8 ms·
How not to interview someone who already has a job (2011)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- singingfish 11y agoHah, my latest gig, one interview, around 10 minutes in it was like "so how do we make it worth your while coming to work here?" (answer, ok money, excellent working conditions). Working well. Nice to have special skillz
- andreyf 11y agoFor engineers without open source contributions, why not give a coding project? It seems to me like there's no need to eat into the person's working time, spending a few hours solving an interesting problem shouldn't deter people you want hire to code all day, and the signals you'll get are orthogonal to what you'll be able to assess in person.
- jmartinpetersen 11y agoBecause you want to minimize friction. They already have a job so they don't really need you. You want them to want you, and making them jump through your hoops (one way or the other) is alienating.
- andreyf 11y agoNah, you want to minimize friction for the people you want to hire and maximize it for people you don't want to hire. Even without the evaluation signal coding exercises give you (one could argue that it's hard to make it representative of actual work), I think there is a correlation between someone who will spend a couple hours working on a coding problem to demonstrate their skill and the kind of person you want to hire.
- pandaman 11y agoThis is a question of hiring people who already have a job. Would you spend few hours solving an interesting problem while being gainfully employed and, hopefully, having interesting problems of your own? Honest question. I, for one, would not.
- andreyf 11y agoAbsolutely, for a company that I want to work with. For companies that I'm not super excited about, I politely decline-for-now. Seems to me like that saves everyone tons of time. Do you really want to hire someone that doesn't want to be there enough to spend a couple of hours coding for you and doesn't have open source code to evaluate them on?
- pandaman 11y agoIf a company approaches me there are probably some reasons for that. Because asking random people to prove how much they want to work for this particular company does not seem to be a very productive approach to me. You can post a job ad and get all the people who are supper excited to self select and then you can have your time making them to jump through whatever hoops you want. With somebody who expressed enough interest to answer the recruiter (in broad sense) you are not guaranteed to have a super excited candidate. Making him or her jump through the hoops will most likely terminate this and any future contacts.
- andreyf 11y ago> If a company approaches me there are probably some reasons for that. Because asking random people to prove how much they want to work for this particular company does not seem to be a very productive approach to me. Why not? Make it a test that is easy to score and then finding people who do well on it and are interested in working for you is rather high, no?
- pandaman 11y agoIt takes time and effort to get somebody who is not looking for a job to talk to you. It's going to cost a lot of money to hire anybody with a random approach. As far as I know, even Google or Apple cannot afford this - every time their recruiters contacted me it was about a job in alignment with my qualifications.
- parados 11y agoThis is exactly what we do where I work. We send them a small problem that any competent person can solve in 15-30 mins in Python/Java/C++. It is amazing what an effective filter this is and submitted results range from fully tested code, innovative O(1) solutions down to code submitted in MS Word that gives the wrong answer. As a front line filter it is cheap, simple and revealing.
- ddebernardy 11y agoYes, and 15 min makes sense. What the parent wrote ("spending a few hours solving an interesting problem") does not.
- nodelessness 11y agoAs someone who is employed, I don't have the inclination to solve a open ended problem that somehow subjectively interests you or some individual arbitrarily in what little time I have in my life. I have other projects I could be working on, my family to give my life to. Not engage in something like this. The test problem should be small. Not a 'coding project'. It is unethical to ask for anything more.
- ddebernardy 11y agoI'm not so sure that a software engineer who doesn't have any time (because you know, family) or desire (because it's unpaid work) to spend on open source software would suddenly find it OK to spend more than short amounts of time on a company's test project -- especially if they have a job or clients or any type of regular work lined up.
- crdoconnor 11y agoI wouldn't mind being asked to create a small piece of open source software that would continue to look good on my portfolio even if the company never talked to me again. Hell, if the company wrote the project boilerplate and the tests and let me fill the code in and put it up with a GPL license, I'd be thrilled :) Won't hold my breath. I'm sick to the back teeth of most of these mini coding projects, though. They're too often sent by companies who aren't even sure they want to hire at all or wouldn't hire you anyway for some unrelated reason (age, race, etc.). The projects are always boring and almost never suitable for a portfolio. It's also too easy to hit the 'send email' button and too easy to ignore the responses. Unless there is some cost for the company sending you the mini-project, a lot are going to waste your time. For this reason, I actually prefer interviews. They're going to at least do a cursory examination and reject you outright before wasting an hour of their own time.
