10 ms·

SWE interviews should be paid

74 points by zcesur 5y ago

realce 5y ago
How much though? We're thinking about doing this at my company, but offering $50-100 feels kind of tacky or something.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Pay them a reasonable hourly rate for the time this consumes. A good rule of thumb for any sort of short-term contract work is to take the annual salary and divide by 1000. Definitely don't pay them less than the long-term hourly rate, which is salary divided by 2000. So if your desired applicant pool is getting $200k, offer them $100-200/hour.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Sebb767 5y ago
I like the idea! This makes interviews a bit more paperwork (people need to sign NDAs and stuff) and it's surely not perfect [0], but there is probably no perfect approach and this is a lot better than most other forms of interviews. It also helps the Interviewee to find out whether he likes his daily work. [0] One could, for example, argue that different people take a different amount of time to get started, but be similarly productive in the end.
jcims 5y ago
Is it possible to pay someone in the US without getting their SSN/EIN? In other words, is there a way to do this without any major strings attached in either direction? I think that's the impediment for most orgs. By the time you've gotten to the interview process most companies have invested thousands of dollars per candidate in the process, adding on a $500-1k cash outlay per short-lister would be a rounding error. Also, giving someone an actual backlog item would turn off most companies, but building a representative task where you vet performance against your current staff seems to be reasonable.
- outside1234 5y ago
  No - the company would need to file a 1099 (assuming it was structured as a contract gig)
  - irf1 5y ago
    Algora takes care of 1099s (via Stripe) so you don't have to
- dvtrn 5y ago
  The IRS has joined the chat
- sly010 5y ago
  As a company, you don't have to report payments to a freelancer under $600 [0] [0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/reporting-payments-to-independent-contractors https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... edit: added source
  - fridif 5y ago
    However the IRS states all income above $10 "must" be reported by the recipient.
    - whofw 5y ago
      You can self report that via other means, you don’t necessarily have to receive a 1099
      - fridif 5y ago
        Agreed, just saying that it wouldn't be tax free income.
- fridif 5y ago
  De jure, no. De facto, VISA gift cards.
slap_shot 5y ago
We pay candidates for interviews, $100 per hour. Companies are starting to adopt this, but it still blows me away that we aren't getting there faster.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I think it's great that people are trying this. But when I'm looking for jobs, this wouldn't influence me much. It might be a useful signal that they respect my time, but also could indicate a relatively mercenary culture. From the hiring side, I'd also have concerns. At a previous company we paid for a lot of user testing subjects and there were some people who were trying to make a living out of it. They'd say absolutely anything up front to try to get in and get the money. And that was just for $30-$50. If we're talking $200-800, that's a lot of incentive for goofs to lie their way into an interview.
  - slap_shot 5y ago
    > this wouldn't influence me much It's not about influencing anybody. It's about valuing people's time and paying them for their time. (this isn't corporate bullshit - I made the policy and that's why I made the policy). > could indicate a relatively mercenary culture. no idea what that even means > that's a lot of incentive for goofs to lie their way into an interview. I'm happy to report we've never let any "goofs" in through the process! But it might actually make us a little too selective.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      > It's about valuing people's time and paying them for their time. Those are two separate things. I think once can do the first without doing the second. > no idea what that even means I used to work for financial traders. Some people tend to treat everything as a commodity. That's not the kind of culture I want to work in. > I'm happy to report we've never let any "goofs" in through the process! But it might actually make us a little too selective. That's a real risk. For me a lot of the best hiring value comes from talking with people who don't fit the profile of a perfect employee. Some of the best people I've worked with are terrible interviewers, for example.
baby 5y ago
I think full day interviews should be banned also. It’s so exhausting.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  I imagine that if a company is paying, it would increase the level of entitlement on their part.
bdcravens 5y ago
I agree to a point. You need to do a good job of screening beforehand, because there's no shortage of "developers" who are applying for jobs they aren't qualified for and seeing what sticks. I'm speaking from the perspective of a small company, where we have a shorter, flatter process, so it may make more sense when it's a longer, more extensive process.
yuppie_scum 5y ago
What? Pure fucking hubris.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  I agree somewhat, but can see the flip side: in large companies where you may go through multiple rounds of interviews, spanning several days overall, you can be made to feel like a resource whose time is disposable.
- tester756 5y ago
  If it's on site and you have to commute e.g 1h (so 2) and spend at least 1h on interview itself, then it's basically half of workday and e.g I, personally would have to take a day off to be able to participate. I don't see it as not reasonable if somebody does not ACE every interview and has to attend a few of them. And we're still pretty optimistic here, there are multi rounds interview.
chrisaycock 5y ago
One counterargument is that many employees in finance are required to disclose outside business activity. From FINRA's perspective, getting paid to do an interview would be covered since it is remuneration that could be a conflict of interest with the current employer. I.e., the employee would have to let his employer know that he got paid to interview somewhere else! Failure to disclose would result in disciplinary action from regulators, possibly leading to a suspension from the industry.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  I thought the same thing. Even in a non-regulated industry, the moment you are paid, you're now consulting which can get tricky contract-wise.
