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According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expec

by jerf 4y ago

According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complaint would smoothly shift to it not being enough money and still being too much work), and you shouldn't just hire people with the intention of rapidly firing them if they don't work out because that's cruel to uproot them like that if you're just going to fire them. Recruiters are also out because they suck and also drain money out of the transaction for no gain since they bring no value to the process. Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Or something like that. Setting limits on what you will do is good, and ghosting is bad, certainly. But in the end, you're going to have to do something unfun to get hired. There's no way around it. I know we'd all love to live in a world where Google one day just logs on to LinkedIn and is so impressed by the sheer brilliance of our awesomeness which just somehow oozes through our listing despite the fact we didn't have to do anything to demonstrate it, as it's also unrealistic to expect programmers to have a lot of publicly-available demonstrations of their skill such as open source projects (forgot to mention that one!), that instead of hitting you with a job interview they just lead with a job offer for their best position, but that's just not going to happen.

ipaddr 4y ago
Or hire in the same way other positions in the company are: through an interview..
jjav 4y ago
> Apparently the approved HN method Not that there's an approved method, but the best one IMO (and which I've been using succesfully for 25+ years) is to carefully read the person's resume and have an in-depth conversation about projects they have worked on. No trick questions, no whiteboard memorizations, just a normal conversation about the work they claim in their resume they have done.
stakkur 4y ago
“The prevailing opinions of my peers shows them idiots, while I walk enlightened but unheard” —Oscar Wilde
CJefferson 4y ago
You seem to have rapidly skipped over the exact thing no-one complains about -- a take-home piece of work paid at a reasonable rate. You just claimed people would complain. I've done exactly this, and everyone seemed happy.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  It shows you are serious about the candidate and feels like a reasonable level of risk on both sides.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  This rules out anybody who isn’t permitted to do that by their existing contract (which is the majority of people depending on jurisdiction) and still disadvantages people who are time-poor. It’s not much of a silver bullet.
- stephencanon 4y ago
  The only real issue with this one is that many folks you might want to hire are prevented from doing outside piecework like this by their contract with their current employer. That's not a dealbreaker, it just means that you either don't hire those folks, or you have two systems available.
  - tommoor 4y ago
    Also visas, almost anyone on an employee sponsored work visa is not permitted to undertake contract work.
    - morelisp 4y ago
      Also people with no visas. At the point in time we're hiring, many of the people we're talking to don't have the legal right to work for us.
      - em-bee 4y ago
        that's not true if they are in their home country.
wikfwikf 4y ago
'The HN gestalt' seems to mean that you have taken comments by completely different people with different preferences and synthesized them as though they were all said by the same person?
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  If you're trying to satisfy everyone, is that not a fine thing to do? And if you aren't trying to satisfy everyone, then I guess the current interview process is fine.
- warrenm 4y ago
  And that that "same person" is somehow the zeitgeist of HN itself!
  - Tevias 4y ago
    That sounds more like the kaput poltergeist of HN! … Now, I want to eat pumpernickel and am shaken by wanderlust in the hinterland.
lapcat 4y ago
> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit AFAICT the null hypothesis has yet to be disproven in tech hiring.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  There are enough lemons on the job market that this barely even bears examination. Anyone who's ever looked at a pile of incoming resumes can see at a glance that selecting at random from them is going to get a viable employee with vanishingly small probability. Anyone's who's tried to interview from even a selected pool of those can assume that the actual pool of candidates is overall even worse than it looks on paper. Actual hiring results look a lot in abstract like dartboarding after trying to filter out the obviously unfit applicants, and while people can reasonably disagree on how hard to filter, not at all seems like a good way to put yourself out of business.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    Filter your resumes however you like before you throw the dart. In any case, the dart throwing method can't be criticized simply because it produces lemons, because no hiring process is perfect. Every company from top to bottom makes bad hires. So you've got to compare the overall results, which will contain both good and bad. One big advantage of the dart throwing method is that it will randomly select good people who tend to be overlooked by hiring managers because they don't interview well.
    - naniwaduni 4y ago
      > Filter your resumes however you like before you throw the dart. Yes, now your process is indistinguishable from existing hiring pipelines. The darts happen to be weighted in all sorts of ways you don't have full insight into, but hey, so are literal dart throws. > In any case, the dart throwing method can't be criticized simply because it produces lemons, because no hiring process is perfect. Every company from top to bottom makes bad hires. So you've got to compare the overall results, which will contain both good and bad. The problem is not that it makes some bad hires. The problem is that you will make >90% bad hires if you don't do filtering, and once you bring a few of them on and word gets out you will be making net >100% bad hires by this process.
sarchertech 4y ago
You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative industries do it. At least then I could use it multiple times. What I don’t like is being treated like a new grad when I have close to 20 years of experience.
- smnrchrds 4y ago
  > I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. As a mechanical engineer with sufficient years of experience that would be considered senior in the software world but intermediate in the mechanical world, I have had interviews where we only talked, interviews where I was given a task and put in front of a computer with one hour to complete it, and interviews where I was sent a problem to work on at home. These interview techniques, while perhaps more prevalent, are by no means limited to the software world.
- smugma 4y ago
  Having hired (and been hired) for both technical and non-technical roles, I personally prefer whiteboard coding interviews (or phone screens asking how they’d design X) to the more abstract business questions, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Within a few minutes I can figure out if a candidate knows SQL better than I do (not that hard to do, basic joins maybe a HAVING clause) or if they took a class and forgot most of it and don’t know what it means to de-normalize data. I can do the same with Excel. But I still don’t know how to effectively judge whether a candidate is effective at closing deals, what their work ethic is, how they actually support team members, are self-starters, etc. It’s much harder to do. Technical fields have a huge advantage in being able to assess skills with objective criteria. It’s not perfect and interview anxiety is real, but it seems a lesser challenge than how business fields hire.
- morelisp 4y ago
  I don't know any other trade that so thoroughly rejects apprenticeships, licensure, and formal certifications.
wowokay 4y ago
Also it should ooz through our LinkedIn profile. They can verify the experience.
bluGill 4y ago
> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Name me one interview method that actually has better results than that? Okay, lets eliminate the ones that are obviously unqualified from the ones we paste up, is your method still better? Most people interviewing honestly have no reason to believe they have a better method. There has been a fair amount of scientific research about how to select good employees, but none of that has made it to the people interviewing. I don't know much that will help, but HR really should be finding scientific basis for how to interview and training people on that.
- dbrgn 4y ago
  Links to such scientific research would be welcome!
  - bluGill 4y ago
    I know it exists, or at least my HR department tells me it exists, but I have no idea how to find it. All I know is HR claims the interview training I've had is based on research. (the STARs system which dates to the 1950s, I'm not sure if it is still considered a good system in research)
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  > Name me one interview method that actually has better results than that? Okay, lets eliminate the ones that are obviously unqualified from the ones we paste up, is your method still better? Once we admit "eliminate the ones that are obviously unqualified", there's no longer a principled distinction between dartboarding and what we actually have, it's just a matter of degree of filtering. The optimal level of filtering is almost inherently going to look higher to employers and lower to applicants based on their incentives. Fixing this is a coordinated action problem.
dvdhnt 4y ago
Replies seem to miss your point. No matter how a company hires, some group of people will be upset and complain about it. The real issue is that the company ghosted OP rather than provide feedback and closure. Personally, the more experience I gain, the better the hiring process becomes.
jeremymcanally 4y ago
Finally, someone with a sensible position on this. Interviewing sucks, but the people on the other side of the table don't know you or your skillset. You have to give them some sort of objective information to work with. The position I really don't understand are those who think as a "senior" (whatever that means) engineer you should be able to walk in, answer a few questions, and then be hired just because you have a long resume. And I say this as someone who has a long resume with pretty good pedigree. It really doesn't work that way. Your resume is basically the Instagram version of your work life (and let's not pretend otherwise). I've worked on a couple of teams that hired solely on the "strength of the résumé," and it was, honestly, a disaster. The two people I know we hired on that basis quickly cycled out (one fired, one quit) because they were pretty terrible. We realized they were just good interviewers who couldn't actually ship very good code. Maybe the issue was on us with a bad set of interview questions, but had we asked them to do even a simple take home, we'd have sussed out the issues really quickly.
- BossingAround 4y ago
  You can't control for all edge cases in an interview. Having an interview process exactly like Google won't give your company Google-like engineers.
  - LocalPCGuy 4y ago
    Most smaller companies also don't want Google-like engineers, I would posit.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > I've worked on a couple of teams that hired solely on the "strength of the résumé," > We realized they were just good interviewers It sounds like they didn't hire solely on the strength of the résumé, because then wouldn't interview performance be irrelevant? In contrast, there are people with strong résumés who don't interview well, regardless of the interviewing method. > The two people I know we hired on that basis quickly cycled out (one fired, one quit) because they were pretty terrible. This is how it should work, I think. Hiring is extremely difficult. Mistakes will be made. The key is to quickly correct those mistakes and move on.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
I don't know if it's still a thing but during many interviews I did for software dev. positions I was simply asked to perform a 30 minute coding task on paper and left alone in a room to do it, plus maybe another 10-20 minutes to fill a questionnaire related to the language of choice. Thinking about it, I think this is a good approach. Duration is right, you're left alone to think, and it's pen and paper so while low tech it does show your own reasoning and your own knowledge of the language (a typo here or there is not critical to the exercise).
BossingAround 4y ago
> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Or something like that. I actually think that'd have, statistically speaking, similar results as right now for a lot of companies that aren't Google.
bambax 4y ago
The problem with tech recruiting is that each company does its own, and so job seekers repeat the process many times with different employers. There should be some kind of test that would be recognized by the industry, that you could attempt once every six months for example, and that would positively assess your ability to code. You would get a score that you could show to recruiters (if you wished to). Some recruiters would accept only 95/100, others 90/100, etc. There could be language assessments as well. I don't understand why this doesn't exist. Or maybe it does exist and is simply ignored? What would it take for companies to trust such a system?
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  This could never work without on-site invigilated exams. Otherwise you will never be able to prove that when Jack applies for a job, Jack took the test. You'll just get an industry of Johns taking the tests for people. This is how language certification works (think TOEFL, IELTS), and that industry still suffers from a massive amount of fraud. If you make a certificate like this too expensive, it serves as a barrier for entry for candidates. If you make it too cheap, the people administering the test will start pushing through candidates as quickly as possible without any regard for academic honesty.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I assume any certification exams where the results can be the difference between getting a good job and not face a huge amount of people who would cheat on them if they could. I know the ones I'm somewhat familiar with have a lot of safeguards in place to the degree that I gather some people found them pretty onerous with remote test taking in the pandemic.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  But what would that test contain? If I go by mainstream, then I guess it would contain some coding task, where you might have to solve algorithm stuff, that you will probably never encounter on the job, or some fake OOP "everything is a class" or "I must use [hot web framework of the month] for trivial things" kind of thing. None of that really tells much about a devs true skill. I think the problem might be, that jobs are so divers as developer. For some jobs maybe the hot web framework of the month is really all you need to know, while other jobs might require you to think about how a system needs to be redesigned to run on some kind of multi server environment. I guess there could be multiple such tests, for each area of expertise one. It would for sure be a lot of work to put them together. One would also need rotating problem sets or questions. Also: Who is going to create these tests? I hope the idea is not big tech or some kind of government participation. Big tech would quickly make it a filter for only themselves, making their tech stacks assumed knowledge in the tests, and government would probably come up with something hopelessly backward like testing your Cobol skills or demanding you write an HTML 4 website, while you have gotten used to more semantic HTML 5 years ago. I think it is a nice idea, but there are many questions about how it could be usefully implemented.
Double_a_92 4y ago
In what other professions do you need to take some practical test during an interview? Do you hear of electrical engineers that are asked to draw some circuit on a whiteboard, or to solder something?
- buildbot 4y ago
  Actually, when I was an undergrad looking for internships, I interviewed at Blue Origin for some embedded role and was asked to draw an simple RC circuit. I was super nervous and forgot the symbol for a capacitor, and just told my interviewer that and made one up. I did not get an offer from them (luckily, in retrospect)
