7 ms·

Best way is to paid-intern an engineer for a week/month and try them out (if they're willing) and see how they fit and might be able to expand on your current c

Best way is to paid-intern an engineer for a week/month and try them out (if they're willing) and see how they fit and might be able to expand on your current culture. That's really the only good way. Asking questions in an interview, no matter how clever or insightful they may be, has been and will forever be a crap shoot.

daniel-cussen 12y ago
It's the only really good way for the company, provided that it doesn't filter out good applicants who would have very good reason to decline leaving a full-time position for a chance at full-time somewhere else. I don't see how it's good for the employee though: the company is effectively shunting the risk of a bad hire from someone who is reasonably positioned to take the risk (despite what entrepreneur blogs may say) to someone who is very poorly positioned to take this risk, and pay them nothing for taking on that same risk. Sure, it'd be nice if you could hire all your great employees this way, but forgetting for a moment whether it's fair, it's not realistic.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  I could see this working if say the company said, let's try this out but let's do remote for weekends only. This way I don't have to quit my current job and they can try me out for a while before they hire.
  - ionforce 12y ago
    What if both the hiring company and the applicant have lives on the weekend?
soperj 12y ago
Honestly, as someone who would have to quit their current job to go work for another company, why on earth would I agree to that instability?
- Bahamut 12y ago
  For me, speaking as a software engineer, I highly agree - if a company tried to pull that on me, that would be a quick way for me to turn down the company. It doesn't make sense if the candidate is working for another company - why would the candidate use up all of his/her vacation for one company if the company isn't serious about bringing the person onboard full-time as a regular employee off the bat?
  - laeus 12y ago
    To be honest, having experienced the tremendous damage done by poor hires (and the amazing difficulty of getting rid of them once they're identified as such), I might see this as a pretty substantial benefit of working at a company that uses this method. Given that, I might be willing to participate in this kind of interview process. It would probably have to be a company I already know and admire for some reasons up front, but I really want to find a place to work where everybody is pulling their weight.
    - pkaye 12y ago
      Yes but by doing this they have shifted all the risks to the candidate. Unless the company is super hot or they substantially compensate financially for that risk.
    - Bahamut 12y ago
      I haven't seen a decent-sized shop where "everybody is pulling their weight". Different developers at are different points in their careers, and have different levels of productivity. As a junior developer, I was very slow when I first started. As a senior developer, I have produced 50% of the work for a project on a team of 8. There are only so many developers that want to work for [insert company] out in the wild. I do sympathize with the big damage done by poor hires & problems getting rid of them - I have seen similar as well. However, a process like this will select against a lot of quality developers and not necessarily select for the ones you want to work with. It just selects for the developers that that company wants to work with who are willing to jump through such an extra set of hoops. It also tells me as a candidate that the people who are working there don't have the courage to speak out against such a process selecting against candidates not willing or able to go through the process or the leadership is too weak to figure out that this sets up a bias that isn't intended to be selected for, thus being a bad hiring mechanism.
rcoder 12y ago
I agree strongly this is the best way to interview a candidate. It's even relatively easy to set up for a new grad or junior candidate who isn't currently working. They should of course also be local or have no family or professional commitments that make a week-long non-work trip difficult. Sadly, many of the best engineers I've worked with do have families, are working, don't live in the same town, and would absolutely balk at the idea of taking a week away from all that to "try out" a new job. Of course, there's a wide spectrum between "work together for a week" and "write some C++ on a whiteboard for 40 minutes" that gets dropped from most screening processes. That's the zone where I'm most interested in finding creative evaluation tools.
- fiachamp 12y ago
  We've found a good middle ground. Giving the candidate a few days to do a test project that involves fixing a bug on the production site. Its something they can do at night after work, gets them resolving a real-life problem, seeing how fast they figure out the codebase.
  - pkaye 12y ago
    Really good candidates will have multiple offers and given equal choices of companies, will choose those which make them not run through hoops.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      In demand DevOps candidate here. I had multiple six figure offers from companies, and still picked the job that required a 4-6 hour project I completed over 2 weeks in the evenings (that I was paid for). Provide the right work environment and perks, and people will "jump through hoops" if they think its worth it.
      - wernercd 12y ago
        This. At the end of the day, what job/pay/perks do you want? If jobs require you to jump through some hoops, then they will be jumped through - within reason.
billychasen 12y ago