  - jen20 5y ago
    Presumably it also means the "consultant" (interviewee) takes on liability?
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      Liability for what?
      - Sanguinaire 5y ago
        Showing up for the interview, participating in good faith, likely other employer-favouring bullshit.
        R0b0t1 5y ago
        And how do you actually show the interviewee failed to do any of those things?
        Sanguinaire 5y ago
        I think the whole idea is idiotic, but this particular point doesn't seem like it would be the blocker. We already have employment contracts which state hours to be worked and similar mundane details, this wouldn't be any different. Such contract details would only be tested if someone tried to exploit a loophole, like showing up for a bunch of interviews to get money but with no intention of actually completing the tasks.
dudul 5y ago
This may be legally impossible to do for someone who's already employed. You can make the claim that it makes your interview more "valid" (although, I still think that you would be testing for the wrong things and focusing on what 1 person can deliver alone is a bad metric), but not more "inclusive".
- jayd16 5y ago
  I really doubt such a payment would be impossible to decline.
  - dudul 5y ago
    Why? Some companies have fairly predatory full time employment agreements that prevent you from having another job, forcing you to disclose any side hustle or contracting work. Sometimes they will claim to own everything you type on a keyboard. I mean, I'm all for seeing this method work, but there is probably a reason the author mentions "interns". Were they able to apply this method with working professionals? Convenient how it's not mentioned.
  - junon 5y ago
    Do you "really doubt" or do you "know"? This sort of payment would be illegal in many cases.
bradlys 5y ago
I’m ambivalent. Sure, guess I’d like it as an industry practice. It would make my taxes very lengthy to do by having to deal with 40+ 1099 forms every year but for sufficient payment not a big deal. I do worry this would raise the bar even further though on expectations because now they’re paying for time. They’d take even less chances on who they interview because it’s 2x as expensive as it used to be. And I don’t think it’d become a world of doing “practical” assessments - I think leetcode would still be very common.
- learc83 5y ago
  You interview at 40+ places every year? If that’s true there is something very wrong with our industry. How do you have time for that? One minor note they only have to file a 1099 if you made more than $600 (of course you’re still supposed to report it).
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    The hirer is the one filing out the 1099, and interviewing 40+ candidates a year is easy. That said, you should only need to file a 1099 when the pay is $600+.
    - learc83 5y ago
      I think the OP was talking about interviewing at 40 companies per year, not interviewing 40 candidates at their company. Also hey man! Are you still doing work for Fusion?
      - bdcravens 5y ago
        How's it going? I am still doing some work for them, though I've had to scale back my freelancing as things have improved substantially at my main role.
        learc83 5y ago
        Going well here. Glad to hear that things are picking up!
duped 5y ago
In this market multiple rounds of interviews are a competitive disadvantage, good devs don't stay on the market long enough to schedule that second on-site.
drewp41 5y ago
Software engineering is one of the most lucrative and high paying jobs out there and y’all want an extra few hundred for doing interviews?? Come on now. I understand the point being made in the article but that amount of money just isn’t the best incentive
jstx1 5y ago
1. Be a company whose mission is to "Create, share & reward paid coding tasks". 2. Make an article with a self-serving title encouring paid coding tasks. 3. Provide no justification. 4. Cover up the lack of justification with a graph of a normal distribution. Mention standard deviations for additional perception of credibility. 5. Share this with people who would like to be paid for things they would do anyway. (The CEO of the company posted this on HN) 6. Profit?
- ctvo 5y ago
  It really is the definition of clickbait. The article is so low quality I have a negative view of the co now.
  - dudul 5y ago
    When I reached the end of the "article" I thought that my browser had failed to load 2/3 of the page. The part where they would explain how they then started using this for professionals as opposed to interns, where they measured how it improved the quality of their hiring, where they would explain if there is any screening before getting people into the "paid for" program.
- mylons 5y ago
  coincidentally I just finished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_(South_Park) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_(South_Park) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising is playing. This is just an advertisement, unpaid. I had no idea who the company was until reading this, and also thought it was an incredibly thin post lacking any real justification for what it’s trying to do. It also has a clickbaity headline for the general consumer of HN. The Ads just keep evolving.
- camgunz 5y ago
  I appreciate the DD you did and admit to feeling a little hoodwinked, but in fairness the CEO did do a Show HN [1] a couple days ago. I can imagine bootstrapping a startup, not getting any interest on a Show HN, and doing some blog posts to continue marketing. I think really the only thing off here is the lack of a kind of "Try Algora! We automate paid SWE interviews" section somewhere. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236640
mgraczyk 5y ago
I agree with the conclusion, and my startups always use a 1-2 week paid "microinternship" before final hiring decisions (unless I've worked with the person before). That being said, this article makes no sense. The justification it gives sounds like it was autogenerated by a bad markov chain. First it claims without justification that market salary equals "mean productivity", which already isn't true. But suppose that we believe that. Then it says that there is a large productivity difference between good and bad engineers. Ok. Finally it says (paraphrasing), "because good engineers are so much more productive, it's rational to pay them for interviewing." But that's just a restatement of the title of the article, not an argument. For single day interviews, I think the opposite is true because of adverse selection. Good engineers aren't looking for 1 day of pay, they are looking for a job. The people who value your 1 day paid interview the most are people who are not looking for a job.
