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Article says "There’s no better way to see how someone performs at the job than having them actually do the job." and argues for a trial work period. Well sure

Article says "There’s no better way to see how someone performs at the job than having them actually do the job." and argues for a trial work period. Well sure, except the first part of any job is coming up to speed on the domain, the codebase, who the key people are, etc. So if you want to see how someone really performs, you're going to have to wait a while past that initial period. And that means you're going to have a lot of people who won't make it past the trial needing support.

CobrastanJorji 5y ago
For very small companies, hiring someone with the right skills who will work well with the team is a crucial, "this might make or break our company" decision. I've seen a couple of companies who solve this by having the candidate spend a day pairing with someone on a real problem. When this works (whatever's being worked on is small enough to be understandable, the language/platform/domain/tool isn't completely foreign to the candidate, etc), it's a really great signal. But for very large companies, it's still really bad to hire bad candidates, but it's also important to be efficient. You need multiple opinions on candidates, but the interviewers can't spend a whole day each; it's too expensive. But on the other hand, you have basically an unlimited pool of candidates. So you do whatever's both fast and is unlikely to produce bad "hire" decisions, and supposedly a series of algorithm puzzlers do a good job of being fast and producing a low false positive rate. I'm not sure if that's actually true, but that's the argument. I am sure that the process rejects a huge number of perfectly good programmers, though.
lhorie 5y ago
Yeah, that is one of those claims that sound nice in theory but kinda come crashing down when rubber meets the road. Companies do in fact engage in a process of getting someone in and doing an actual job, they're called internships. The problem is that these arrangements typically involve someone dedicating some non-trivial amount of their time to "babysitting" (not necessarily in the literal sense, but in the sense that a newbie doesn't have historical context or familiarity with processes and workflows, even if they are by all other measures bright individuals w/ actual experience under their belts). Either you spend inordinate amounts of time setting up and maintaining a contrived bubble where a candidate can operate cleanly for a very short period of time, or you're looking at very long evaluation times (requiring a week or more of time from a candidate, who generally already is gainfully employed). It's also worth pointing out that this process is incredibly expensive. One hour of time from a full time employee doesn't really cost anything more than the few minutes lost to context switching (ie. not really that much worse than the person going out to buy a coffee). Literally setting up a paid one week period for a senior level candidate would cost, optimistically, a few hundred dollars for evaluating a single candidate. It's completely unworkable in a large company that conducts dozens of interviews or more per week.
- jcrites 5y ago
  > Literally setting up a paid one week period for a senior level candidate would cost, optimistically, a few hundred dollars for evaluating a single candidate. It’s unworkable for anyone who is already employed. What am I going to do: use a week of vacation for this “interview”? (The fact that I’d be paid is immaterial: I lose vacation time. Plus, the more senior you are, the more of your compensation is in equity. Will I get a week’s worth of an FTE’s both salary and equity just for doing the interview? And at what job level? The highest for which I’m being considered? This wouldn’t be viable for private companies because it would bloat the cap table with a massive number of insubstantial stockholders; and I believe that companies run into SEC compliance issues when they have more than a certain number (1000?) of stockholders. Additionally, when I’m looking for a new position, I don’t just interview with one company. I typically aim to get between five and six offers (on a ~5 year cadence) to get an understanding of the spectrum of market rates for engineers, and to see what options are available. There’s no way I could spend weeks interviewing. Maybe I would consider this if it was my “dream job”; but I’m not sure that the signal from such a trial would be better than typical interview. Many companies have substantial technology stacks of proprietary infrastructure that you need to learn and become proficient with in order to be effective at your job. At recent employers, engineers have felt it takes 1-2 years to feel fully up to speed and effective using the company’s tech stack. With this kind of ramp up time, a one-week trial would only be useful with a make-work fake project. My current employer spends six weeks full time just training all engineers who join the company - before they even begin to have actual responsibilities for doing work on their team.
  - anthuswilliams 5y ago
    The maximum number of stockholders for a private corporation is 2000, and it excludes stock awarded as part of employee grants, so that point is not a factor. But your other points still aptly demonstrate the utter lunacy of this idea.
    - jcrites 5y ago
      Thanks for the information. I was not aware that employee compensation was exempt from that limitation. I couldn't in practice see small companies choosing to go through the hassle of issuing stock to candidates for a week's worth of work though. It would be a lot of legal hassle for a process that's problematic for both sides. Plus, you might end up with the problem of people interviewing at every hot startup that does a "1-week job trial" hoping to get some early stock at the next company that becomes a unicorn in 10 years.
snarf21 5y ago
If that is what they really want, then do a 1099 paying task that takes 40 hours over a months time with a weekly check-in meeting to ask questions not solvable via email. I don't love that idea but it is respectful of everyone's time at least.
- HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
  But then you're not actually working there. That's just an incredibly arduous and expensive take-home.
anthuswilliams 5y ago
Agreed. This idea could only by put forth by someone who has never had to do the work involved in hiring a software engineer.
- dmoy 5y ago
  Or at least never had to do the work involved in hiring a hundred or a thousand software engineers. I definitely believe you can get away with no coding questions like this for smaller organizations. But once you get to a big enough scale, all the other methods have too many issues (e.g. a large class of hiring methods which essentially skip anyone who currently has a job - trial periods). You can't afford to limit your hiring pool too much when you're big enough.
dredmorbius 5y ago
The increasing prevalence of the acqui-hire seems to me to be one manifestation of this. Allow a team to come together, demonstrate an ability to work together, to define a project (hopefully one of interest to the acquirer, if not in the output than in the process which develops it), then hire based on proven ability. Or at least that's one interpretation, and amongst the more charitable, of the practice.
lithos 5y ago
Trial periods and take home assignments also exclude vast swathes of society. Anyone who can’t have an uncertain job, who doesn’t have lots of extra time, is currently employed (compared to a college student getting their first job), and can’t have periods without insurance (for trial periods). Even if that’s a feature you’re looking to “force” into your recruiting program, you’re probably better off getting a “trust fund baby” work force by targeting overseas volunteer work.

