9 ms·

Too aggressive in tone for what the gripe is here. I wouldn't hire this guy. Several of you long-time participants on Hacker News have noticed various iteration

Too aggressive in tone for what the gripe is here. I wouldn't hire this guy. Several of you long-time participants on Hacker News have noticed various iterations of my FAQ post on company hiring procedures,[1] and if you haven't read that, I invite you to follow the link and read it. Genuine work-sample tests are a GOOD idea in hiring, as most of the comments already here have said. Perhaps a full-day work sample feels too long to most job applicants, compared to a one-hour work sample (but how much would paying each applicant help with that?). There are also intellectual property issues here (but doesn't freedom of contract in most countries allow a way to resolve that issue?). But he doth protest too much, methinks. In any job application situation, the company's concern is "can this applicant really do the job and do it well?" The applicant's concern is "will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?" In general, a work-sample test is a very good idea for answering both kinds of questions, and anyway research shows that a work-sample test is a far more valid hiring procedure than most other hiring procedures that have been tried. Check my FAQ link for research citations on that topic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923 P.S. Yes, I intend to touch up my FAQ draft some more and then post it to my personal website. I just bookmarked the blog post kindly submitted here as another resource to refer to as I update my FAQ. AFTER EDIT: I'd be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is. That helps me learn to make the FAQ better for its next posting on my website.