tvanantwerp 5y ago
I'm looking at a 4 hour interview in my near future, so yes I'd like remuneration. But even more than that, I'd like an interview that doesn't take 4 hours.
- tdeck 5y ago
  4 hours seems like a dream. The typical process seems to include: 20 minute chat with recruiter to introduce yourself 2 40 minute phone screen 5 hours of "onsite" interviews 1-2 15 minute recap chats with recruiter Possible additional 40 minute interview with hiring manager to sell you on offer It's almost impossible to do more than 3 of these in a week because companies all have times that don't work for them, and quite often have certain days of the week that they don't interview on.
deleted 5y ago
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Waterluvian 5y ago
Make the entire interview process take less than 5 hours. If you’re anxious about hiring a fake or someone who isn’t cutting it, get better at firing faster. Only once have I seen an employer show a new employee the door within that “six month probation period” they talked about. This is basically the ultimate form of paying people for an interview: the interview happens on the job for a while. It also would help with an issue I’ve struggled with a lot: learning that the person is a jerk who doesn’t work well with others and has loud holy war opinions on minutiae. A valid criticism of this approach is that it can be expensive and disruptive to turnover a position in three months.
dehrmann 5y ago
It sounds like it was specifically for a real, non-trivial problem out of their backlog. > the strongest candidates self-selected into this paid screening challenge ... > to make developer interviews more valid & inclusive, introduce payments. This still makes them exclusive. Someone with a full-time job who's busy with life could easily not care about $600--they're time-limited, not money limited. They also provide little evidence supporting their motivation of hiring better engineers. I buy that better engineers are better for the company, they just didn't show that paid interviews select better engineers. All that said, I agree that a long-ish, real-world problem is a great indicator of job performance. Paying people just means you're not taking advantage of them. The bigger problem is still around time.
shonenknifefan1 5y ago
My initial thought is that paid interviews might shift the incentive of candidates from getting hired to doing more interviews regardless of interest in a given company. That might lead to a reduction in the interview -> hire rate, which then might increase the cost per hire even without considering the payout to the candidates for interviewing. This hypothesis should be testable. Though, the dynamics would probably be different if this policy became an industry standard.
ummonk 5y ago
If you’re gonna give out take home project, they should definitely be paid. I tend to reject take home projects out of hand because they take up my time but not the company’s, unlike a phone interview. I need to know the company is serious and values my time.
- learc83 5y ago
  We do take home projects instead of whiteboard challenges. Grading the take home takes me longer than doing a whiteboard interview.
- dudul 5y ago
  Once you submit your take home what do you think happens? We do it at my current company and I usually spend around 45minutes to review a take home and submit (what I think is) useful feedback. And I have to do a few a week. Definitely takes some of the company's time. What method do you prefer over a take-home?
learc83 5y ago
The only other industry I can think of that has interviews anywhere as close to as ridiculous as ours is the performing arts. Why is that other industries don’t need 6+ rounds of interviews for experienced candidates?
- dudul 5y ago
  I often wonder the same thing. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that most (all? I don't think so but maybe) other industries can rely on trusted licenses, degrees, certificates, etc. Now I'll admit I never interviewed to be a lawyer, or a plumber or a telemarketer so maybe I don't have a clear picture of what other industries do.
  - learc83 5y ago
    I have talked to many friends in other industries. Some of them are heavily regulated—my wife’s a doctor and her interviews are basically just people spending a lot of money showing her around and begging her to work there. Some of them aren’t heavily regulated. I have many friends in engineering disciplines that don’t require FE or PE exams, and they don’t need to deal with any of this nonsense. I think our industry is just very prone to following trends for whatever reason. I would love it if we grew up a bit and introduced more regulation.
divbzero 5y ago
DuckDuckGo does something similar: they run a paid test project as part of their hiring process.
dudul 5y ago
Great, it was done with interns with good results. Now, was this applied to working professionals? Why is the blog post not describing how it worked out? All you can say at this point is that it seemed to have helped to hire interns.
throwaway09223 5y ago
I think this is a stronger argument that we should have more entry-level contractor gigs available with a route toward full-time employment. Because they're easier to fire, contractor positions allow more risk-taking in the hiring process and this increases candidate diversity - true background diversity, not what you see with category-based quota systems. A company will be more likely to hire a person without a pedigree into a contractor role, and once hired they have an opportunity to showcase their aptitude. Interviews are expensive in terms of employee time. Paying a candidate for their time as well wouldn't be the most expensive part of the process, but in general increasing the cost of an interview will serve to decrease the breadth of the process. Companies will probably start to become sensitive to people they perceive as profiting from the interview process and restrict access accordingly. I think this would be ultimately detrimental to the goal of scouting new talent.
- joecot 5y ago
  Different strokes for different folks, but I immediately dismiss any job posting that mentions contract to hire. Even if it's a 2 week trial. I have a mortgage to pay and regular expenses, and given I've had secure full-time development work for over a decade, I would never jump from a secure job to a contract position where a company does not have to offer benefits or even the courtesy of actually firing me so I can collect unemployment. If a company wants me to have wizard of oz style interviews, sure, I'll jump those hoops until I have an offer from a company I like. But I'm not going to sit in financial limbo while a company decides if I'm worth keeping or not. Of course for someone just starting in the industry, or comfortable with contract work, this might be fine. But I imagine many SWEs have no interest in contract to hire for similar reasons.