This doesn't take into consideration the time to bring someone up to speed and their productivity hit from that. There is also cost and slowdown from the company's perspective to bring someone new up to speed (it usually will slow down others involved too). You should just be sure you need and want to hire someone before they show up for their first day.
bitwize 12y ago
The point is, if you want to get an actual job in the actual tech economy -- not the ideal tech economy from your head -- better bone up on your brain teasers. And have a Word-format CV.
- justizin 12y ago
  AND FOR CHRISSAKE KEEP YOUR SPARE PAGER BATTERY HANDY! fuckin' word format resume. That is no longer a thing.
matthewmacleod 12y ago
This isn't the best way at all – you're going to end up with a candidate who wants/is able to agree to that, instead of a potentially much better candidate who won't. Since I'd wager that the vast majority of skilled engineers would reject that offer outright, you end up really shrinking your pool of talent.
mathattack 12y ago
Even a week or month is short. I've been in situations where it's tough to make a hiring decision based on 10 weeks of (paid) interaction, even when saying "No" means having only 4-5 interviews to decide on a "Yes" for someone else. This is why hiring people who we professionally interact with (referrals) is so important. And it's a handicap for people with weak networks or internal-only jobs.
- pmiller2 12y ago
  How is it that a company could not be able to make a decision after 2+ months of a person actually working for them? If it's not a clear "no," we know that person hasn't managed to destroy the company and can at least get along well enough socially. If it's not a "yes" after that much time, that seems like a management failure. After all, 2 months should be more than enough time to produce enough code to tell whether a person can code and will bring a net positive influence to the environment.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    It comes from "This person is good, but not great, and we only have one spot, so should we hold out for great?"
morgante 12y ago
If only competent candidates would agree to doing that. I've offered it to multiple candidates, and only those who were justifiably unemployed for months were interested (and, unsurprisingly, they didn't work out).
tn13 12y ago
There are many more better methods but eventually if a method is better it also means it is expensive. Hiring a paid intern would involve lot of legal crap + lot of time wasted on a person. Also number of interns we can have is super limited and we will need some sort of interview to select interns in first place. Asking tough questions in interview is not particularly bad because tough questions generally work welll. This strategy has worked well for Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon I dont see why it cant work for everyone else.
- sheepmullet 12y ago
  "This strategy has worked well for Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon I dont see why it cant work for everyone else." The downside to the methods Google etc use is they have a huge number of false negatives. They reject tons of great engineers. This works out well when you constantly have thousands of great engineers applying to work for your company. It does not work well at all if you are a normal company.
  - jghn 12y ago
    Exactly. This is one of the largest failures of the tech industry when it comes to interviews. They see the current tech behemoth and extrapolate their hiring practices, but the reality is that those companies are fitting their models to a different set of data than 99.9% of the other companies in the world. When you're a household name and most engineers view your company as a top place to go and you're getting thousands of resumes a day, you have the ability to filter differently than most folks.
  - tn13 12y ago
    Yes. This is true. That is why try recruiting in countries like India.
- RogerL 12y ago
  Has it? Besides the number of great people they turn down, the great people that refuse to interview at all with them (I don't know anyone willing to waste their time with a process clearly designed to be biased towards their failure), how much deadwood are in those companies? A ton, by all available reports. There is a difference between what I call 'clever' and 'smart'. There are plenty of people that are fast on their feet at thinking about algorithmic-y type things. That doesn't translate into an ability to think through engineering problems, drive a project forward, cut through red tape, motivate peers, mentor the less experienced, identify market opportunities, behave ethically, build great teams .. I can go on. There is so much to this job other than manipulating binary trees, and swiftness at doing that at a white board is not a particularly good indicator of being able to think hard about novel problems. My best math professor, ever, had to ask the class to do the arithmetic and often we'd have to correct his algebra steps. He was fantastic, he just wasn't great at doing that stuff on his feet in front in front of an audience. And, of course, not many jobs require novel algorithms; most require all other stuff. I'd give my eye teeth for an engineer that can just plod through and keep a project on schedule and budget. Don't see how the 'tough questions' identify her.
_greim_ 12y ago
> has been and will forever be a crap shoot This is too strong a statement. It's an imperfect heuristic, and it's painful for all involved (which makes negative reactions to it be over-represented in online discussions), but it's better than shuffling the deck of resumes and randomly choosing one. You ask candidates what they know about tech, and it quickly becomes obvious who's in the know and who's able to think outside the box, and who isn't. It's more of a crap shoot in terms of gauging work ethic and personality. Week-long trials are simply not feasible for most companies (or candidates, for that matter).

