7 ms·

I'm not sure why part time contract style "interviews" aren't more common. If I ever got into a situation where I was hiring, it would start with a 2 hour conv

by nickjj 5y ago

I'm not sure why part time contract style "interviews" aren't more common. If I ever got into a situation where I was hiring, it would start with a 2 hour conversation. No coding questions. I want to get to know you and also talk shop about applicable technologies. Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. The interviewer would do the driving to eliminate large amounts of ramp up time. This could be anything from R&D to implementing something real that'll ship to production. This would be paid work of course and the schedule would be based on the interviewee's availability, hopefully at least a few hours a day. The duration depends on how well of a match they are, a better match would have more hours just to filter things over a longer sample size. The person pairing with them (a currently employed dev / tech lead / CTO, etc.) would be doing this work anyways so it's not a time sink, as opposed to them stopping their "real" work to do 5 technical interviews. I'm guessing this would give both a good assessment of how the interviewee thinks through problems and you can get a good sense of where they're at technically. Also you get to see how well you mesh together from a "do I want to work with this person every day?" standpoint. It's also super low risk for the company because you don't need to go through the entire costly hiring process up front. It also lets the person interviewing for the job get a better sense of what it'll be like to really work there. It's a win / win. Why isn't this more popular?

riffraff 5y ago
because people don't have time to do a job and a half, so you'll be selecting for people with copious free time or will to spend the few they have working for you. Works great for students or people unemployed or just graduated, not so much for older people with e.g. a family.
nopenopenopeno 5y ago
Not a chance. I don’t want to be a freelance interviewer and this sounds exhausting. I need a job and to move on with my life.
wrs 5y ago
Most interviewees already have a full time job, and your existing employees don’t want to spend their evening hours pair programming with a candidate. So this doesn’t scale at all. However, this is exactly what I did to hire the first few employees of my startup, because those initial hires are really critical. I was willing to limit my choices and take more time in order to avoid false positives. Also, that was ten years ago in a somewhat less crazy job market.
whimsicalism 5y ago
This comes up routinely. The answer that continues to be true is that if you want to hire talented developers, nobody would agree to this process. You have to understand that, as an employer in the current market, you do not really hold any of the cards if you want to hire talented developers. It's not a win/win. Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job. Let's say it does take 2 weeks to do 20 hours (2 hours a day), you would be compensated $4,000 for working 2 hours a day. Or if you're in between jobs you would have the time to do 20-30 hours in about 1 week and get paid $200 / hour. I guess I'm just picky. I did freelance work for ~20 years and worked on 1 contract very part time for 2 years before deciding I wanted to try something new and work there full time. There was no interview process, I just signed a document and that was it. I couldn't ever in a million years think about joining up at a place based on a few short interviews where 90% of the time is answering their interview questions. As someone who would be hired I really care about what I would be doing most days and what it's like to work there. Of course salary, benefits, TC, etc. is all important too but those are only numbers in the end. I think this short contracting approach looks out more so for the interviewee. This "talented developer" can now pick and choose based on really knowing what it'll be like instead of hoping it's decent based on a couple of interviews. I would have thought a highly talented person isn't concerned about jumping between interviews, getting hired, quitting after 3 weeks because it's not a good fit and repeating the process until they find a good match. Am I just way off base here? Do most folks bounce between jobs every few weeks (going through 5-7 interviews per job) until they find something they like?
  - prepend 5y ago
    My employer requires approval for any outside work. Every prior company except for a few early stage startups did as well. I would not be able to moonlight to interview contract. I wouldn’t quit my current job for this. This is great for unemployed people who don’t have offers from companies that hire without this process. It’s fantastic for people who suck and can’t find work and would love to futz around in these paid interviews for a few thousand.
greggman3 5y ago
In 2012 a Google recruiter told me the got 1 million applications a year. I'm guessing that number is higher in 2022 and it's similar for other similar companies. You can't give 1 million applicants 5-30 hours of contract work. You still need some process to select a few of them. What would that process be?
- Aachen 5y ago
  Nobody said you needed to give contract work to everyone and their dog, or that it was specifically a great idea if you're big enough to get a million applications (proverbially or literally). If it's clearly not a good fit then this wouldn't be offered. If you are doubting then this could be a good way to make a decision with the most information you could possibly have, low risk for the company, the applicant gets paid when they might otherwise be between jobs... there are the caveats mentioned in sibling threads, but in some cases, yeah I can see this being a good idea. We recently rejected someone and I still think that was the right decision, but there is still a chance it wasn't. I wouldn't have minded giving them some contract work to find out if they were competent and just terrible at showing it in an interview. I didn't realise this was even an option. Though in this case it probably wouldn't have worked out due to them currently having a job.
autarch 5y ago
> I would hire you to do 30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. You say this as if most (or any) candidates could do this. If you currently have a job, then you almost certainly won't have time for this, unless you're single with no hobbies. If you do have time, you may not be allowed to moonlight under your current employment contract. And if you don't have a job, you _still_ may not have the time or desire to do this! I'm currently jobless (by choice - I wanted a break) and I started interviewing a few weeks ago. It's exhausting! Even if I could squeeze in 30 hours of work over a couple of weeks, I wouldn't want to. I had 11.5 hours of interviews this past week, and now you want me to spend another 10-15 hours pair programming with you? Absolutely not. If you spread those hours out over many weeks (6 weeks at 5 hours per week) the candidate will be done with the process everywhere else much sooner and they'll just accept an offer before this process finishes. If you want a trial period, make an offer and have a 3-month probation period during which you will give the new hire regular feedback (at least once a month but more often is better). Doesn't every company do this already, at least implicitly?
- 0des 5y ago
  Do you generally have this mindset because you are very successful or is there another track record element I'm missing? I don't recognize the username and wanted to understand your response better.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I don't understand this response? This is going to be the standard mindset for any experienced engineer in the Bay area, at minimum.