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    Well, sure. I wouldn't take contract work either at this point in my career. But on the other hand I don't really have to do technical interviews at all anymore. After a point everything is reputation and networking. Contract work is important for people just breaking into the field.
enumjorge 5y ago
This article is disappointingly shallow. Maybe it worked for Algora, but it doesn’t mean it would scale well across the industry. Then there’s the problem with undesirable secondary effects as other comments on this thread have mentioned. I’ve done hiring before and the fact that the cost of considering a candidate is relatively low both in terms of cost and time, meant that I could consider candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. A resume and job application only tell you so much. If I was on the fence about someone it was easy to jump on a call for an hour with them to get more data. Sure the signal you can get from an hour long interview isn’t great, but it’s something. If there was a higher cost associated with bringing a candidate in (more than the wage, I’d be worried about the paperwork involved), employers might start relying even more on signals like alma mater status, current employer pedigree etc. as first pass filter before bringing someone in.
thatjamesdude 5y ago
Vastly misunderstood this from the title and I suspect a few others have as well. This seems to be more about internships than interviews for a qualified professional (or whatever you want to call those candidates). Just make unpaid internships illegal. If you do work for a company that a paid employee would normally do, then you should be compensated. But not paying someone to run around and get you coffee is just completely nonsensical these days. I'd laugh all the way out of the door, and my country has a 40% unemployment rate. I'm just not going to do work I don't get paid for, because it turns out living is expensive.
orangegreen 5y ago
Or, once companies start paying for interviews, they start outsourcing all of their work to interviewees, never hiring anyone. I don't think this would ever actually scale well, but if there's any way to exploit labor, corporations are going to figure out how.
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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moondev 5y ago
> Earlier this year we decided to hire summer interns. We wanted to know how well someone would perform on the job, so we gave our top candidates a real paid task from our backlog. Was the first interview sprint planning?
jkingsbery 5y ago
It's an interesting idea, but there are lots of problems this article doesn't address. At most of the companies I've worked for, there is a bunch of up front ramp up before someone can complete even a simple task. You have to become familiar with a team's frameworks, the business context, and the structure of the code base. To do one real task then requires all that ramp up first (or else, you'd need to simplify it so it's not a real task). How big a task? If you are interviewing new college grads, it might not matter, but people who already have industry experience either have to use a large chunk of vacation time or leave their current job if the task is non-trivial (taking, say, a sprint or two to do). How much do you pay? Do you have a fixed bounty? Do you pay senior engineers more? I get how you want to see someone do this for real, but I've already built something like this 20 times. If a company trying to recruit me asked me to build this, I could spend a few hours building it again, or I could just tell you about the times I did something like that (and the challenges I ran into), which would take 30 minutes.
andrewingram 5y ago
Last year I did a week-long work trial for a popular product startup. I will never do it again, reasons: * The interview pressure of knowing you’re being assessed based on every interaction and piece of output, but for an entire week. * A week isn’t enough time to truly assess what it’s like to work with someone… * …yet, is long enough such that it’s only a viable option for people with capability to dedicate a week. Which basically means the unemployed, or those working at companies where they can take a week off at short notice. * The tax situation can be complicated, which adds to the stress of it all. My anxiety and stress levels have never been higher, and this was after being laid off and a subsequent 6 months of unemployment. If they hadn’t decided against hiring me (apparently my code and product mindset were great, but I didn’t work fast enough), I was ready to decline them on the basis of concluding that this approach to hiring (it was mandatory) was inhumane.
teeray 5y ago
I would much rather have a licensure process that covers the leetcoding part of most interviews rather than having to basically take the equivalent of that exam repeatedly and also for every position you apply to. It is a monumental waste of everyone’s time.
Sanguinaire 5y ago
Alternatively, stop pretending this industry is a precious snowflake and conduct reasonable-duration, non-exploitative interviews like everyone else in the history of modern employment.
lamontcg 5y ago
They could just be less ridiculous instead.
anthuswilliams 5y ago
The article makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims, but one that catches my eye is the idea that paying people to interview is more inclusive because it allows companies to issue challenges that are more representative of the actual job. But are there actually any data out there that support this claim? This is a common canard. I can see how it might make some intuitive sense, but it appears to be utterly mistaken. When I brought up the idea at my current workplace, we ended up choosing not to pay candidates, because almost 100% of our female software engineers declared that they would not have started an interview process where they were being paid unless they were VERY certain they were qualified for the role.
- shadilay 5y ago
  Who says no to free money if they agree to interview you?
  - anthuswilliams 5y ago
    Impostor syndrome is a thing. And if you're paying money, people will opt out because they don't want to feel like they're defrauding you. This viewpoint is strikingly common.