daniel-cussen 12y ago

It's the only really good way for the company, provided that it doesn't filter out good applicants who would have very good reason to decline leaving a full-time position for a chance at full-time somewhere else. I don't see how it's good for the employee though: the company is effectively shunting the risk of a bad hire from someone who is reasonably positioned to take the risk (despite what entrepreneur blogs may say) to someone who is very poorly positioned to take this risk, and pay them nothing for taking on that same risk. Sure, it'd be nice if you could hire all your great employees this way, but forgetting for a moment whether it's fair, it's not realistic.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago
I could see this working if say the company said, let's try this out but let's do remote for weekends only. This way I don't have to quit my current job and they can try me out for a while before they hire.
- ionforce 12y ago
  What if both the hiring company and the applicant have lives on the weekend?

soperj 12y ago

Honestly, as someone who would have to quit their current job to go work for another company, why on earth would I agree to that instability?

Bahamut 12y ago
For me, speaking as a software engineer, I highly agree - if a company tried to pull that on me, that would be a quick way for me to turn down the company. It doesn't make sense if the candidate is working for another company - why would the candidate use up all of his/her vacation for one company if the company isn't serious about bringing the person onboard full-time as a regular employee off the bat?
- laeus 12y ago
  To be honest, having experienced the tremendous damage done by poor hires (and the amazing difficulty of getting rid of them once they're identified as such), I might see this as a pretty substantial benefit of working at a company that uses this method. Given that, I might be willing to participate in this kind of interview process. It would probably have to be a company I already know and admire for some reasons up front, but I really want to find a place to work where everybody is pulling their weight.
  - pkaye 12y ago
    Yes but by doing this they have shifted all the risks to the candidate. Unless the company is super hot or they substantially compensate financially for that risk.
  - Bahamut 12y ago
    I haven't seen a decent-sized shop where "everybody is pulling their weight". Different developers at are different points in their careers, and have different levels of productivity. As a junior developer, I was very slow when I first started. As a senior developer, I have produced 50% of the work for a project on a team of 8. There are only so many developers that want to work for [insert company] out in the wild. I do sympathize with the big damage done by poor hires & problems getting rid of them - I have seen similar as well. However, a process like this will select against a lot of quality developers and not necessarily select for the ones you want to work with. It just selects for the developers that that company wants to work with who are willing to jump through such an extra set of hoops. It also tells me as a candidate that the people who are working there don't have the courage to speak out against such a process selecting against candidates not willing or able to go through the process or the leadership is too weak to figure out that this sets up a bias that isn't intended to be selected for, thus being a bad hiring mechanism.

rcoder 12y ago

I agree strongly this is the best way to interview a candidate. It's even relatively easy to set up for a new grad or junior candidate who isn't currently working. They should of course also be local or have no family or professional commitments that make a week-long non-work trip difficult. Sadly, many of the best engineers I've worked with do have families, are working, don't live in the same town, and would absolutely balk at the idea of taking a week away from all that to "try out" a new job. Of course, there's a wide spectrum between "work together for a week" and "write some C++ on a whiteboard for 40 minutes" that gets dropped from most screening processes. That's the zone where I'm most interested in finding creative evaluation tools.

fiachamp 12y ago
We've found a good middle ground. Giving the candidate a few days to do a test project that involves fixing a bug on the production site. Its something they can do at night after work, gets them resolving a real-life problem, seeing how fast they figure out the codebase.
- pkaye 12y ago
  Really good candidates will have multiple offers and given equal choices of companies, will choose those which make them not run through hoops.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    In demand DevOps candidate here. I had multiple six figure offers from companies, and still picked the job that required a 4-6 hour project I completed over 2 weeks in the evenings (that I was paid for). Provide the right work environment and perks, and people will "jump through hoops" if they think its worth it.
    - wernercd 12y ago
      This. At the end of the day, what job/pay/perks do you want? If jobs require you to jump through some hoops, then they will be jumped through - within reason.

billychasen 12y ago

This doesn't take into consideration the time to bring someone up to speed and their productivity hit from that. There is also cost and slowdown from the company's perspective to bring someone new up to speed (it usually will slow down others involved too). You should just be sure you need and want to hire someone before they show up for their first day.