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    Notice that this was for an internship. This kind of thing is commune for new grads, not people with experience.
    - buildbot 4y ago
      Fair enough, I would not know as I ended up in ML research instead haha.
manholio 4y ago
Or you could just pay people for their time at the prevailing rate, > 50$/h cash. Here is your homework, we expect someone at your level to spend no more than two days on it, here is your $800, have fun.
- aitchnyu 4y ago
  This is a lucrative although unethical income for much of the world. I'm an Indian dev with 10 years experience in relatively cutting edge tech and 3 interviews would match my salary.
  - manholio 4y ago
    That's why you use the homework as a final step, after screening CVs, technical interview etc. Taking a burn from time to time from a candidate not really looking for a job yet willing to go through hoops is surely more reasonable for a company than burning all your candidates by the equivalent amount, no?
Mo3 4y ago
> There's no way around it. I never had to
alistairSH 4y ago
I'll counter your straw man with a bit of another... the rest of the white collar world largely gets by without take-home assignments or similar. For example, my wife is an organization development consultant, she's changed jobs a few times over the last 12 years, and never has she had a take-home test. Instead, she has a few rounds of interviews, typically starting with a hiring VP, followed by an SVP or executive, and possibly a panel interview with possible peers. They talk about her previous work in detail, digging into frameworks she's used, papers she's read, etc. And then relate that work to the open position. Personally, I've had reasonable success talking through a basic system design problem. Depending on the candidate's experience level, I can focus on different aspects of the problem... overall design, performance & algorithms, eventual layout of services/components in AWS, etc.
cyber_kinetist 4y ago
The real issue here that nobody talks about: there are just too many people wanting to become programmers. And I mean this in the most sincere way: we need to understand most developers aren't seeking to do programming for intrinsic fun or to create something that helps other people, they do them to earn a livable wage. Programming jobs are the only type of technical job left that actually pays shit (well enough to buy a house and start a family), so each year more and more are trying to hack interviews applying for 6-figure jobs that provide at least a reasonable middle-class life nowadays. So here goes accelerated hyper-competition... Obviously the real solution for this is to abolish wage work (so people actually only do programming that is useful or fun), but many here on HN would think of this as unrealistic, so there's that.
- ryanmercer 4y ago
  >Programming jobs are the only type of technical job left that actually pays shit (well enough to buy a house and start a family), Meh, in the Midwest plenty of jobs pay enough for that, 6-figure tech jobs put you at 3-4x the median income (31k here in Indiana), but plenty of other jobs absolutely pay enough to buy a house (teaching - my wife makes just shy of double median income as a high school teacher, nursing, law enforcement, fire fighting, all sorts of trades, etc).
  - cyber_kinetist 4y ago
    How's the housing market in Indiana? Do you think it's affordable to live there while earning somewhere around 40k ~ 50k? (which is what high school teachers in the area seem to earn, at least from my initial research).
    - ryanmercer 4y ago
      >How's the housing market in Indiana? Well... ya know. Things have been weird lately. My wife and I bought 20 months ago with me making 39k and her making upper 40k. We bought this house with zero down at 170k and it's now estimated at 240-250k per the mortgage company and Zillow. We have about 1200sqft on the ground floor then about 1200 in the basement with a little over half of an acre, we're 30 minutes outside of Indy. House is 1960s. A new construction house in Plainfield, immediately adjacent to Indy, you get 2 bed, 2 bath, 2 car garage, basically no yard with the house at 1504 sqft is starting at 290k right now and can get a 3 bed with similar sqft for closer to 300k. If you picked the neighborhood well, and were ok with not having the latest and greatest features, a single person could still probably pull a mortgage in a safer neighborhood without issue. >somewhere around 40k ~ 50k? (which is what high school teachers in the area seem to earn So this varies wildly. My wife was getting the higher end of that at the rural school she was teaching at, she's moved one school district over and took a considerable pay bump - mind you she has like 12~ years of experience, and once she finishes her masters she'll get a 4-5k pay bump at her next (annual) contract renewal automatically.
glitchc 4y ago
The posturing is uncalled for. We have Jonathan Swift style hoops to jump through because hiring managers do not trust any claims of experience made by candidates. That is the crux of the problem. Perhaps the reason why things are so is that a good chunk of tech revolves around advertising, and it’s easy to think of resumes as ads if you work in that space day in and day out.
crispyambulance 4y ago
> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Yes, but to be fair, I am not convinced that such a method would yield drastically worse results than what is already done at many places. I am not totally being facetious about that either! It's a jungle. People get hired or rejected for all kinds of reasons, meritocracy has less to do with it than we would all like. The best approach is to keep one's professional network well-maintained so that when it comes time to change, your reputation precedes you. That's not always possible. Some jobs really are filled from candidates who drop their resume into an anonymous applicant vat on the web and hope for the best. But I think the best-fit jobs are often obtained when you know someone and they know you.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Every job I've gotten since the one out of grad school has been directly through someone I knew. (Not many of them but a large span of years.) And, yes, one of the interviews was having an informal lunch with the CEO and COO when I hadn't even directly asked about a job yet.
activitypea 4y ago
My rule is that the interview process is symmetrical -- I will not be spending more time in the interview process than people at the company. Whiteboard interviews are personally a red flag, since they're a sign that the company doesn't quite know what they're looking for in an applicant, but they're not exploitative the way takeaway homework is.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Exactly. So, do homework and only apply to those companies that interview the way you want to be interviewed. Devs shouldn't be sending out 250 resumes to rando corps anyway. Figure out who you want to actually work for.
mathverse 4y ago
I had to take a deep breath when I read this comment. As others have mentioned this is a huge strawman. My post was not meant to imply that home assignments are a wrong tool to filter out candidates. It's how it is conducted that makes it a toxic practice. Not providing any meaningful feedback or not paying for a work that takes too much time is what makes it not acceptable.
- ed312 4y ago
  Re the "no meaningful feedback" - this may be laziness or negligence, but in my experience is almost certainly related to liability. "Takes too much time" as a value probably varies widely between engineers. I personally like a system with a take home designed to take 1 hour (we've said so explicitly) but we don't actually cap the time. There is an entirely other camp of engineers who don't want _any_ time limits so they can approach the problem in whatever way they want. At the end of the day you have to make a call re the most efficient use of your team's time to find new folks.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
No other job requires performing free labor to get the job. Within tech, no other position requires it. Outside tech, no technical role I know of requires it. Take-homes exist because companies suck at interviewing tech workers. It should be enough to simply review some code while on a call. Companies should hire senior engineer consultants to do technical interviews. A staff engineer with 15+ years experience can suss out how good another engineer is in 1.5 hrs.