74 points by zcesur 5y ago

realce 5y ago

How much though? We're thinking about doing this at my company, but offering $50-100 feels kind of tacky or something.

wpietri 5y ago
Pay them a reasonable hourly rate for the time this consumes. A good rule of thumb for any sort of short-term contract work is to take the annual salary and divide by 1000. Definitely don't pay them less than the long-term hourly rate, which is salary divided by 2000. So if your desired applicant pool is getting $200k, offer them $100-200/hour.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Sebb767 5y ago

I like the idea! This makes interviews a bit more paperwork (people need to sign NDAs and stuff) and it's surely not perfect [0], but there is probably no perfect approach and this is a lot better than most other forms of interviews. It also helps the Interviewee to find out whether he likes his daily work. [0] One could, for example, argue that different people take a different amount of time to get started, but be similarly productive in the end.

jcims 5y ago

Is it possible to pay someone in the US without getting their SSN/EIN? In other words, is there a way to do this without any major strings attached in either direction? I think that's the impediment for most orgs. By the time you've gotten to the interview process most companies have invested thousands of dollars per candidate in the process, adding on a $500-1k cash outlay per short-lister would be a rounding error. Also, giving someone an actual backlog item would turn off most companies, but building a representative task where you vet performance against your current staff seems to be reasonable.

outside1234 5y ago
No - the company would need to file a 1099 (assuming it was structured as a contract gig)
- irf1 5y ago
  Algora takes care of 1099s (via Stripe) so you don't have to
dvtrn 5y ago
The IRS has joined the chat
sly010 5y ago
As a company, you don't have to report payments to a freelancer under $600 [0] [0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/reporting-payments-to-independent-contractors https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... edit: added source
- fridif 5y ago
  However the IRS states all income above $10 "must" be reported by the recipient.
  - whofw 5y ago
    You can self report that via other means, you don’t necessarily have to receive a 1099
    - fridif 5y ago
      Agreed, just saying that it wouldn't be tax free income.
fridif 5y ago
De jure, no. De facto, VISA gift cards.

slap_shot 5y ago

We pay candidates for interviews, $100 per hour. Companies are starting to adopt this, but it still blows me away that we aren't getting there faster.

wpietri 5y ago
I think it's great that people are trying this. But when I'm looking for jobs, this wouldn't influence me much. It might be a useful signal that they respect my time, but also could indicate a relatively mercenary culture. From the hiring side, I'd also have concerns. At a previous company we paid for a lot of user testing subjects and there were some people who were trying to make a living out of it. They'd say absolutely anything up front to try to get in and get the money. And that was just for $30-$50. If we're talking $200-800, that's a lot of incentive for goofs to lie their way into an interview.
- slap_shot 5y ago
  > this wouldn't influence me much It's not about influencing anybody. It's about valuing people's time and paying them for their time. (this isn't corporate bullshit - I made the policy and that's why I made the policy). > could indicate a relatively mercenary culture. no idea what that even means > that's a lot of incentive for goofs to lie their way into an interview. I'm happy to report we've never let any "goofs" in through the process! But it might actually make us a little too selective.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    > It's about valuing people's time and paying them for their time. Those are two separate things. I think once can do the first without doing the second. > no idea what that even means I used to work for financial traders. Some people tend to treat everything as a commodity. That's not the kind of culture I want to work in. > I'm happy to report we've never let any "goofs" in through the process! But it might actually make us a little too selective. That's a real risk. For me a lot of the best hiring value comes from talking with people who don't fit the profile of a perfect employee. Some of the best people I've worked with are terrible interviewers, for example.

baby 5y ago

I think full day interviews should be banned also. It’s so exhausting.

bdcravens 5y ago
I imagine that if a company is paying, it would increase the level of entitlement on their part.

bdcravens 5y ago

I agree to a point. You need to do a good job of screening beforehand, because there's no shortage of "developers" who are applying for jobs they aren't qualified for and seeing what sticks. I'm speaking from the perspective of a small company, where we have a shorter, flatter process, so it may make more sense when it's a longer, more extensive process.

yuppie_scum 5y ago

What? Pure fucking hubris.

bdcravens 5y ago
I agree somewhat, but can see the flip side: in large companies where you may go through multiple rounds of interviews, spanning several days overall, you can be made to feel like a resource whose time is disposable.
tester756 5y ago
If it's on site and you have to commute e.g 1h (so 2) and spend at least 1h on interview itself, then it's basically half of workday and e.g I, personally would have to take a day off to be able to participate. I don't see it as not reasonable if somebody does not ACE every interview and has to attend a few of them. And we're still pretty optimistic here, there are multi rounds interview.

chrisaycock 5y ago

One counterargument is that many employees in finance are required to disclose outside business activity. From FINRA's perspective, getting paid to do an interview would be covered since it is remuneration that could be a conflict of interest with the current employer. I.e., the employee would have to let his employer know that he got paid to interview somewhere else! Failure to disclose would result in disciplinary action from regulators, possibly leading to a suspension from the industry.