bitwize 12y ago

The point is, if you want to get an actual job in the actual tech economy -- not the ideal tech economy from your head -- better bone up on your brain teasers. And have a Word-format CV.

justizin 12y ago
AND FOR CHRISSAKE KEEP YOUR SPARE PAGER BATTERY HANDY! fuckin' word format resume. That is no longer a thing.

matthewmacleod 12y ago

This isn't the best way at all – you're going to end up with a candidate who wants/is able to agree to that, instead of a potentially much better candidate who won't. Since I'd wager that the vast majority of skilled engineers would reject that offer outright, you end up really shrinking your pool of talent.

mathattack 12y ago

Even a week or month is short. I've been in situations where it's tough to make a hiring decision based on 10 weeks of (paid) interaction, even when saying "No" means having only 4-5 interviews to decide on a "Yes" for someone else. This is why hiring people who we professionally interact with (referrals) is so important. And it's a handicap for people with weak networks or internal-only jobs.

pmiller2 12y ago
How is it that a company could not be able to make a decision after 2+ months of a person actually working for them? If it's not a clear "no," we know that person hasn't managed to destroy the company and can at least get along well enough socially. If it's not a "yes" after that much time, that seems like a management failure. After all, 2 months should be more than enough time to produce enough code to tell whether a person can code and will bring a net positive influence to the environment.
- mathattack 12y ago
  It comes from "This person is good, but not great, and we only have one spot, so should we hold out for great?"

morgante 12y ago

If only competent candidates would agree to doing that. I've offered it to multiple candidates, and only those who were justifiably unemployed for months were interested (and, unsurprisingly, they didn't work out).

tn13 12y ago

There are many more better methods but eventually if a method is better it also means it is expensive. Hiring a paid intern would involve lot of legal crap + lot of time wasted on a person. Also number of interns we can have is super limited and we will need some sort of interview to select interns in first place. Asking tough questions in interview is not particularly bad because tough questions generally work welll. This strategy has worked well for Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon I dont see why it cant work for everyone else.

sheepmullet 12y ago
"This strategy has worked well for Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon I dont see why it cant work for everyone else." The downside to the methods Google etc use is they have a huge number of false negatives. They reject tons of great engineers. This works out well when you constantly have thousands of great engineers applying to work for your company. It does not work well at all if you are a normal company.
- jghn 12y ago
  Exactly. This is one of the largest failures of the tech industry when it comes to interviews. They see the current tech behemoth and extrapolate their hiring practices, but the reality is that those companies are fitting their models to a different set of data than 99.9% of the other companies in the world. When you're a household name and most engineers view your company as a top place to go and you're getting thousands of resumes a day, you have the ability to filter differently than most folks.
- tn13 12y ago
  Yes. This is true. That is why try recruiting in countries like India.
RogerL 12y ago
Has it? Besides the number of great people they turn down, the great people that refuse to interview at all with them (I don't know anyone willing to waste their time with a process clearly designed to be biased towards their failure), how much deadwood are in those companies? A ton, by all available reports. There is a difference between what I call 'clever' and 'smart'. There are plenty of people that are fast on their feet at thinking about algorithmic-y type things. That doesn't translate into an ability to think through engineering problems, drive a project forward, cut through red tape, motivate peers, mentor the less experienced, identify market opportunities, behave ethically, build great teams .. I can go on. There is so much to this job other than manipulating binary trees, and swiftness at doing that at a white board is not a particularly good indicator of being able to think hard about novel problems. My best math professor, ever, had to ask the class to do the arithmetic and often we'd have to correct his algebra steps. He was fantastic, he just wasn't great at doing that stuff on his feet in front in front of an audience. And, of course, not many jobs require novel algorithms; most require all other stuff. I'd give my eye teeth for an engineer that can just plod through and keep a project on schedule and budget. Don't see how the 'tough questions' identify her.

_greim_ 12y ago

> has been and will forever be a crap shoot This is too strong a statement. It's an imperfect heuristic, and it's painful for all involved (which makes negative reactions to it be over-represented in online discussions), but it's better than shuffling the deck of resumes and randomly choosing one. You ask candidates what they know about tech, and it quickly becomes obvious who's in the know and who's able to think outside the box, and who isn't. It's more of a crap shoot in terms of gauging work ethic and personality. Week-long trials are simply not feasible for most companies (or candidates, for that matter).