can be difficult to scale and can be inefficient to make-up projects for potential hires, give them access to code, etc. Some companies have found ways to bake cultural fit into their standard application process to great success. Twilio for example asks all applicants, business or engineering, to build telephony apps using the Twilio API before applying. This self-selects for people who are more willing to do research, be creative, and in general improves the likelihood that they will get along well with the team. I am a bit biased here, but another path I would definitely advocate for is using interns. This is similar to the contractor approach but with a number of benefits in terms of price, and the fact that a hiring decision is not implicit at the end of the term. We have seen many startups build a pipeline of early hires by taking on multiple interns and seeing who is the best fit over the course of a few months.

nathanfp 15y ago

timedoctor 15y ago

I totally agree with this article. You can get much better information from actually working with people. You don't have to expose them to your system, you can create a small project for them that is related and tests their skills.

Tycho 15y ago

Some interview questions I want to say 'do you realise how awkward that is to answer?' like asking people how their former colleagues would describe them, or what their weaknesses are. You couldn't do that in a normal conversation so I'm not sure it's a good idea in interviews. But who knows. Maybe it's effective or maybe it's simply the done thing.

Tycho 15y ago

jacques_chester 15y ago

I know someone who could plausibly answer that interview question. She has a degree in English literature, undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in law (U. Queensland and Oxford, respectively), plus taking classics on the side while learning Scots / Civil law at Edinburgh. She's scientifically literate and active in various skeptical societies. She wrote an award-winning novel and has another on the way about an alternate history Rome where Archimedes was captured and not killed by the Romans. People like this are out there. Perhaps such "Hail Mary Non-Sequiturs" are actually worth including.

seanp2k 15y ago

@JasonFreedman That's great if it works for you, but personally I feel that you're just putting all the risk with the employee, which is shitty. If someone is out of a job, the last thing they want is a 3-week gig. Yeah, I get that "well if they're good, they'll probably be allowed to stay". I wouldn't even consider working for a contract-to-hire position with a "few weeks" of guaranteed work. As a business, the risk is on YOU to hire the right person. As an employee, you're offering me what, maybe a month of rent while preventing me from going on most other job interviews? That's not a risk I'm willing to take. I'd rather do 3 interviews every day and have 5 jobs to pick from at the end of a week. Also, the projects...I'd guess that the projects you have people work on aren't very beneficial to your company, or are so focused that they might not take advantage of the talents of the employee. On the flip side, I think working with someone is the best way to get to know how they are / can be as an employee, and sometimes I feel that otherwise good employees will stumble on inverviews, so giving them some time to really prove themselves can be a good option....but I think that by limiting yourself to people willing to risk a few weeks on a long interview are going to be the most desperate of the desperate.