  - autarch 5y ago
    Yes, to echo the other response, I don't think my mindset is unusual. What you're suggesting is too much for most candidates. Also, it's a candidate's market right now, at least for experienced devs like myself. I'm getting a good amount of interest in my applications and nowhere I've applied has asked for anything close to 30 hours of my time (5-7 hours total is typical).
monster_group 5y ago
The problem with this approach is that any real task requires a lot of internal knowledge (functional and technical) of the system which an outside candidate will not have. The pairing employee will have lots of it though and it is likely the candidate will appear inadequate even if the employee is aware of the internal knowledge difference. It is not straightforward to be productive on an alien code base from the get go.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of web/sass companies. Even if there is a lot of knowledge, there are so many areas of the code with technical debt that could just be "How would you refactor this code. Here is how it works." or "This is a small error that needs to be handled. Here is how it works. How would you handle it?"
  - sahila 5y ago
    > I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of web/sass companies I entirely disagree with this except for the most trivial things you describe. And for those trivial things, does your company just have a never ending list of these things which are not fixed. Feels like you go through 2 candidates (60 hours) and that backlog is now cleared.
    - nouveaux 5y ago
      I find it hard to believe that most web/sass companies are not doing the same kinds of queries to the database, consuming stripe APIs the same way, or adding a job to a queue in similar fashion. I think this is true even in the open source world. Any senior dev should be able to pair with someone knowledgeable and provide value, with the exception of very technical code bases. Most web/sass companies do not have very technical code bases. I would give the same bug to all the candidates for baseline purposes.
in_cahoots 5y ago
Most people with jobs probably can’t devote 5-30 hours to contract work during the workday. Plus most employment contracts won’t allow this kind of side gig.
prewett 5y ago
It might be low risk for the company, but it’s not low risk for anyone who already has a job that they want to keep until they find a new one. You can’t take a week of vacation for a bunch of companies. It would work for people without a job or contractors, but in the latter case, they probably are looking for contract work not W2 employment, so you’d be better off with contract-to-hire.
QuarterReptile 5y ago
You're describing an internship, but one where (a) the intern gets that much attention than normal, and (b) someone experienced is doing an internship.
marssaxman 5y ago
In addition to the obstacles others have mentioned, accounting for contract work creates extra nuisance at tax time. A tiny gig like you describe sounds like a lot of hassle for not a lot of money.
Fordec 5y ago
People have jobs and lives. The only people this gets are unemployed and self employed people who have nothing to lose or the time to spare. This strategy poaches nobody of worth with an ounce of self respect.
VirusNewbie 5y ago
Its a good idea but the thing about big orgs is you aren’t paying the big bucks for 99% of the labor, you’re paying because the one day the developer has to make a decision that does impact something at scale or in the hot path they don’t fuck up. The differentiation between good and great doesn’t come into play on the average workday.
paxys 5y ago
Are you going to pay me $250/hr for that time? If not, why would I spend 30 hours of my life vying for a chance for a full time job with your company? And what about my current job?
- Aachen 5y ago
  Those are some high standards, you value your time at 250×8×5×52= half a million a year? I don't disagree that 30 hours is way over the top for an interview question unless you happen to find it as much fun as <insert your favorite hobby>, or if it's somehow usefully spent time for other reasons, but your response seems to be at an equally extreme end of the spectrum.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    An average FAANG SWE (l4-l5 equivalent across all including msft) is pulling in 250-400K salaried. Convert that to hourly corp-to-corp rates and yeah you're looking at a billable rate of 200/hr or more for a lot of potential hires.
  - ByteJockey 5y ago
    This isn't a guaranteed full time job. For all intents and purposes, it's a short term contract with very little notice. Dev time is like anything else, if you buy in bulk (say... 2000 hours a year) and on a regular schedule, you can get some pretty good discounts. I'm in the mid-west, and that's a little under my rate for short-term low-notice (read: emergency) contract work. I can't imagine anyone on either of the coasts is going to jump at it.
    - nickjj 5y ago
      > I can't imagine anyone on either of the coasts is going to jump at it. So for clarity, they will jump to do 10 hours for 5-7 technical interviews at $0 but won't do 10 hours of paid contracting work where they get $2,000? I can't speak for anyone other than myself but $200 / hour is pretty damn competitive for any contract work no matter where you live. That's $192,000 a year if you put in 20 hours a week (half the normal 40 hours that most folks put in). I wouldn't classify this as emergency work either. You're getting notified of a contracting opportunity in the form of an interview. I spent ~20 years doing contract work. If someone messaged me on Wednesday, unless I'm really busy chances are I could start working with them the upcoming Monday. Sometimes I do find myself booked for weeks or months but if someone comes to me for an oddball job where I know it's only 5-15 hours of work and they're cool with me only putting in 1-2 hours a day then I can almost always find time to do it, even when I'm at near max "comfortable" capacity (~40 hours of contracting work a week).
Tao331 5y ago
Turn the table. How would you feel about your employees doing work for someone else on the side? I know some people are cool with their employees moonlighting, but I'm pretty sure it's still a minority.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > Turn the table. How would you feel about your employees doing work for someone else on the side? The alternative isn't much better. The current standard interview process leaves your employees going behind your back to interview for jobs with better compensation and the moment one of those offers materializes they put in their 2 weeks notice without blinking an eye.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
>Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. So they have to be unemployed while interviewing with you? Companies these day seem to be completely oblivious to the candidate already having a job but it's usually the case. Other than that it doesn't sound bad, but it's kind of a big problem.
- nickjj 5y ago
  > So they have to be unemployed while interviewing with you? If you're doing 5-7 normal interviews that could end up being 5-15 hours worth of interviews. The time issue is shared with both styles of interviews. I know I said 5-30 for contracting but at this point if you're doing 15 hours of normal interviews it's not really much different to do 20 or 30 hours of contract interviews. It's just a longer process, which IMO is beneficial because you (as the person being interviewed) get to see a better picture of what it's like there. Plus this 30 hours isn't set in stone, maybe after 5 or 10 hours you find out you're a perfect match and now it's the same time as standard interviews except you've gotten paid for it too.

