8 ms·

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 an

by 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
> 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. If the application is so simple that you can get actual productivity in someone in the first couple hours then stop trying to hire candidates and outsource the entire thing to India for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise it's a pair-programming test with massive hand-holding from another developer which is ridiculously more expensive for the company. I'd choose to spend a few hours on the employer's actual application over any other form interview. Obviously there are extreme cases (hey we'd like you to spend a few weeks working on this API, you know, for the interview), but I don't get that vibe from this article.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Right. If the application is easy enough to define that someone completely new can code it up in a day, they can just send it to India and be done with it. This isn't like a comic book company asking job candidates to submit a page of a script, where they can just use it as is. Software is a very living product and you need live people maintaining it. I do think that companies should consider paying a candidate a few hundred bucks to spend his whole day with you. This doesn't change whether he's working on "open source stuff" or the company's product they are selling for money. EDIT tldr: they should have paid him for his time not for his product
  - peteretep 13y ago
    Perhaps, but that's not what he's complaining about. He's complaining that he's providing them business value for free. He's not, he's tying up one of their Senior Devs for a day, which is a pretty good sign that they really want to hire the best people. He fully accepts at the beginning that he knew they wanted a day of his time, and he was willing to give it - he just wanted to work on some open-source work instead of their product.
    - danielweber 13y ago
      I think he fundamentally misunderstands the employer-employee relationship. If someone hires me for a day's work and he uses it to make a million dollars, I have not been cheated. If someone hires me for a day's work and he can't extract any value from it, he has not been cheated. He seems hung up on the fact that he thought the company was benefiting from his work. 1) They probably weren't, as you said, and 2) it doesn't matter if they do or not. He should be compensated for giving them a full day of his time regardless of whether he gives them useful work-product.
clamour 13y ago
The less scrupulous English language schools do exactly this where I live. They'll post a job offering online and have you teach a "demo class" as part of your interview. In reality, that demo class is just a class that they didn't want to pay a substitute teacher for. Clever eh?
ijk 13y ago
An actual example (from another domain): http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=127990 http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=127990 A company solicited "art tests" as part of a hiring process that basically amounted to having the candidates create free content for them.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Software isn't art. If a company can break down its problems so much that complete outsiders can make them work in a day then they wouldn't need developers.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321751043 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321751043
nevinera 13y ago
As we're all aware, adding extra developers to a project will cause it to finish sooner, so adding dozens of them for one day each should get your product out the door weeks ahead of schedule. Right? Right??
- fat0wl 13y ago
  lol yeah this is what gets me too. I'd be pretty damn surprised if a company i was applying to (so they will be conceivably paying my bills for a long time...) would give me $450 to sit next to one of their programmers and slow him down for a day. maybe I wouldn't say anything too valuable unless it really seems like it will tip the scales but this is part of common sense and good judgment at any job -- if you publicly spill too many good ideas, others will repeat & steal credit. plenty of corporations will hire with a couple hours of interview but i don't really expect startups & small companies to work like this realistically. They probably need to be more careful with hiring. if you're obsessed with your "day rate" and think you can get people to keep paying it, then just keep freelancing... the point of a job is to get a steady check every week in a more relaxed environment than freelancers typically face. if you want that opportunity, you have to prove yourself. the idea that they are trying to trick your fantastically brilliant mind into solving their problems sounds like a Ruby-ists fantasy or something, lol. Just get real now and then, the author made fun of them for hiring [Hipster programming language] but he sounds just like [Hipster programmer]. If you walk into a place and you are not feelin the vibe then you are free to leave. Their request seems far from egregious though, I've done a pair interview before and it's strange but you're pretty much just shadowing someone and hangin out. They're not going to set up a dev environment for you and give you the keys to the codebase, come on. Full disclosure: I have a job

by RyanZAG 13y ago

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

> 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. If the application is so simple that you can get actual productivity in someone in the first couple hours then stop trying to hire candidates and outsource the entire thing to India for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise it's a pair-programming test with massive hand-holding from another developer which is ridiculously more expensive for the company. I'd choose to spend a few hours on the employer's actual application over any other form interview. Obviously there are extreme cases (hey we'd like you to spend a few weeks working on this API, you know, for the interview), but I don't get that vibe from this article.

danielweber 13y ago
Right. If the application is easy enough to define that someone completely new can code it up in a day, they can just send it to India and be done with it. This isn't like a comic book company asking job candidates to submit a page of a script, where they can just use it as is. Software is a very living product and you need live people maintaining it. I do think that companies should consider paying a candidate a few hundred bucks to spend his whole day with you. This doesn't change whether he's working on "open source stuff" or the company's product they are selling for money. EDIT tldr: they should have paid him for his time not for his product
- peteretep 13y ago
  Perhaps, but that's not what he's complaining about. He's complaining that he's providing them business value for free. He's not, he's tying up one of their Senior Devs for a day, which is a pretty good sign that they really want to hire the best people. He fully accepts at the beginning that he knew they wanted a day of his time, and he was willing to give it - he just wanted to work on some open-source work instead of their product.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    I think he fundamentally misunderstands the employer-employee relationship. If someone hires me for a day's work and he uses it to make a million dollars, I have not been cheated. If someone hires me for a day's work and he can't extract any value from it, he has not been cheated. He seems hung up on the fact that he thought the company was benefiting from his work. 1) They probably weren't, as you said, and 2) it doesn't matter if they do or not. He should be compensated for giving them a full day of his time regardless of whether he gives them useful work-product.

clamour 13y ago

The less scrupulous English language schools do exactly this where I live. They'll post a job offering online and have you teach a "demo class" as part of your interview. In reality, that demo class is just a class that they didn't want to pay a substitute teacher for. Clever eh?

ijk 13y ago

An actual example (from another domain): http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=127990 http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=127990 A company solicited "art tests" as part of a hiring process that basically amounted to having the candidates create free content for them.

danielweber 13y ago
Software isn't art. If a company can break down its problems so much that complete outsiders can make them work in a day then they wouldn't need developers.
- leephillips 13y ago
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321751043 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321751043

nevinera 13y ago

As we're all aware, adding extra developers to a project will cause it to finish sooner, so adding dozens of them for one day each should get your product out the door weeks ahead of schedule. Right? Right??

fat0wl 13y ago
lol yeah this is what gets me too. I'd be pretty damn surprised if a company i was applying to (so they will be conceivably paying my bills for a long time...) would give me $450 to sit next to one of their programmers and slow him down for a day. maybe I wouldn't say anything too valuable unless it really seems like it will tip the scales but this is part of common sense and good judgment at any job -- if you publicly spill too many good ideas, others will repeat & steal credit. plenty of corporations will hire with a couple hours of interview but i don't really expect startups & small companies to work like this realistically. They probably need to be more careful with hiring. if you're obsessed with your "day rate" and think you can get people to keep paying it, then just keep freelancing... the point of a job is to get a steady check every week in a more relaxed environment than freelancers typically face. if you want that opportunity, you have to prove yourself. the idea that they are trying to trick your fantastically brilliant mind into solving their problems sounds like a Ruby-ists fantasy or something, lol. Just get real now and then, the author made fun of them for hiring [Hipster programming language] but he sounds just like [Hipster programmer]. If you walk into a place and you are not feelin the vibe then you are free to leave. Their request seems far from egregious though, I've done a pair interview before and it's strange but you're pretty much just shadowing someone and hangin out. They're not going to set up a dev environment for you and give you the keys to the codebase, come on. Full disclosure: I have a job