bdcravens 5y ago
I thought the same thing. Even in a non-regulated industry, the moment you are paid, you're now consulting which can get tricky contract-wise.
- jen20 5y ago
  Presumably it also means the "consultant" (interviewee) takes on liability?
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    Liability for what?
    - Sanguinaire 5y ago
      Showing up for the interview, participating in good faith, likely other employer-favouring bullshit.
      - R0b0t1 5y ago
        And how do you actually show the interviewee failed to do any of those things?
        Sanguinaire 5y ago
        I think the whole idea is idiotic, but this particular point doesn't seem like it would be the blocker. We already have employment contracts which state hours to be worked and similar mundane details, this wouldn't be any different. Such contract details would only be tested if someone tried to exploit a loophole, like showing up for a bunch of interviews to get money but with no intention of actually completing the tasks.

dudul 5y ago

This may be legally impossible to do for someone who's already employed. You can make the claim that it makes your interview more "valid" (although, I still think that you would be testing for the wrong things and focusing on what 1 person can deliver alone is a bad metric), but not more "inclusive".

jayd16 5y ago
I really doubt such a payment would be impossible to decline.
- dudul 5y ago
  Why? Some companies have fairly predatory full time employment agreements that prevent you from having another job, forcing you to disclose any side hustle or contracting work. Sometimes they will claim to own everything you type on a keyboard. I mean, I'm all for seeing this method work, but there is probably a reason the author mentions "interns". Were they able to apply this method with working professionals? Convenient how it's not mentioned.
- junon 5y ago
  Do you "really doubt" or do you "know"? This sort of payment would be illegal in many cases.

bradlys 5y ago

I’m ambivalent. Sure, guess I’d like it as an industry practice. It would make my taxes very lengthy to do by having to deal with 40+ 1099 forms every year but for sufficient payment not a big deal. I do worry this would raise the bar even further though on expectations because now they’re paying for time. They’d take even less chances on who they interview because it’s 2x as expensive as it used to be. And I don’t think it’d become a world of doing “practical” assessments - I think leetcode would still be very common.

learc83 5y ago
You interview at 40+ places every year? If that’s true there is something very wrong with our industry. How do you have time for that? One minor note they only have to file a 1099 if you made more than $600 (of course you’re still supposed to report it).
- bdcravens 5y ago
  The hirer is the one filing out the 1099, and interviewing 40+ candidates a year is easy. That said, you should only need to file a 1099 when the pay is $600+.
  - learc83 5y ago
    I think the OP was talking about interviewing at 40 companies per year, not interviewing 40 candidates at their company. Also hey man! Are you still doing work for Fusion?
    - bdcravens 5y ago
      How's it going? I am still doing some work for them, though I've had to scale back my freelancing as things have improved substantially at my main role.
      - learc83 5y ago
        Going well here. Glad to hear that things are picking up!

duped 5y ago

In this market multiple rounds of interviews are a competitive disadvantage, good devs don't stay on the market long enough to schedule that second on-site.

drewp41 5y ago

Software engineering is one of the most lucrative and high paying jobs out there and y’all want an extra few hundred for doing interviews?? Come on now. I understand the point being made in the article but that amount of money just isn’t the best incentive

jstx1 5y ago

1. Be a company whose mission is to "Create, share & reward paid coding tasks". 2. Make an article with a self-serving title encouring paid coding tasks. 3. Provide no justification. 4. Cover up the lack of justification with a graph of a normal distribution. Mention standard deviations for additional perception of credibility. 5. Share this with people who would like to be paid for things they would do anyway. (The CEO of the company posted this on HN) 6. Profit?

ctvo 5y ago
It really is the definition of clickbait. The article is so low quality I have a negative view of the co now.
- dudul 5y ago
  When I reached the end of the "article" I thought that my browser had failed to load 2/3 of the page. The part where they would explain how they then started using this for professionals as opposed to interns, where they measured how it improved the quality of their hiring, where they would explain if there is any screening before getting people into the "paid for" program.
mylons 5y ago
coincidentally I just finished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_(South_Park) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsored_Content_(South_Park) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising is playing. This is just an advertisement, unpaid. I had no idea who the company was until reading this, and also thought it was an incredibly thin post lacking any real justification for what it’s trying to do. It also has a clickbaity headline for the general consumer of HN. The Ads just keep evolving.
camgunz 5y ago
I appreciate the DD you did and admit to feeling a little hoodwinked, but in fairness the CEO did do a Show HN [1] a couple days ago. I can imagine bootstrapping a startup, not getting any interest on a Show HN, and doing some blog posts to continue marketing. I think really the only thing off here is the lack of a kind of "Try Algora! We automate paid SWE interviews" section somewhere. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236640

mgraczyk 5y ago

I agree with the conclusion, and my startups always use a 1-2 week paid "microinternship" before final hiring decisions (unless I've worked with the person before). That being said, this article makes no sense. The justification it gives sounds like it was autogenerated by a bad markov chain. First it claims without justification that market salary equals "mean productivity", which already isn't true. But suppose that we believe that. Then it says that there is a large productivity difference between good and bad engineers. Ok. Finally it says (paraphrasing), "because good engineers are so much more productive, it's rational to pay them for interviewing." But that's just a restatement of the title of the article, not an argument. For single day interviews, I think the opposite is true because of adverse selection. Good engineers aren't looking for 1 day of pay, they are looking for a job. The people who value your 1 day paid interview the most are people who are not looking for a job.