- drglitch 11y agoAgree on mini coding, useless projects - especially when an HR drone sends out Java test to a python dev :) Another thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of people who are already employed, permission must be obtained from current employer before contributing to open source (and more and more companies are actively enforcing that unfortunately).
- andersonvieira 11y ago> for a lot of people who are already employed, permission must be obtained from current employer before contributing to open source I am always puzzled about contract clauses that try to limit what an employee can do in their free time. I understand that some people may be in a bad situation and have no choice but to put up with it. But if we're really in a seller's market, as everyone says, how can this kind of thing become a tendency?
- drglitch 11y agoIt's actually usually not the employer, but the local dept of labor laws - for salaries employees, unless explicitly stated otherwise - your employer generally "owns" anything you do in your line of work, even on your own time. So for example if you work for a game studio, coming up with an idea for a game would auto-magically make it your employer's property, even if you did it on a sunday morning. This is further reinforced by various employer-specific clauses in the hiring contract / code of conduct. Its screwed up but its the world we live in.
- Decade 11y agoI have a limited number of hours and a lot of need for money. I would be a lot happier with these multi-hour code challenges if successful completion led to guaranteed job offer. As it is, they disproportionately waste my time, for the amount of care the recruiter puts on the rejection.
- sheepmullet 11y agoOr if they offered 30-50% above market if you aced their tests.
- hidro 11y agoI strongly prefer this approach, as long as the project is interesting enough to attract engineers, and allows you to assert the aspects you want to see in them. The coding project we give to candidates is to implement an open source Hacker News client. If it were me I won't mind doing one and put it on my portfolio (which I did), regardless of whether I pass the interview.
- hvs 11y agoIf you are asking someone to develop something for "a few hours" on their own time, you should be willing to pay them for it. Companies regularly pay recruiters 30% of the first year salary for candidates, companies should be willing to pay a few hundred dollars to someone that they are asking to dedicate a significant chunk of time for the "honor" of developing code for them.
- jghn 11y agoDo you also ask that they pay you for the time spent on site during an interview? It's possible that these projects are replacing on site time. FWIW we have a coding project but it's part (a large part) of the on site and really just replaces the whiteboarding and such. Candidates are not asked to code on the fly in ither sessions
- aswanson 11y agoNo, but lunch at a good nearby restaurant paid for by the interviewer is a considerate offering. If the level of interest is high enough that man-day or more project submittal is asked of the candidate, at least put some skin in the game along with candidate in terms of time. Time is money. "The only thing I have in this life is time, and you are wasting it." -Andy Grove
- jghn 11y agoI'd argue that having several people on the company's side - both in person and prep work is skin in the game. I've fought a fairly arduous battle in my company where we spend a lot of time reviewing code samples, resumes, pre-interview discussions and then the actual interviews. All told it's far more person-hours than the candidate is spending. That said, that's exactly how I think the dynamic should be
- hvs 11y agoI don't think the fact that you have a lot of people spending time on an interview is any sort of "payment" for the interviewee. That's an investment in the company. The interviewee gets nothing out of it (unless they are the one person that is hired). For what it's worth, I'm not talking about the 2-4 hours an interviewee spends on-site. I'm talking about the additional 4-8 hours some companies expect interviewees to spend doing coding projects or time spent on-site above and beyond 2-4 hours.
- macspoofing 11y agoIf you're interviewing 10 people for 1 position, you've just wasted 9 people's time. Maybe a smaller problem that takes a few minutes, but not hours.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThat's what the resume is for, including a code resume. No, I'm not going to work a day for free for you.
- kephra 11y ago> You will go through 6-8 interviews!” I thought: “YOU will hire a bunch of unemployed people”. Can someone explain why HR managers have such a severe prejudice against hiring unemployed people? Imho, its their job, to select those people from the unemployemnt pool that fits the company, and have the skills. A HR who only poaches employed people, is doing a bad job, and hiding his laziness under an evil prejudice.