ryanSrich 4y ago
Why not just interview the developer? You can ask them technical questions that very clearly demonstrate if they understand how to code. You can also ask for code samples of past projects, or just pay them to code something small for 1 hour at home. I don’t understand how this is hard. I’ve hired dozens of engineers in the last 10 years. I’ve never needed to resort to any google level leetcode tactics. It’s never made sense to me if the goal is to hire a quality software engineer that can get the job done. Maybe that’s not the goal for companies that make interviewees do this performative bullshit.
brodouevencode 4y ago
There's so much strawmanning and sarcasm in this response. I love it.
conformist 4y ago
Somewhat off-topic: I'm a native German speaker and I'm really struggling to understand what "Gestalt" is supposed to mean in contemporary English usage. Like, "Zeitgeist" seems to be used like I would in German (although far more frequently). What am I missing? Is there some subtle difference in meaning via Yiddish or similar?
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  In contemporary American English (the only language I claim to be somewhat familiar with), they mean the exact same thing - I would say a sort of collective, unspoken understanding of a subject. English is kind of a crazy language I think.
- morsch 4y ago
  Gestalt is used in various contexts, like the psychology (especially the psychology of perception). Here's wiktionary: A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic elements that creates a whole, unified concept or pattern which is other than the sum of its parts, due to the relationships between the parts (of a character, personality, entity, or being) quotations It's also used that way in German, aside from its regular meaning: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt
- rkachowski 4y ago
  A holistic view of a situation - an image viewed / unearthed / discovered via composition of various aspects.
trentwritescode 4y ago
It's not fair to characterized the masses of software developers as being opposed to putting effort into getting jobs. The real challenge is that we all prefer different approaches to the interview and vetting processes while, at the same time, employers are unprepared to accommodate each candidate's style. Nevertheless, I would absolutely not spend 6 hours on a take home assignment without compensation. Capitalists get carried away sometimes...
onion2k 4y ago
But in the end, you're going to have to do something unfun to get hired. It could be an interview. Or a series of interviews. Just like every other job.
shafyy 4y ago
I do think that take home tasks are the best way to hire somebody (or letting somebody bring their existing, recent code and talk about that). At the same time, I think companies should pay applications if this take home task takes more than 1-2 hours. I'm not saying you need to pay a lot, I think it's more a symbolic gesture of respect. Those costs are negligible for a company compared to the money and resources they spend on hiring/recruiting.
- LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  I'd challenge you to consider that take home tasks are better for some interviewees, but others would do better to have that task done as part of the interview (in-person, video). Offering an option (maybe even ahead of time) allows the individual to play to their strengths and situation, and properly designed (and with good questions/exercises to ensure people who are just good interviewees don't BS their way through the process) it shouldn't make much difference which option the interviewee chooses.
  - shafyy 4y ago
    Sure, why not offer an option. But I'm convinced that take home tasks are generally better because that's much closer to the way you actually work as a programmer. People who don't get nervous during live coding might like take home tasks because it's more of a time sink, but I'd wager that they still do good on them.
    - LocalPCGuy 4y ago
      There are a lot of problems with take-home assignments in general and I feel like it discounts that to just say "they are better generally". I disagree with that statement both personally, as an interviewer, and in reading others' anecdotal experiences. It is better "for some people some of the time", but I firmly disagree that can be generalized to a best practice.
      - shafyy 4y ago
drawkbox 4y ago
Contract to hire is the way to go, even if a short time. Most jobs are like that anyways, the first weeks/months are still part of the hiring process. This tests the worker in the actual environment. The contract could even be remote and sectioned off from the larger enterprise, just like any contractors added currently. The important part of contract-to-hire is it shows how the person will communicate while working, which is not really verified in any way with a take-home or whiteboard setup. Going straight to full employment is like going from strangers to marriage, contracting is a dating phase. As someone who has been freelancing/contracting for a long while, it is much preferred to full-time employment and essential ownership anyways. I personally don't mind take home tests, everything you do you can learn from and this gives you somewhat an idea of the type of company you are working with (not necessarily the work). Though they should be paid, as people that are in demand would be more willing to do them as well as the company more invested in reviewing them. However, in no way is the take home test a good indicator of how this person will ship product.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >Most jobs are like that anyways The difference is in the presumed defaults. If you hire me, my assumption is that outside of company/organizational problems/changed of some sort, you'll keep me around so long as I'm reasonably competent. Contract to hire on the other hand , sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us. Which, if someone already has a job or has other good offers in hand, is not going to sound like a great deal unless it's a company/position they really want and are very confident they can do.
  - drawkbox 4y ago
    > sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us Same with interviewing/take-home/whiteboard. It is just a better realistic view of the company. It not only makes it a "wow us" for the worker to the workplace, it is also the workplace to the worker. It is a two way street with a more realistic sample. It also reduces the friction of locked in employment. Creative/programming/product/design are all creative fields, most projects/products like that have more flex/contractor style arrangements based on projects/products not necessarily the company such as movies, music, books, etc. Most of my career has been in games/interactive/agency style projects/products so it may make more sense there. You can't judge creativity and product shipping capabilities with a take-home/whiteboard/interview very well. The sample is much smaller. The better way is the body of work and a real test that is longer or closer to the actual work and timeframes.
mekoka 4y ago
Complaining about unfair practices doesn't imply that you're unwilling to be tested, hence strawman. The recurrence of those complaints indicates that the process could be improved to benefit both parties. Everything you listed can be made better for all. The reasons they're not have to do with a mix of convenience, traditionalism, mimicry and other social factors. Think of all the good reasons companies had to have workers on site a few years ago, but can somehow still make it work remotely today.
rufasterisco 4y ago
you should get the person that will lead me/work with me with on a video call, open up 3 real issues, let me choose one (or more) of them, see how I tackle the problem, let me code the solution (or pair program it), let me google anything I want, and at that point you would know how I work, and I would have a view into what it feels like working for you then (or instead) we might do the opposite: I should have a project on github (or similar) that you can look at beforehand, let you pick an issue, etc etc if the issues are 6 hours issues, the commitment is on both sides: the company has a team member spending those 6 hours too