tvanantwerp 5y ago

I'm looking at a 4 hour interview in my near future, so yes I'd like remuneration. But even more than that, I'd like an interview that doesn't take 4 hours.

tdeck 5y ago
4 hours seems like a dream. The typical process seems to include: 20 minute chat with recruiter to introduce yourself 2 40 minute phone screen 5 hours of "onsite" interviews 1-2 15 minute recap chats with recruiter Possible additional 40 minute interview with hiring manager to sell you on offer It's almost impossible to do more than 3 of these in a week because companies all have times that don't work for them, and quite often have certain days of the week that they don't interview on.

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Waterluvian 5y ago

Make the entire interview process take less than 5 hours. If you’re anxious about hiring a fake or someone who isn’t cutting it, get better at firing faster. Only once have I seen an employer show a new employee the door within that “six month probation period” they talked about. This is basically the ultimate form of paying people for an interview: the interview happens on the job for a while. It also would help with an issue I’ve struggled with a lot: learning that the person is a jerk who doesn’t work well with others and has loud holy war opinions on minutiae. A valid criticism of this approach is that it can be expensive and disruptive to turnover a position in three months.

dehrmann 5y ago

It sounds like it was specifically for a real, non-trivial problem out of their backlog. > the strongest candidates self-selected into this paid screening challenge ... > to make developer interviews more valid & inclusive, introduce payments. This still makes them exclusive. Someone with a full-time job who's busy with life could easily not care about $600--they're time-limited, not money limited. They also provide little evidence supporting their motivation of hiring better engineers. I buy that better engineers are better for the company, they just didn't show that paid interviews select better engineers. All that said, I agree that a long-ish, real-world problem is a great indicator of job performance. Paying people just means you're not taking advantage of them. The bigger problem is still around time.

shonenknifefan1 5y ago

My initial thought is that paid interviews might shift the incentive of candidates from getting hired to doing more interviews regardless of interest in a given company. That might lead to a reduction in the interview -> hire rate, which then might increase the cost per hire even without considering the payout to the candidates for interviewing. This hypothesis should be testable. Though, the dynamics would probably be different if this policy became an industry standard.

ummonk 5y ago

If you’re gonna give out take home project, they should definitely be paid. I tend to reject take home projects out of hand because they take up my time but not the company’s, unlike a phone interview. I need to know the company is serious and values my time.

learc83 5y ago
We do take home projects instead of whiteboard challenges. Grading the take home takes me longer than doing a whiteboard interview.
dudul 5y ago
Once you submit your take home what do you think happens? We do it at my current company and I usually spend around 45minutes to review a take home and submit (what I think is) useful feedback. And I have to do a few a week. Definitely takes some of the company's time. What method do you prefer over a take-home?

learc83 5y ago

The only other industry I can think of that has interviews anywhere as close to as ridiculous as ours is the performing arts. Why is that other industries don’t need 6+ rounds of interviews for experienced candidates?

dudul 5y ago
I often wonder the same thing. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that most (all? I don't think so but maybe) other industries can rely on trusted licenses, degrees, certificates, etc. Now I'll admit I never interviewed to be a lawyer, or a plumber or a telemarketer so maybe I don't have a clear picture of what other industries do.
- learc83 5y ago
  I have talked to many friends in other industries. Some of them are heavily regulated—my wife’s a doctor and her interviews are basically just people spending a lot of money showing her around and begging her to work there. Some of them aren’t heavily regulated. I have many friends in engineering disciplines that don’t require FE or PE exams, and they don’t need to deal with any of this nonsense. I think our industry is just very prone to following trends for whatever reason. I would love it if we grew up a bit and introduced more regulation.

divbzero 5y ago

DuckDuckGo does something similar: they run a paid test project as part of their hiring process.

dudul 5y ago

Great, it was done with interns with good results. Now, was this applied to working professionals? Why is the blog post not describing how it worked out? All you can say at this point is that it seemed to have helped to hire interns.

throwaway09223 5y ago

I think this is a stronger argument that we should have more entry-level contractor gigs available with a route toward full-time employment. Because they're easier to fire, contractor positions allow more risk-taking in the hiring process and this increases candidate diversity - true background diversity, not what you see with category-based quota systems. A company will be more likely to hire a person without a pedigree into a contractor role, and once hired they have an opportunity to showcase their aptitude. Interviews are expensive in terms of employee time. Paying a candidate for their time as well wouldn't be the most expensive part of the process, but in general increasing the cost of an interview will serve to decrease the breadth of the process. Companies will probably start to become sensitive to people they perceive as profiting from the interview process and restrict access accordingly. I think this would be ultimately detrimental to the goal of scouting new talent.