- gaius 11y agoIt's called validation, or social proof, and it shows up in all sorts of ways, incl. dating.
- kephra 11y agoSo a HR who successfully poached an employed coder, hired someone who is willing to drop work at the moment he gets a better offer. The other HR stupidity is, that its much easier to get a raise, if you switch jobs often, then if you stay in a job long enough to be productive. The result are projects broken by HR causing to much fluctuation.
- nosefrog 11y agoI don't think any of those approaches are the fault of HR. If you have a system where companies will pay more money for a new employee than to retain an old employee, then employee churn naturally follows from that.
- throw_away 11y agoI don't understand why they dont lede with here's the $$ and here's the problem. I don't want to work on bullshit no matter how many massages and drycleaning you give me. I don't want to work for $40k plus lottery tickets on earth shattering problems. Why do we have to play this time-consuming game before you tell me the info I need to hear? This doesn't scale. I'll stick to the devil I know.
- Decade 11y agoI think this also applies to someone who is unemployed. All I want is to do meaningful work and get paid. I'm tired of the hamster wheel of job applications. For coders, a major offender is the variety of TrueAbility/Codility/HackerRank/custom code challenges. FizzBuzz is fine. You want to filter out people who just can't code. Beyond that, timed challenges don't tell the recruiter anything about how a person interacts with others, or maintains code, or researches solutions for new problems. And then, after I successfully complete the code challenge, investing time that I really can't afford, they just look at my resume and delete my application, anyway.
- pan69 11y agoHad the same thing the other week. This guy want me to do a coding test, i.e. build a complete smallish application with all bells and whistles, which was going to take somewhere between 8 to 10 hours of my time. Really? This is supposed to be a test to establish if I can write code or not? If you want me to spend that much time, no worries, I'll invoice you for the privilege.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoWas there actually a [further] job available or was it a ruse to have you do a days unpaid work?
- krampian 11y ago>> I'll invoice you for the privilege I would have no hesitation on actually bringing this up. Charge him your regular rate and refund him 50% off your fee if he later hires you.
- DanBC 11y ago> refund him 50% off your fee if he later hires you. That would be incompatible with anti-corruption rules in some places.
- ilitirit 11y agoSometimes the people who ask you to interview are not the same people who do actually end up interviewing you, or they don't communicate with each other. At one of my last interviews I was told I don't look like I want the job enough because I was dressed casually. I was very confused. I reminded them that they requested an interview with me several times, even after I told them I was not on the market, and that I had actually taken time of work for the interview. I only showed up because they practically begged me. I was so annoyed at some of the questions. "What value can you add to this company?" No sir, how can YOU make it worth MY while to join you, considering that I have to leave a position that I'm perfectly comfortable with? After finally understanding that I was happy with my current job, one of the interviewers asked me "So why are you here wasting our time?" I was infuriated. The whole experience left a bitter taste in my mouth. I don't think I would ever consider interviewing at that company again.
- pjmorris 11y agoThe 'one phone interview, one on-site interview, make a decision' format is how every good company I've worked for has hired, ranging over multiple industries and multiple decades. You can tell a lot about a company from your very first interactions with them. I'd steer clear of anything more elaborate than what she described, they are probably guessing about how to hire, and that mean's they're probably guessing about how to run a business. That kind of risk can be entertaining and instructive, but might not be great for your career.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI've had folks get irate when I wouldn't spend the day at their interview. I was in alpha release, fighting fires and working on a deadline! I'm kind of glad I never worked for that idiot.
- marcosdumay 11y agoOr, an even shorter TLDR: Decide! How much does it cost to have 7 people interview a candidate anyway? Even without considering that the best candidates will run away, how can companies justify that?
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoI'll save this for the inevitable barrage of LinkedIn messages that will appear after I start a new job soon.
- bhayden 11y agoI once had an interview for a job while I was already employed. They asked why I wanted to leave my current job, I told them I didn't and that I liked my job, but I also look for better opportunities. My interviewer seemed incredulous at this concept, and thought I was wasting her time. Does she only want to hire unemployed or unhappily employed people? So dumb.
- vitalinos 11y agoIt's easy to say when you do have a job