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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 o
by 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 agoThe 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 agoThanks 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.
- lordnacho 5y agoThis might change when a lot of people are remote. I could see people working a second job temporarily to see if they want to jump ship.