by jerf 4y ago

ipaddr 4y ago

Or hire in the same way other positions in the company are: through an interview..

jjav 4y ago

> Apparently the approved HN method Not that there's an approved method, but the best one IMO (and which I've been using succesfully for 25+ years) is to carefully read the person's resume and have an in-depth conversation about projects they have worked on. No trick questions, no whiteboard memorizations, just a normal conversation about the work they claim in their resume they have done.

stakkur 4y ago

“The prevailing opinions of my peers shows them idiots, while I walk enlightened but unheard” —Oscar Wilde

CJefferson 4y ago

You seem to have rapidly skipped over the exact thing no-one complains about -- a take-home piece of work paid at a reasonable rate. You just claimed people would complain. I've done exactly this, and everyone seemed happy.

ipaddr 4y ago
It shows you are serious about the candidate and feels like a reasonable level of risk on both sides.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
This rules out anybody who isn’t permitted to do that by their existing contract (which is the majority of people depending on jurisdiction) and still disadvantages people who are time-poor. It’s not much of a silver bullet.
stephencanon 4y ago
The only real issue with this one is that many folks you might want to hire are prevented from doing outside piecework like this by their contract with their current employer. That's not a dealbreaker, it just means that you either don't hire those folks, or you have two systems available.
- tommoor 4y ago
  Also visas, almost anyone on an employee sponsored work visa is not permitted to undertake contract work.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    Also people with no visas. At the point in time we're hiring, many of the people we're talking to don't have the legal right to work for us.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      that's not true if they are in their home country.

wikfwikf 4y ago

'The HN gestalt' seems to mean that you have taken comments by completely different people with different preferences and synthesized them as though they were all said by the same person?

xboxnolifes 4y ago
If you're trying to satisfy everyone, is that not a fine thing to do? And if you aren't trying to satisfy everyone, then I guess the current interview process is fine.
warrenm 4y ago
And that that "same person" is somehow the zeitgeist of HN itself!
- Tevias 4y ago
  That sounds more like the kaput poltergeist of HN! … Now, I want to eat pumpernickel and am shaken by wanderlust in the hinterland.

lapcat 4y ago

> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit AFAICT the null hypothesis has yet to be disproven in tech hiring.

naniwaduni 4y ago
There are enough lemons on the job market that this barely even bears examination. Anyone who's ever looked at a pile of incoming resumes can see at a glance that selecting at random from them is going to get a viable employee with vanishingly small probability. Anyone's who's tried to interview from even a selected pool of those can assume that the actual pool of candidates is overall even worse than it looks on paper. Actual hiring results look a lot in abstract like dartboarding after trying to filter out the obviously unfit applicants, and while people can reasonably disagree on how hard to filter, not at all seems like a good way to put yourself out of business.
- lapcat 4y ago
  Filter your resumes however you like before you throw the dart. In any case, the dart throwing method can't be criticized simply because it produces lemons, because no hiring process is perfect. Every company from top to bottom makes bad hires. So you've got to compare the overall results, which will contain both good and bad. One big advantage of the dart throwing method is that it will randomly select good people who tend to be overlooked by hiring managers because they don't interview well.
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    > Filter your resumes however you like before you throw the dart. Yes, now your process is indistinguishable from existing hiring pipelines. The darts happen to be weighted in all sorts of ways you don't have full insight into, but hey, so are literal dart throws. > In any case, the dart throwing method can't be criticized simply because it produces lemons, because no hiring process is perfect. Every company from top to bottom makes bad hires. So you've got to compare the overall results, which will contain both good and bad. The problem is not that it makes some bad hires. The problem is that you will make >90% bad hires if you don't do filtering, and once you bring a few of them on and word gets out you will be making net >100% bad hires by this process.

sarchertech 4y ago

You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative industries do it. At least then I could use it multiple times. What I don’t like is being treated like a new grad when I have close to 20 years of experience.

smnrchrds 4y ago
> I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. As a mechanical engineer with sufficient years of experience that would be considered senior in the software world but intermediate in the mechanical world, I have had interviews where we only talked, interviews where I was given a task and put in front of a computer with one hour to complete it, and interviews where I was sent a problem to work on at home. These interview techniques, while perhaps more prevalent, are by no means limited to the software world.
smugma 4y ago
Having hired (and been hired) for both technical and non-technical roles, I personally prefer whiteboard coding interviews (or phone screens asking how they’d design X) to the more abstract business questions, both as an interviewer and interviewee. Within a few minutes I can figure out if a candidate knows SQL better than I do (not that hard to do, basic joins maybe a HAVING clause) or if they took a class and forgot most of it and don’t know what it means to de-normalize data. I can do the same with Excel. But I still don’t know how to effectively judge whether a candidate is effective at closing deals, what their work ethic is, how they actually support team members, are self-starters, etc. It’s much harder to do. Technical fields have a huge advantage in being able to assess skills with objective criteria. It’s not perfect and interview anxiety is real, but it seems a lesser challenge than how business fields hire.
morelisp 4y ago
I don't know any other trade that so thoroughly rejects apprenticeships, licensure, and formal certifications.

wowokay 4y ago

Also it should ooz through our LinkedIn profile. They can verify the experience.

bluGill 4y ago

> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Name me one interview method that actually has better results than that? Okay, lets eliminate the ones that are obviously unqualified from the ones we paste up, is your method still better? Most people interviewing honestly have no reason to believe they have a better method. There has been a fair amount of scientific research about how to select good employees, but none of that has made it to the people interviewing. I don't know much that will help, but HR really should be finding scientific basis for how to interview and training people on that.