RyanZAG 13y ago
Surely the disagreement should be obvious? If they interview 50 candidates and get each candidate to do a free day of work, they're exploiting the candidates and the market. As others have said, there is no reason not to let the candidate work on related OSS projects or on already solved tasks. Adding new features to a code base for free is not on. This is like hiring labor for your bridge building company, getting 50 people and having them drag rocks around all day and then not paying them. Feels close to illegal.
- jrs235 13y ago
  But in this case they offered an endless supply of teeth rotting soda and snacks and the possibility of playing ping pong (I assume only if he got his "work" done). I doubt the bridge builders are compensated with that! /sarcasm
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Heyo. From time to time I do interviews at my employer which involve having someone hack on our code base, pair-programming style, for around an hour-ish. But the work isn't free. Sure, the company isn't paying you, but the company is paying me, and you can bet that we're not getting as much done as we would get done on an interview-free day. I don't think anyone's ever been under the delusion that we're just trying to get cheap labor to build our codebase for us.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    There's a big difference between talking through an interview for an hour with some questions on how they'll handle a code base with maybe a function or two here and there to demonstrate, and the following: > LD: "Well, I thought we could work on our application, we've got some features I want to implement and push live by the end of the day" Key difference being that the interviewee is going to be adding new features that will be pushed live without any further work by other employees.
    - abraininavat 13y ago
      The interviewee isn't going to be able to do it (correctly) without the guidance of the interviewer. Not if the project is of more than trivial complexity.
    - judk 13y ago
      The actual red flag here is that the LD has no sense of software schedules or QA, or is feeling so pressured that he can't make time to prepare a well structured interview session.
- columbo 13y ago
static_typed 13y ago
Sure - when restaurants take on a new cook or chef, they may well ask him to produce a dish or two, but none of those dishes will be sold to paying customers outside. The staff/management will check them, try them, review them, but will not be selling them to the customers outside.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Undiscussed: the paying customers would understandably be outraged to discover live code which they paid for was created by non-employees operating without pay under adverse conditions. You want to work for a company that would do that to their customers? ETA: I'm referring to product integrity. Do you want a highly complex and specialized product developed, at least in part, by people whose total exposure & involvement lasted less than a day and had basically no incentive to do it right?
  - lemonberry 13y ago
    Is this sarcasm? I don't think most people care about the conditions workers have to work in. This a problem that bridges many industries from chocolate to diamonds to electronic products to clothing.
- RogerL 13y ago
  But why do we care? In your specific example (which I do recognize as being proffered as an analogy not an equality), I'd rather the food went to a hungry person than picked at then dumped in the trash. Of course it can't work that way because after all they need to taste your food to evaluate it. All I'm saying is I wouldn't care if my work ended up in their code base vs an open source code base, and I'd prefer it to just being wiped from the hard drive after I was done. In return I'd get something very valuable - insight into the working conditions, what it is like to work with the senior dev, what the code base looks like, what the build and QA system is like, and so on.
ctdonath 13y ago
Tone was rather aggressive, but still within the norm for someone being blindsided with high-stakes requirements for changing an unfamiliar codebase with an extremely aggressive deadline - and no compensation. Bait-and-switch: this situation wasn't an interview as expected, it was being assigned work with severe threat of being fired without due pay. When my employer wanted "work sample" for my interview, they set up a consulting contract, gave me time to familiarize with the codebase, discussed realistic sample assignment requirements, placed no limits on my work time, sensibly integrated my submission(s), and paid me for it. I'm very happy working here.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Severe threat of being fired? He wasn't even working for them. If he wrote a bug and it made it into production, it would be 100% the fault of his mentor. I am warming up to the concept of a very short paid contract to do the code interview, btw.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    The point is that he would be working for them. That's why he was so aggressive in his posted rant. He'd be writing production code going live that very same day, and then (one may safely presume) he would be relieved of any further development duties, not allowed in the building again, and not paid for his work. The situation as described was indistinguishable from obvious deceptive practices (persuade person to do work under guise of "interview" with no intention of paying or hiring).
    - danielweber 13y ago
      If you want to argue that he should be paid for his time I agree. If you want to argue that he should be paid for the value of his work product, realize that in almost all cases that value is likely negative. Slowing down a developer for a day to work with a candidate is in no way beneficial to a company.
      - 13y ago
msluyter 13y ago
Thanks for compiling this faq, btw. The unstructured nature of HN tends to work against any sort of historical or accumulated knowledge. I have a vision of people stepping up and doing this for different CRTs (Commonly Recurring Topics) on HN and pretty soon we're the StackOverflow of... well, something.
draz 13y ago
this is a little off topic, but related: I've seen it time and again where an applicant DOES spend the time to do work for free/part of the interview process (I won't get into this religious war), and then not get any response back from the potential employer. Not a yay, nor a nay. That, my friends, is exploitation.....
vinceguidry 13y ago
The anger comes from being put on the spot like that. There are clear ethical concerns here and the interviewer is just bulldozing over them. I don't know many people that could handle that situation gracefully.
furyg3 13y ago
You're totally right, but eliminating risk costs time/effort/money. So pay him. You've already seen his CV, talked to references, interviewed him, done a technical interview, what more do you want? If you need a painter, you may want to see a painter's work before you hire him to paint your house. Maybe his portfolio was fake? Maybe that client reference is actually his uncle? Maybe he's never done this type of project! So hire him to paint the shed first. You can't ask someone to do that for free...
Silhouette 13y ago
I'd be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is. I think you're generally being rather kind on the not-yet-employer here, but I have one specific point: giving up a whole day of your labour for free for every interview is not a sustainable strategy. I don't know what the average number of interviews is prior to taking a new position, but if they all last a day, that is a lot of work for each applicant to do without getting paid, and it's a lot of work from a lot of applicants that the prospective employer gets for free. Everyone is taking a risk going through a recruitment process, but typically it's already stacked heavily in the prospective employer's favour as they set the terms of the interview and generally it's held at their choice of venue, using their preferred facilities, and with minimal overhead for their existing staff. Throwing in working for free on the prospective employer's real project, and IMHO this tips from unbalanced to downright insulting. If you want to hire a professional, give them some professional courtesy and treat them as such. (I would almost certainly have ended the interview in that situation as well, though perhaps not with quite the same choice of words. But then this sort of one-sided relationship is why I choose not to work for anyone as an employee any more and instead run my own businesses, so I do have a well-established bias here.)
- darkxanthos 13y ago
  Most interviews I've been in take essentially a whole day. Whether I add code to their codebase or not. I'd prefer working for free for the day... At least I'd have a better idea of what I'm getting into.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    May I ask where you're from? I'm in the UK, and in my entire career I have never had a single visit to a prospective employer that lasted more than a half-day. It's not unusual (IME) to do that a couple of times, so maybe some places do everything on the same day, but I've never been through a recruitment process that wasn't all done in a couple of half-day visits at most. Maybe my experience is just coincidental and completely out of the mainstream.
Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
Much of what's being said is focusing on one half of the work-sample: the company assessing the potential employee but this: "The applicant's concern is "will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?"" Is a big deal too. Wondering what the company is really like? You're going to get to work for a day with one of their devs, see what they're like, see their code base, their tools and processes, their standards. Given that most companies oversell themselves (the old saying interview is like a seduction, a job is like a marriage), this would seem to me to be an amazing opportunity to find out if this is the right move. Sure you want to be pretty certain before you commit this time, but so will the company - unless you're off the charts great it's likely they'll lose as much of their lead dev's time as he gets you up to speed as they'll gain from you - so as a final stage in a recruitment process that could lead to a long term commitment, it seems win win.
- jwarkentin 13y ago
  On the other hand, many people already have jobs are were contacted by the company looking for a candidate. I would have to take a day off work to go in for a full day interview, so some compensation is also reasonable.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > On the other hand, many people already have jobs are were contacted by the company looking for a candidate. I would have to take a day off work to go in for a full day interview, so some compensation is also reasonable. I would say that if getting the opportunity to evaluate the company as a fit more substantially than a traditional interview isn't adequate compensation for the company getting to do the same for you, that's quite possibly a good sign to you and the company that you aren't really a good fit.
    - jwarkentin 13y ago
      I disagree. While I have an awesome job, I'm always casually open to new opportunities. That doesn't mean that I'm willing to sacrifice a day of my time for an opportunity which I know very little about before making the sacrifice. If I'm out of work and/or desperate, then yes, the potential benefit outweighs the cost/risk. Since I'm not by any means desperate or looking, asking me to take the risk/make the sacrifice with no compensation is more than the possibility of some yet unknown potential gain. That isn't any logical grounds to assume I wouldn't be a good fit. That just means the ROI tells me it's not worth my time. Without seeing significant potential reward and a reasonable possibility of getting the job, and actually wanting it, there is no way I'd go in for more than a couple hours of coding without compensation.
k3n 13y ago
For lack of a better mechanism, I'm commenting here so that I can read your very informative user page when I get home later. Sorry for the noise all.