joecot 5y ago
Different strokes for different folks, but I immediately dismiss any job posting that mentions contract to hire. Even if it's a 2 week trial. I have a mortgage to pay and regular expenses, and given I've had secure full-time development work for over a decade, I would never jump from a secure job to a contract position where a company does not have to offer benefits or even the courtesy of actually firing me so I can collect unemployment. If a company wants me to have wizard of oz style interviews, sure, I'll jump those hoops until I have an offer from a company I like. But I'm not going to sit in financial limbo while a company decides if I'm worth keeping or not. Of course for someone just starting in the industry, or comfortable with contract work, this might be fine. But I imagine many SWEs have no interest in contract to hire for similar reasons.
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Well, sure. I wouldn't take contract work either at this point in my career. But on the other hand I don't really have to do technical interviews at all anymore. After a point everything is reputation and networking. Contract work is important for people just breaking into the field.

enumjorge 5y ago

This article is disappointingly shallow. Maybe it worked for Algora, but it doesn’t mean it would scale well across the industry. Then there’s the problem with undesirable secondary effects as other comments on this thread have mentioned. I’ve done hiring before and the fact that the cost of considering a candidate is relatively low both in terms of cost and time, meant that I could consider candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. A resume and job application only tell you so much. If I was on the fence about someone it was easy to jump on a call for an hour with them to get more data. Sure the signal you can get from an hour long interview isn’t great, but it’s something. If there was a higher cost associated with bringing a candidate in (more than the wage, I’d be worried about the paperwork involved), employers might start relying even more on signals like alma mater status, current employer pedigree etc. as first pass filter before bringing someone in.

thatjamesdude 5y ago

Vastly misunderstood this from the title and I suspect a few others have as well. This seems to be more about internships than interviews for a qualified professional (or whatever you want to call those candidates). Just make unpaid internships illegal. If you do work for a company that a paid employee would normally do, then you should be compensated. But not paying someone to run around and get you coffee is just completely nonsensical these days. I'd laugh all the way out of the door, and my country has a 40% unemployment rate. I'm just not going to do work I don't get paid for, because it turns out living is expensive.

orangegreen 5y ago

Or, once companies start paying for interviews, they start outsourcing all of their work to interviewees, never hiring anyone. I don't think this would ever actually scale well, but if there's any way to exploit labor, corporations are going to figure out how.

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moondev 5y ago

> Earlier this year we decided to hire summer interns. We wanted to know how well someone would perform on the job, so we gave our top candidates a real paid task from our backlog. Was the first interview sprint planning?

jkingsbery 5y ago

It's an interesting idea, but there are lots of problems this article doesn't address. At most of the companies I've worked for, there is a bunch of up front ramp up before someone can complete even a simple task. You have to become familiar with a team's frameworks, the business context, and the structure of the code base. To do one real task then requires all that ramp up first (or else, you'd need to simplify it so it's not a real task). How big a task? If you are interviewing new college grads, it might not matter, but people who already have industry experience either have to use a large chunk of vacation time or leave their current job if the task is non-trivial (taking, say, a sprint or two to do). How much do you pay? Do you have a fixed bounty? Do you pay senior engineers more? I get how you want to see someone do this for real, but I've already built something like this 20 times. If a company trying to recruit me asked me to build this, I could spend a few hours building it again, or I could just tell you about the times I did something like that (and the challenges I ran into), which would take 30 minutes.

andrewingram 5y ago

Last year I did a week-long work trial for a popular product startup. I will never do it again, reasons: * The interview pressure of knowing you’re being assessed based on every interaction and piece of output, but for an entire week. * A week isn’t enough time to truly assess what it’s like to work with someone… * …yet, is long enough such that it’s only a viable option for people with capability to dedicate a week. Which basically means the unemployed, or those working at companies where they can take a week off at short notice. * The tax situation can be complicated, which adds to the stress of it all. My anxiety and stress levels have never been higher, and this was after being laid off and a subsequent 6 months of unemployment. If they hadn’t decided against hiring me (apparently my code and product mindset were great, but I didn’t work fast enough), I was ready to decline them on the basis of concluding that this approach to hiring (it was mandatory) was inhumane.

teeray 5y ago

I would much rather have a licensure process that covers the leetcoding part of most interviews rather than having to basically take the equivalent of that exam repeatedly and also for every position you apply to. It is a monumental waste of everyone’s time.

Sanguinaire 5y ago

Alternatively, stop pretending this industry is a precious snowflake and conduct reasonable-duration, non-exploitative interviews like everyone else in the history of modern employment.

lamontcg 5y ago

They could just be less ridiculous instead.

anthuswilliams 5y ago

The article makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims, but one that catches my eye is the idea that paying people to interview is more inclusive because it allows companies to issue challenges that are more representative of the actual job. But are there actually any data out there that support this claim? This is a common canard. I can see how it might make some intuitive sense, but it appears to be utterly mistaken. When I brought up the idea at my current workplace, we ended up choosing not to pay candidates, because almost 100% of our female software engineers declared that they would not have started an interview process where they were being paid unless they were VERY certain they were qualified for the role.

shadilay 5y ago
Who says no to free money if they agree to interview you?
- anthuswilliams 5y ago
  Impostor syndrome is a thing. And if you're paying money, people will opt out because they don't want to feel like they're defrauding you. This viewpoint is strikingly common.