dbrgn 4y ago
Links to such scientific research would be welcome!
- bluGill 4y ago
  I know it exists, or at least my HR department tells me it exists, but I have no idea how to find it. All I know is HR claims the interview training I've had is based on research. (the STARs system which dates to the 1950s, I'm not sure if it is still considered a good system in research)
naniwaduni 4y ago
> Name me one interview method that actually has better results than that? Okay, lets eliminate the ones that are obviously unqualified from the ones we paste up, is your method still better? Once we admit "eliminate the ones that are obviously unqualified", there's no longer a principled distinction between dartboarding and what we actually have, it's just a matter of degree of filtering. The optimal level of filtering is almost inherently going to look higher to employers and lower to applicants based on their incentives. Fixing this is a coordinated action problem.

dvdhnt 4y ago

Replies seem to miss your point. No matter how a company hires, some group of people will be upset and complain about it. The real issue is that the company ghosted OP rather than provide feedback and closure. Personally, the more experience I gain, the better the hiring process becomes.

jeremymcanally 4y ago

Finally, someone with a sensible position on this. Interviewing sucks, but the people on the other side of the table don't know you or your skillset. You have to give them some sort of objective information to work with. The position I really don't understand are those who think as a "senior" (whatever that means) engineer you should be able to walk in, answer a few questions, and then be hired just because you have a long resume. And I say this as someone who has a long resume with pretty good pedigree. It really doesn't work that way. Your resume is basically the Instagram version of your work life (and let's not pretend otherwise). I've worked on a couple of teams that hired solely on the "strength of the résumé," and it was, honestly, a disaster. The two people I know we hired on that basis quickly cycled out (one fired, one quit) because they were pretty terrible. We realized they were just good interviewers who couldn't actually ship very good code. Maybe the issue was on us with a bad set of interview questions, but had we asked them to do even a simple take home, we'd have sussed out the issues really quickly.

BossingAround 4y ago
You can't control for all edge cases in an interview. Having an interview process exactly like Google won't give your company Google-like engineers.
- LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  Most smaller companies also don't want Google-like engineers, I would posit.
lapcat 4y ago
> I've worked on a couple of teams that hired solely on the "strength of the résumé," > We realized they were just good interviewers It sounds like they didn't hire solely on the strength of the résumé, because then wouldn't interview performance be irrelevant? In contrast, there are people with strong résumés who don't interview well, regardless of the interviewing method. > The two people I know we hired on that basis quickly cycled out (one fired, one quit) because they were pretty terrible. This is how it should work, I think. Hiring is extremely difficult. Mistakes will be made. The key is to quickly correct those mistakes and move on.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

I don't know if it's still a thing but during many interviews I did for software dev. positions I was simply asked to perform a 30 minute coding task on paper and left alone in a room to do it, plus maybe another 10-20 minutes to fill a questionnaire related to the language of choice. Thinking about it, I think this is a good approach. Duration is right, you're left alone to think, and it's pen and paper so while low tech it does show your own reasoning and your own knowledge of the language (a typo here or there is not critical to the exercise).

BossingAround 4y ago

> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Or something like that. I actually think that'd have, statistically speaking, similar results as right now for a lot of companies that aren't Google.

bambax 4y ago

The problem with tech recruiting is that each company does its own, and so job seekers repeat the process many times with different employers. There should be some kind of test that would be recognized by the industry, that you could attempt once every six months for example, and that would positively assess your ability to code. You would get a score that you could show to recruiters (if you wished to). Some recruiters would accept only 95/100, others 90/100, etc. There could be language assessments as well. I don't understand why this doesn't exist. Or maybe it does exist and is simply ignored? What would it take for companies to trust such a system?

ThePadawan 4y ago
This could never work without on-site invigilated exams. Otherwise you will never be able to prove that when Jack applies for a job, Jack took the test. You'll just get an industry of Johns taking the tests for people. This is how language certification works (think TOEFL, IELTS), and that industry still suffers from a massive amount of fraud. If you make a certificate like this too expensive, it serves as a barrier for entry for candidates. If you make it too cheap, the people administering the test will start pushing through candidates as quickly as possible without any regard for academic honesty.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I assume any certification exams where the results can be the difference between getting a good job and not face a huge amount of people who would cheat on them if they could. I know the ones I'm somewhat familiar with have a lot of safeguards in place to the degree that I gather some people found them pretty onerous with remote test taking in the pandemic.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
But what would that test contain? If I go by mainstream, then I guess it would contain some coding task, where you might have to solve algorithm stuff, that you will probably never encounter on the job, or some fake OOP "everything is a class" or "I must use [hot web framework of the month] for trivial things" kind of thing. None of that really tells much about a devs true skill. I think the problem might be, that jobs are so divers as developer. For some jobs maybe the hot web framework of the month is really all you need to know, while other jobs might require you to think about how a system needs to be redesigned to run on some kind of multi server environment. I guess there could be multiple such tests, for each area of expertise one. It would for sure be a lot of work to put them together. One would also need rotating problem sets or questions. Also: Who is going to create these tests? I hope the idea is not big tech or some kind of government participation. Big tech would quickly make it a filter for only themselves, making their tech stacks assumed knowledge in the tests, and government would probably come up with something hopelessly backward like testing your Cobol skills or demanding you write an HTML 4 website, while you have gotten used to more semantic HTML 5 years ago. I think it is a nice idea, but there are many questions about how it could be usefully implemented.

Double_a_92 4y ago

In what other professions do you need to take some practical test during an interview? Do you hear of electrical engineers that are asked to draw some circuit on a whiteboard, or to solder something?

buildbot 4y ago
Actually, when I was an undergrad looking for internships, I interviewed at Blue Origin for some embedded role and was asked to draw an simple RC circuit. I was super nervous and forgot the symbol for a capacitor, and just told my interviewer that and made one up. I did not get an offer from them (luckily, in retrospect)
- sarchertech 4y ago
  Notice that this was for an internship. This kind of thing is commune for new grads, not people with experience.
  - buildbot 4y ago
    Fair enough, I would not know as I ended up in ML research instead haha.

manholio 4y ago

Or you could just pay people for their time at the prevailing rate, > 50$/h cash. Here is your homework, we expect someone at your level to spend no more than two days on it, here is your $800, have fun.

aitchnyu 4y ago
This is a lucrative although unethical income for much of the world. I'm an Indian dev with 10 years experience in relatively cutting edge tech and 3 interviews would match my salary.
- manholio 4y ago
  That's why you use the homework as a final step, after screening CVs, technical interview etc. Taking a burn from time to time from a candidate not really looking for a job yet willing to go through hoops is surely more reasonable for a company than burning all your candidates by the equivalent amount, no?