CobrastanJorji 5y ago

For very small companies, hiring someone with the right skills who will work well with the team is a crucial, "this might make or break our company" decision. I've seen a couple of companies who solve this by having the candidate spend a day pairing with someone on a real problem. When this works (whatever's being worked on is small enough to be understandable, the language/platform/domain/tool isn't completely foreign to the candidate, etc), it's a really great signal. But for very large companies, it's still really bad to hire bad candidates, but it's also important to be efficient. You need multiple opinions on candidates, but the interviewers can't spend a whole day each; it's too expensive. But on the other hand, you have basically an unlimited pool of candidates. So you do whatever's both fast and is unlikely to produce bad "hire" decisions, and supposedly a series of algorithm puzzlers do a good job of being fast and producing a low false positive rate. I'm not sure if that's actually true, but that's the argument. I am sure that the process rejects a huge number of perfectly good programmers, though.

lhorie 5y ago

Yeah, that is one of those claims that sound nice in theory but kinda come crashing down when rubber meets the road. Companies do in fact engage in a process of getting someone in and doing an actual job, they're called internships. The problem is that these arrangements typically involve someone dedicating some non-trivial amount of their time to "babysitting" (not necessarily in the literal sense, but in the sense that a newbie doesn't have historical context or familiarity with processes and workflows, even if they are by all other measures bright individuals w/ actual experience under their belts). Either you spend inordinate amounts of time setting up and maintaining a contrived bubble where a candidate can operate cleanly for a very short period of time, or you're looking at very long evaluation times (requiring a week or more of time from a candidate, who generally already is gainfully employed). It's also worth pointing out that this process is incredibly expensive. One hour of time from a full time employee doesn't really cost anything more than the few minutes lost to context switching (ie. not really that much worse than the person going out to buy a coffee). Literally setting up a paid one week period for a senior level candidate would cost, optimistically, a few hundred dollars for evaluating a single candidate. It's completely unworkable in a large company that conducts dozens of interviews or more per week.