by nickjj 5y ago

riffraff 5y ago

because people don't have time to do a job and a half, so you'll be selecting for people with copious free time or will to spend the few they have working for you. Works great for students or people unemployed or just graduated, not so much for older people with e.g. a family.

nopenopenopeno 5y ago

Not a chance. I don’t want to be a freelance interviewer and this sounds exhausting. I need a job and to move on with my life.

wrs 5y ago

Most interviewees already have a full time job, and your existing employees don’t want to spend their evening hours pair programming with a candidate. So this doesn’t scale at all. However, this is exactly what I did to hire the first few employees of my startup, because those initial hires are really critical. I was willing to limit my choices and take more time in order to avoid false positives. Also, that was ten years ago in a somewhat less crazy job market.

whimsicalism 5y ago

This comes up routinely. The answer that continues to be true is that if you want to hire talented developers, nobody would agree to this process. You have to understand that, as an employer in the current market, you do not really hold any of the cards if you want to hire talented developers. It's not a win/win. Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job.

nickjj 5y ago
> Nobody with options is going to accept multiple weeks of limbo in exchange for maybe having a job. Let's say it does take 2 weeks to do 20 hours (2 hours a day), you would be compensated $4,000 for working 2 hours a day. Or if you're in between jobs you would have the time to do 20-30 hours in about 1 week and get paid $200 / hour. I guess I'm just picky. I did freelance work for ~20 years and worked on 1 contract very part time for 2 years before deciding I wanted to try something new and work there full time. There was no interview process, I just signed a document and that was it. I couldn't ever in a million years think about joining up at a place based on a few short interviews where 90% of the time is answering their interview questions. As someone who would be hired I really care about what I would be doing most days and what it's like to work there. Of course salary, benefits, TC, etc. is all important too but those are only numbers in the end. I think this short contracting approach looks out more so for the interviewee. This "talented developer" can now pick and choose based on really knowing what it'll be like instead of hoping it's decent based on a couple of interviews. I would have thought a highly talented person isn't concerned about jumping between interviews, getting hired, quitting after 3 weeks because it's not a good fit and repeating the process until they find a good match. Am I just way off base here? Do most folks bounce between jobs every few weeks (going through 5-7 interviews per job) until they find something they like?
- prepend 5y ago
  My employer requires approval for any outside work. Every prior company except for a few early stage startups did as well. I would not be able to moonlight to interview contract. I wouldn’t quit my current job for this. This is great for unemployed people who don’t have offers from companies that hire without this process. It’s fantastic for people who suck and can’t find work and would love to futz around in these paid interviews for a few thousand.