RyanZAG 13y ago

Surely the disagreement should be obvious? If they interview 50 candidates and get each candidate to do a free day of work, they're exploiting the candidates and the market. As others have said, there is no reason not to let the candidate work on related OSS projects or on already solved tasks. Adding new features to a code base for free is not on. This is like hiring labor for your bridge building company, getting 50 people and having them drag rocks around all day and then not paying them. Feels close to illegal.

jrs235 13y ago
But in this case they offered an endless supply of teeth rotting soda and snacks and the possibility of playing ping pong (I assume only if he got his "work" done). I doubt the bridge builders are compensated with that! /sarcasm
fennecfoxen 13y ago
Heyo. From time to time I do interviews at my employer which involve having someone hack on our code base, pair-programming style, for around an hour-ish. But the work isn't free. Sure, the company isn't paying you, but the company is paying me, and you can bet that we're not getting as much done as we would get done on an interview-free day. I don't think anyone's ever been under the delusion that we're just trying to get cheap labor to build our codebase for us.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  There's a big difference between talking through an interview for an hour with some questions on how they'll handle a code base with maybe a function or two here and there to demonstrate, and the following: > LD: "Well, I thought we could work on our application, we've got some features I want to implement and push live by the end of the day" Key difference being that the interviewee is going to be adding new features that will be pushed live without any further work by other employees.
  - abraininavat 13y ago
    The interviewee isn't going to be able to do it (correctly) without the guidance of the interviewer. Not if the project is of more than trivial complexity.
  - judk 13y ago
    The actual red flag here is that the LD has no sense of software schedules or QA, or is feeling so pressured that he can't make time to prepare a well structured interview session.
columbo 13y ago

static_typed 13y ago

Sure - when restaurants take on a new cook or chef, they may well ask him to produce a dish or two, but none of those dishes will be sold to paying customers outside. The staff/management will check them, try them, review them, but will not be selling them to the customers outside.