Mo3 4y ago

> There's no way around it. I never had to

alistairSH 4y ago

I'll counter your straw man with a bit of another... the rest of the white collar world largely gets by without take-home assignments or similar. For example, my wife is an organization development consultant, she's changed jobs a few times over the last 12 years, and never has she had a take-home test. Instead, she has a few rounds of interviews, typically starting with a hiring VP, followed by an SVP or executive, and possibly a panel interview with possible peers. They talk about her previous work in detail, digging into frameworks she's used, papers she's read, etc. And then relate that work to the open position. Personally, I've had reasonable success talking through a basic system design problem. Depending on the candidate's experience level, I can focus on different aspects of the problem... overall design, performance & algorithms, eventual layout of services/components in AWS, etc.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago

The real issue here that nobody talks about: there are just too many people wanting to become programmers. And I mean this in the most sincere way: we need to understand most developers aren't seeking to do programming for intrinsic fun or to create something that helps other people, they do them to earn a livable wage. Programming jobs are the only type of technical job left that actually pays shit (well enough to buy a house and start a family), so each year more and more are trying to hack interviews applying for 6-figure jobs that provide at least a reasonable middle-class life nowadays. So here goes accelerated hyper-competition... Obviously the real solution for this is to abolish wage work (so people actually only do programming that is useful or fun), but many here on HN would think of this as unrealistic, so there's that.

ryanmercer 4y ago
>Programming jobs are the only type of technical job left that actually pays shit (well enough to buy a house and start a family), Meh, in the Midwest plenty of jobs pay enough for that, 6-figure tech jobs put you at 3-4x the median income (31k here in Indiana), but plenty of other jobs absolutely pay enough to buy a house (teaching - my wife makes just shy of double median income as a high school teacher, nursing, law enforcement, fire fighting, all sorts of trades, etc).
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  How's the housing market in Indiana? Do you think it's affordable to live there while earning somewhere around 40k ~ 50k? (which is what high school teachers in the area seem to earn, at least from my initial research).
  - ryanmercer 4y ago
    >How's the housing market in Indiana? Well... ya know. Things have been weird lately. My wife and I bought 20 months ago with me making 39k and her making upper 40k. We bought this house with zero down at 170k and it's now estimated at 240-250k per the mortgage company and Zillow. We have about 1200sqft on the ground floor then about 1200 in the basement with a little over half of an acre, we're 30 minutes outside of Indy. House is 1960s. A new construction house in Plainfield, immediately adjacent to Indy, you get 2 bed, 2 bath, 2 car garage, basically no yard with the house at 1504 sqft is starting at 290k right now and can get a 3 bed with similar sqft for closer to 300k. If you picked the neighborhood well, and were ok with not having the latest and greatest features, a single person could still probably pull a mortgage in a safer neighborhood without issue. >somewhere around 40k ~ 50k? (which is what high school teachers in the area seem to earn So this varies wildly. My wife was getting the higher end of that at the rural school she was teaching at, she's moved one school district over and took a considerable pay bump - mind you she has like 12~ years of experience, and once she finishes her masters she'll get a 4-5k pay bump at her next (annual) contract renewal automatically.

glitchc 4y ago

The posturing is uncalled for. We have Jonathan Swift style hoops to jump through because hiring managers do not trust any claims of experience made by candidates. That is the crux of the problem. Perhaps the reason why things are so is that a good chunk of tech revolves around advertising, and it’s easy to think of resumes as ads if you work in that space day in and day out.

crispyambulance 4y ago

> Apparently the approved HN method is to arrange the resumes on a dartboard, throw darts at it, and commit up front to hiring whoever you hit unconditionally for at least two years without no possibility of having to fire them. Yes, but to be fair, I am not convinced that such a method would yield drastically worse results than what is already done at many places. I am not totally being facetious about that either! It's a jungle. People get hired or rejected for all kinds of reasons, meritocracy has less to do with it than we would all like. The best approach is to keep one's professional network well-maintained so that when it comes time to change, your reputation precedes you. That's not always possible. Some jobs really are filled from candidates who drop their resume into an anonymous applicant vat on the web and hope for the best. But I think the best-fit jobs are often obtained when you know someone and they know you.

ghaff 4y ago
Every job I've gotten since the one out of grad school has been directly through someone I knew. (Not many of them but a large span of years.) And, yes, one of the interviews was having an informal lunch with the CEO and COO when I hadn't even directly asked about a job yet.

activitypea 4y ago

My rule is that the interview process is symmetrical -- I will not be spending more time in the interview process than people at the company. Whiteboard interviews are personally a red flag, since they're a sign that the company doesn't quite know what they're looking for in an applicant, but they're not exploitative the way takeaway homework is.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

Exactly. So, do homework and only apply to those companies that interview the way you want to be interviewed. Devs shouldn't be sending out 250 resumes to rando corps anyway. Figure out who you want to actually work for.

mathverse 4y ago

I had to take a deep breath when I read this comment. As others have mentioned this is a huge strawman. My post was not meant to imply that home assignments are a wrong tool to filter out candidates. It's how it is conducted that makes it a toxic practice. Not providing any meaningful feedback or not paying for a work that takes too much time is what makes it not acceptable.

ed312 4y ago
Re the "no meaningful feedback" - this may be laziness or negligence, but in my experience is almost certainly related to liability. "Takes too much time" as a value probably varies widely between engineers. I personally like a system with a take home designed to take 1 hour (we've said so explicitly) but we don't actually cap the time. There is an entirely other camp of engineers who don't want _any_ time limits so they can approach the problem in whatever way they want. At the end of the day you have to make a call re the most efficient use of your team's time to find new folks.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

No other job requires performing free labor to get the job. Within tech, no other position requires it. Outside tech, no technical role I know of requires it. Take-homes exist because companies suck at interviewing tech workers. It should be enough to simply review some code while on a call. Companies should hire senior engineer consultants to do technical interviews. A staff engineer with 15+ years experience can suss out how good another engineer is in 1.5 hrs.