jcrites 5y ago
> Literally setting up a paid one week period for a senior level candidate would cost, optimistically, a few hundred dollars for evaluating a single candidate. It’s unworkable for anyone who is already employed. What am I going to do: use a week of vacation for this “interview”? (The fact that I’d be paid is immaterial: I lose vacation time. Plus, the more senior you are, the more of your compensation is in equity. Will I get a week’s worth of an FTE’s both salary and equity just for doing the interview? And at what job level? The highest for which I’m being considered? This wouldn’t be viable for private companies because it would bloat the cap table with a massive number of insubstantial stockholders; and I believe that companies run into SEC compliance issues when they have more than a certain number (1000?) of stockholders. Additionally, when I’m looking for a new position, I don’t just interview with one company. I typically aim to get between five and six offers (on a ~5 year cadence) to get an understanding of the spectrum of market rates for engineers, and to see what options are available. There’s no way I could spend weeks interviewing. Maybe I would consider this if it was my “dream job”; but I’m not sure that the signal from such a trial would be better than typical interview. Many companies have substantial technology stacks of proprietary infrastructure that you need to learn and become proficient with in order to be effective at your job. At recent employers, engineers have felt it takes 1-2 years to feel fully up to speed and effective using the company’s tech stack. With this kind of ramp up time, a one-week trial would only be useful with a make-work fake project. My current employer spends six weeks full time just training all engineers who join the company - before they even begin to have actual responsibilities for doing work on their team.
- anthuswilliams 5y ago
  The maximum number of stockholders for a private corporation is 2000, and it excludes stock awarded as part of employee grants, so that point is not a factor. But your other points still aptly demonstrate the utter lunacy of this idea.
  - jcrites 5y ago
    Thanks for the information. I was not aware that employee compensation was exempt from that limitation. I couldn't in practice see small companies choosing to go through the hassle of issuing stock to candidates for a week's worth of work though. It would be a lot of legal hassle for a process that's problematic for both sides. Plus, you might end up with the problem of people interviewing at every hot startup that does a "1-week job trial" hoping to get some early stock at the next company that becomes a unicorn in 10 years.

snarf21 5y ago

If that is what they really want, then do a 1099 paying task that takes 40 hours over a months time with a weekly check-in meeting to ask questions not solvable via email. I don't love that idea but it is respectful of everyone's time at least.

HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
But then you're not actually working there. That's just an incredibly arduous and expensive take-home.

anthuswilliams 5y ago

Agreed. This idea could only by put forth by someone who has never had to do the work involved in hiring a software engineer.

dmoy 5y ago
Or at least never had to do the work involved in hiring a hundred or a thousand software engineers. I definitely believe you can get away with no coding questions like this for smaller organizations. But once you get to a big enough scale, all the other methods have too many issues (e.g. a large class of hiring methods which essentially skip anyone who currently has a job - trial periods). You can't afford to limit your hiring pool too much when you're big enough.

dredmorbius 5y ago

The increasing prevalence of the acqui-hire seems to me to be one manifestation of this. Allow a team to come together, demonstrate an ability to work together, to define a project (hopefully one of interest to the acquirer, if not in the output than in the process which develops it), then hire based on proven ability. Or at least that's one interpretation, and amongst the more charitable, of the practice.

lithos 5y ago

Trial periods and take home assignments also exclude vast swathes of society. Anyone who can’t have an uncertain job, who doesn’t have lots of extra time, is currently employed (compared to a college student getting their first job), and can’t have periods without insurance (for trial periods). Even if that’s a feature you’re looking to “force” into your recruiting program, you’re probably better off getting a “trust fund baby” work force by targeting overseas volunteer work.