ctdonath 13y ago
Undiscussed: the paying customers would understandably be outraged to discover live code which they paid for was created by non-employees operating without pay under adverse conditions. You want to work for a company that would do that to their customers? ETA: I'm referring to product integrity. Do you want a highly complex and specialized product developed, at least in part, by people whose total exposure & involvement lasted less than a day and had basically no incentive to do it right?
- lemonberry 13y ago
  Is this sarcasm? I don't think most people care about the conditions workers have to work in. This a problem that bridges many industries from chocolate to diamonds to electronic products to clothing.
RogerL 13y ago
But why do we care? In your specific example (which I do recognize as being proffered as an analogy not an equality), I'd rather the food went to a hungry person than picked at then dumped in the trash. Of course it can't work that way because after all they need to taste your food to evaluate it. All I'm saying is I wouldn't care if my work ended up in their code base vs an open source code base, and I'd prefer it to just being wiped from the hard drive after I was done. In return I'd get something very valuable - insight into the working conditions, what it is like to work with the senior dev, what the code base looks like, what the build and QA system is like, and so on.

ctdonath 13y ago

Tone was rather aggressive, but still within the norm for someone being blindsided with high-stakes requirements for changing an unfamiliar codebase with an extremely aggressive deadline - and no compensation. Bait-and-switch: this situation wasn't an interview as expected, it was being assigned work with severe threat of being fired without due pay. When my employer wanted "work sample" for my interview, they set up a consulting contract, gave me time to familiarize with the codebase, discussed realistic sample assignment requirements, placed no limits on my work time, sensibly integrated my submission(s), and paid me for it. I'm very happy working here.

danielweber 13y ago
Severe threat of being fired? He wasn't even working for them. If he wrote a bug and it made it into production, it would be 100% the fault of his mentor. I am warming up to the concept of a very short paid contract to do the code interview, btw.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  The point is that he would be working for them. That's why he was so aggressive in his posted rant. He'd be writing production code going live that very same day, and then (one may safely presume) he would be relieved of any further development duties, not allowed in the building again, and not paid for his work. The situation as described was indistinguishable from obvious deceptive practices (persuade person to do work under guise of "interview" with no intention of paying or hiring).
  - danielweber 13y ago
    If you want to argue that he should be paid for his time I agree. If you want to argue that he should be paid for the value of his work product, realize that in almost all cases that value is likely negative. Slowing down a developer for a day to work with a candidate is in no way beneficial to a company.
    - 13y ago

msluyter 13y ago

Thanks for compiling this faq, btw. The unstructured nature of HN tends to work against any sort of historical or accumulated knowledge. I have a vision of people stepping up and doing this for different CRTs (Commonly Recurring Topics) on HN and pretty soon we're the StackOverflow of... well, something.

draz 13y ago

this is a little off topic, but related: I've seen it time and again where an applicant DOES spend the time to do work for free/part of the interview process (I won't get into this religious war), and then not get any response back from the potential employer. Not a yay, nor a nay. That, my friends, is exploitation.....

vinceguidry 13y ago

The anger comes from being put on the spot like that. There are clear ethical concerns here and the interviewer is just bulldozing over them. I don't know many people that could handle that situation gracefully.

furyg3 13y ago

You're totally right, but eliminating risk costs time/effort/money. So pay him. You've already seen his CV, talked to references, interviewed him, done a technical interview, what more do you want? If you need a painter, you may want to see a painter's work before you hire him to paint your house. Maybe his portfolio was fake? Maybe that client reference is actually his uncle? Maybe he's never done this type of project! So hire him to paint the shed first. You can't ask someone to do that for free...