ryanSrich 4y ago

Why not just interview the developer? You can ask them technical questions that very clearly demonstrate if they understand how to code. You can also ask for code samples of past projects, or just pay them to code something small for 1 hour at home. I don’t understand how this is hard. I’ve hired dozens of engineers in the last 10 years. I’ve never needed to resort to any google level leetcode tactics. It’s never made sense to me if the goal is to hire a quality software engineer that can get the job done. Maybe that’s not the goal for companies that make interviewees do this performative bullshit.

brodouevencode 4y ago

There's so much strawmanning and sarcasm in this response. I love it.

conformist 4y ago

Somewhat off-topic: I'm a native German speaker and I'm really struggling to understand what "Gestalt" is supposed to mean in contemporary English usage. Like, "Zeitgeist" seems to be used like I would in German (although far more frequently). What am I missing? Is there some subtle difference in meaning via Yiddish or similar?

hotpotamus 4y ago
In contemporary American English (the only language I claim to be somewhat familiar with), they mean the exact same thing - I would say a sort of collective, unspoken understanding of a subject. English is kind of a crazy language I think.
morsch 4y ago
Gestalt is used in various contexts, like the psychology (especially the psychology of perception). Here's wiktionary: A collection of physical, biological, psychological or symbolic elements that creates a whole, unified concept or pattern which is other than the sum of its parts, due to the relationships between the parts (of a character, personality, entity, or being) quotations It's also used that way in German, aside from its regular meaning: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt
rkachowski 4y ago
A holistic view of a situation - an image viewed / unearthed / discovered via composition of various aspects.

trentwritescode 4y ago

It's not fair to characterized the masses of software developers as being opposed to putting effort into getting jobs. The real challenge is that we all prefer different approaches to the interview and vetting processes while, at the same time, employers are unprepared to accommodate each candidate's style. Nevertheless, I would absolutely not spend 6 hours on a take home assignment without compensation. Capitalists get carried away sometimes...

onion2k 4y ago

But in the end, you're going to have to do something unfun to get hired. It could be an interview. Or a series of interviews. Just like every other job.

shafyy 4y ago

I do think that take home tasks are the best way to hire somebody (or letting somebody bring their existing, recent code and talk about that). At the same time, I think companies should pay applications if this take home task takes more than 1-2 hours. I'm not saying you need to pay a lot, I think it's more a symbolic gesture of respect. Those costs are negligible for a company compared to the money and resources they spend on hiring/recruiting.

LocalPCGuy 4y ago
I'd challenge you to consider that take home tasks are better for some interviewees, but others would do better to have that task done as part of the interview (in-person, video). Offering an option (maybe even ahead of time) allows the individual to play to their strengths and situation, and properly designed (and with good questions/exercises to ensure people who are just good interviewees don't BS their way through the process) it shouldn't make much difference which option the interviewee chooses.
- shafyy 4y ago
  Sure, why not offer an option. But I'm convinced that take home tasks are generally better because that's much closer to the way you actually work as a programmer. People who don't get nervous during live coding might like take home tasks because it's more of a time sink, but I'd wager that they still do good on them.
  - LocalPCGuy 4y ago
    There are a lot of problems with take-home assignments in general and I feel like it discounts that to just say "they are better generally". I disagree with that statement both personally, as an interviewer, and in reading others' anecdotal experiences. It is better "for some people some of the time", but I firmly disagree that can be generalized to a best practice.
    - shafyy 4y ago

drawkbox 4y ago

Contract to hire is the way to go, even if a short time. Most jobs are like that anyways, the first weeks/months are still part of the hiring process. This tests the worker in the actual environment. The contract could even be remote and sectioned off from the larger enterprise, just like any contractors added currently. The important part of contract-to-hire is it shows how the person will communicate while working, which is not really verified in any way with a take-home or whiteboard setup. Going straight to full employment is like going from strangers to marriage, contracting is a dating phase. As someone who has been freelancing/contracting for a long while, it is much preferred to full-time employment and essential ownership anyways. I personally don't mind take home tests, everything you do you can learn from and this gives you somewhat an idea of the type of company you are working with (not necessarily the work). Though they should be paid, as people that are in demand would be more willing to do them as well as the company more invested in reviewing them. However, in no way is the take home test a good indicator of how this person will ship product.

ghaff 4y ago
>Most jobs are like that anyways The difference is in the presumed defaults. If you hire me, my assumption is that outside of company/organizational problems/changed of some sort, you'll keep me around so long as I'm reasonably competent. Contract to hire on the other hand , sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us. Which, if someone already has a job or has other good offers in hand, is not going to sound like a great deal unless it's a company/position they really want and are very confident they can do.
- drawkbox 4y ago
  > sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us Same with interviewing/take-home/whiteboard. It is just a better realistic view of the company. It not only makes it a "wow us" for the worker to the workplace, it is also the workplace to the worker. It is a two way street with a more realistic sample. It also reduces the friction of locked in employment. Creative/programming/product/design are all creative fields, most projects/products like that have more flex/contractor style arrangements based on projects/products not necessarily the company such as movies, music, books, etc. Most of my career has been in games/interactive/agency style projects/products so it may make more sense there. You can't judge creativity and product shipping capabilities with a take-home/whiteboard/interview very well. The sample is much smaller. The better way is the body of work and a real test that is longer or closer to the actual work and timeframes.

mekoka 4y ago

Complaining about unfair practices doesn't imply that you're unwilling to be tested, hence strawman. The recurrence of those complaints indicates that the process could be improved to benefit both parties. Everything you listed can be made better for all. The reasons they're not have to do with a mix of convenience, traditionalism, mimicry and other social factors. Think of all the good reasons companies had to have workers on site a few years ago, but can somehow still make it work remotely today.

rufasterisco 4y ago

you should get the person that will lead me/work with me with on a video call, open up 3 real issues, let me choose one (or more) of them, see how I tackle the problem, let me code the solution (or pair program it), let me google anything I want, and at that point you would know how I work, and I would have a view into what it feels like working for you then (or instead) we might do the opposite: I should have a project on github (or similar) that you can look at beforehand, let you pick an issue, etc etc if the issues are 6 hours issues, the commitment is on both sides: the company has a team member spending those 6 hours too