greggman3 5y ago

In 2012 a Google recruiter told me the got 1 million applications a year. I'm guessing that number is higher in 2022 and it's similar for other similar companies. You can't give 1 million applicants 5-30 hours of contract work. You still need some process to select a few of them. What would that process be?

Aachen 5y ago
Nobody said you needed to give contract work to everyone and their dog, or that it was specifically a great idea if you're big enough to get a million applications (proverbially or literally). If it's clearly not a good fit then this wouldn't be offered. If you are doubting then this could be a good way to make a decision with the most information you could possibly have, low risk for the company, the applicant gets paid when they might otherwise be between jobs... there are the caveats mentioned in sibling threads, but in some cases, yeah I can see this being a good idea. We recently rejected someone and I still think that was the right decision, but there is still a chance it wasn't. I wouldn't have minded giving them some contract work to find out if they were competent and just terrible at showing it in an interview. I didn't realise this was even an option. Though in this case it probably wouldn't have worked out due to them currently having a job.

autarch 5y ago

> I would hire you to do 30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. You say this as if most (or any) candidates could do this. If you currently have a job, then you almost certainly won't have time for this, unless you're single with no hobbies. If you do have time, you may not be allowed to moonlight under your current employment contract. And if you don't have a job, you _still_ may not have the time or desire to do this! I'm currently jobless (by choice - I wanted a break) and I started interviewing a few weeks ago. It's exhausting! Even if I could squeeze in 30 hours of work over a couple of weeks, I wouldn't want to. I had 11.5 hours of interviews this past week, and now you want me to spend another 10-15 hours pair programming with you? Absolutely not. If you spread those hours out over many weeks (6 weeks at 5 hours per week) the candidate will be done with the process everywhere else much sooner and they'll just accept an offer before this process finishes. If you want a trial period, make an offer and have a 3-month probation period during which you will give the new hire regular feedback (at least once a month but more often is better). Doesn't every company do this already, at least implicitly?

0des 5y ago
Do you generally have this mindset because you are very successful or is there another track record element I'm missing? I don't recognize the username and wanted to understand your response better.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I don't understand this response? This is going to be the standard mindset for any experienced engineer in the Bay area, at minimum.
- autarch 5y ago
  Yes, to echo the other response, I don't think my mindset is unusual. What you're suggesting is too much for most candidates. Also, it's a candidate's market right now, at least for experienced devs like myself. I'm getting a good amount of interest in my applications and nowhere I've applied has asked for anything close to 30 hours of my time (5-7 hours total is typical).

monster_group 5y ago

The problem with this approach is that any real task requires a lot of internal knowledge (functional and technical) of the system which an outside candidate will not have. The pairing employee will have lots of it though and it is likely the candidate will appear inadequate even if the employee is aware of the internal knowledge difference. It is not straightforward to be productive on an alien code base from the get go.

nouveaux 5y ago
I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of web/sass companies. Even if there is a lot of knowledge, there are so many areas of the code with technical debt that could just be "How would you refactor this code. Here is how it works." or "This is a small error that needs to be handled. Here is how it works. How would you handle it?"
- sahila 5y ago
  > I can't imagine this to be true for the vast majority of web/sass companies I entirely disagree with this except for the most trivial things you describe. And for those trivial things, does your company just have a never ending list of these things which are not fixed. Feels like you go through 2 candidates (60 hours) and that backlog is now cleared.
  - nouveaux 5y ago
    I find it hard to believe that most web/sass companies are not doing the same kinds of queries to the database, consuming stripe APIs the same way, or adding a job to a queue in similar fashion. I think this is true even in the open source world. Any senior dev should be able to pair with someone knowledgeable and provide value, with the exception of very technical code bases. Most web/sass companies do not have very technical code bases. I would give the same bug to all the candidates for baseline purposes.

in_cahoots 5y ago

Most people with jobs probably can’t devote 5-30 hours to contract work during the workday. Plus most employment contracts won’t allow this kind of side gig.

prewett 5y ago

It might be low risk for the company, but it’s not low risk for anyone who already has a job that they want to keep until they find a new one. You can’t take a week of vacation for a bunch of companies. It would work for people without a job or contractors, but in the latter case, they probably are looking for contract work not W2 employment, so you’d be better off with contract-to-hire.