Silhouette 13y ago

I'd be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is. I think you're generally being rather kind on the not-yet-employer here, but I have one specific point: giving up a whole day of your labour for free for every interview is not a sustainable strategy. I don't know what the average number of interviews is prior to taking a new position, but if they all last a day, that is a lot of work for each applicant to do without getting paid, and it's a lot of work from a lot of applicants that the prospective employer gets for free. Everyone is taking a risk going through a recruitment process, but typically it's already stacked heavily in the prospective employer's favour as they set the terms of the interview and generally it's held at their choice of venue, using their preferred facilities, and with minimal overhead for their existing staff. Throwing in working for free on the prospective employer's real project, and IMHO this tips from unbalanced to downright insulting. If you want to hire a professional, give them some professional courtesy and treat them as such. (I would almost certainly have ended the interview in that situation as well, though perhaps not with quite the same choice of words. But then this sort of one-sided relationship is why I choose not to work for anyone as an employee any more and instead run my own businesses, so I do have a well-established bias here.)

darkxanthos 13y ago
Most interviews I've been in take essentially a whole day. Whether I add code to their codebase or not. I'd prefer working for free for the day... At least I'd have a better idea of what I'm getting into.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  May I ask where you're from? I'm in the UK, and in my entire career I have never had a single visit to a prospective employer that lasted more than a half-day. It's not unusual (IME) to do that a couple of times, so maybe some places do everything on the same day, but I've never been through a recruitment process that wasn't all done in a couple of half-day visits at most. Maybe my experience is just coincidental and completely out of the mainstream.

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago

Much of what's being said is focusing on one half of the work-sample: the company assessing the potential employee but this: "The applicant's concern is "will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?"" Is a big deal too. Wondering what the company is really like? You're going to get to work for a day with one of their devs, see what they're like, see their code base, their tools and processes, their standards. Given that most companies oversell themselves (the old saying interview is like a seduction, a job is like a marriage), this would seem to me to be an amazing opportunity to find out if this is the right move. Sure you want to be pretty certain before you commit this time, but so will the company - unless you're off the charts great it's likely they'll lose as much of their lead dev's time as he gets you up to speed as they'll gain from you - so as a final stage in a recruitment process that could lead to a long term commitment, it seems win win.

jwarkentin 13y ago
On the other hand, many people already have jobs are were contacted by the company looking for a candidate. I would have to take a day off work to go in for a full day interview, so some compensation is also reasonable.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > On the other hand, many people already have jobs are were contacted by the company looking for a candidate. I would have to take a day off work to go in for a full day interview, so some compensation is also reasonable. I would say that if getting the opportunity to evaluate the company as a fit more substantially than a traditional interview isn't adequate compensation for the company getting to do the same for you, that's quite possibly a good sign to you and the company that you aren't really a good fit.
  - jwarkentin 13y ago
    I disagree. While I have an awesome job, I'm always casually open to new opportunities. That doesn't mean that I'm willing to sacrifice a day of my time for an opportunity which I know very little about before making the sacrifice. If I'm out of work and/or desperate, then yes, the potential benefit outweighs the cost/risk. Since I'm not by any means desperate or looking, asking me to take the risk/make the sacrifice with no compensation is more than the possibility of some yet unknown potential gain. That isn't any logical grounds to assume I wouldn't be a good fit. That just means the ROI tells me it's not worth my time. Without seeing significant potential reward and a reasonable possibility of getting the job, and actually wanting it, there is no way I'd go in for more than a couple hours of coding without compensation.

k3n 13y ago

For lack of a better mechanism, I'm commenting here so that I can read your very informative user page when I get home later. Sorry for the noise all.