QuarterReptile 5y ago

You're describing an internship, but one where (a) the intern gets that much attention than normal, and (b) someone experienced is doing an internship.

marssaxman 5y ago

In addition to the obstacles others have mentioned, accounting for contract work creates extra nuisance at tax time. A tiny gig like you describe sounds like a lot of hassle for not a lot of money.

Fordec 5y ago

People have jobs and lives. The only people this gets are unemployed and self employed people who have nothing to lose or the time to spare. This strategy poaches nobody of worth with an ounce of self respect.

VirusNewbie 5y ago

Its a good idea but the thing about big orgs is you aren’t paying the big bucks for 99% of the labor, you’re paying because the one day the developer has to make a decision that does impact something at scale or in the hot path they don’t fuck up. The differentiation between good and great doesn’t come into play on the average workday.

paxys 5y ago

Are you going to pay me $250/hr for that time? If not, why would I spend 30 hours of my life vying for a chance for a full time job with your company? And what about my current job?

Aachen 5y ago
Those are some high standards, you value your time at 250×8×5×52= half a million a year? I don't disagree that 30 hours is way over the top for an interview question unless you happen to find it as much fun as <insert your favorite hobby>, or if it's somehow usefully spent time for other reasons, but your response seems to be at an equally extreme end of the spectrum.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  An average FAANG SWE (l4-l5 equivalent across all including msft) is pulling in 250-400K salaried. Convert that to hourly corp-to-corp rates and yeah you're looking at a billable rate of 200/hr or more for a lot of potential hires.
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  This isn't a guaranteed full time job. For all intents and purposes, it's a short term contract with very little notice. Dev time is like anything else, if you buy in bulk (say... 2000 hours a year) and on a regular schedule, you can get some pretty good discounts. I'm in the mid-west, and that's a little under my rate for short-term low-notice (read: emergency) contract work. I can't imagine anyone on either of the coasts is going to jump at it.
  - nickjj 5y ago
    > I can't imagine anyone on either of the coasts is going to jump at it. So for clarity, they will jump to do 10 hours for 5-7 technical interviews at $0 but won't do 10 hours of paid contracting work where they get $2,000? I can't speak for anyone other than myself but $200 / hour is pretty damn competitive for any contract work no matter where you live. That's $192,000 a year if you put in 20 hours a week (half the normal 40 hours that most folks put in). I wouldn't classify this as emergency work either. You're getting notified of a contracting opportunity in the form of an interview. I spent ~20 years doing contract work. If someone messaged me on Wednesday, unless I'm really busy chances are I could start working with them the upcoming Monday. Sometimes I do find myself booked for weeks or months but if someone comes to me for an oddball job where I know it's only 5-15 hours of work and they're cool with me only putting in 1-2 hours a day then I can almost always find time to do it, even when I'm at near max "comfortable" capacity (~40 hours of contracting work a week).

Tao331 5y ago

Turn the table. How would you feel about your employees doing work for someone else on the side? I know some people are cool with their employees moonlighting, but I'm pretty sure it's still a minority.

nickjj 5y ago
> Turn the table. How would you feel about your employees doing work for someone else on the side? The alternative isn't much better. The current standard interview process leaves your employees going behind your back to interview for jobs with better compensation and the moment one of those offers materializes they put in their 2 weeks notice without blinking an eye.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

>Then after that is simple. I would hire you to do 5-30 hours of contract work where we pair program on real life things. So they have to be unemployed while interviewing with you? Companies these day seem to be completely oblivious to the candidate already having a job but it's usually the case. Other than that it doesn't sound bad, but it's kind of a big problem.

nickjj 5y ago
> So they have to be unemployed while interviewing with you? If you're doing 5-7 normal interviews that could end up being 5-15 hours worth of interviews. The time issue is shared with both styles of interviews. I know I said 5-30 for contracting but at this point if you're doing 15 hours of normal interviews it's not really much different to do 20 or 30 hours of contract interviews. It's just a longer process, which IMO is beneficial because you (as the person being interviewed) get to see a better picture of what it's like there. Plus this 30 hours isn't set in stone, maybe after 5 or 10 hours you find out you're a perfect match and now it's the same time as standard interviews except you've gotten paid for it too.