5 ms·
Why not do 2 phone screens to filter out completely incompetent people and then let them choose: - paid work for a week - writing patch for a project or makin
by lukasm 11y ago
Why not do 2 phone screens to filter out completely incompetent people and then let them choose:
- paid work for a week
- writing patch for a project or making simple tool(proxy of the job) and invite them to talk about it.
- civilian 11y agoBecause candidates have lives outside of code. They probably already have a job, so taking a week off for "vacation" which will actually be a "paid interview" sounds like a crummy deal. Writing a patch-- similarly, it's eating into their own time. You're going to lower your hire rate from that.
- dagw 11y agoIf they can take half a day or a day out of their life to show up for an interview then certainly they can take the same time out of their life to write some code instead.
- lukasm 11y agobut it's paid so you can take a week off between jobs. As I said, give them an option. Interview can take a whole day, doing a project pretty much the same, but you can split it into a few day or do it over the weekend.
- douche 11y agoWe did this for our most recent hire - gave them a short project to implement over a long weekend. I think we shot for a target of having it take the applicants at most four hours; I threw together the reference example in an hour or two. I think it was a success, and we'll probably use this method going forward. There's just no substitute for seeing actual code, and by extension, the way someone structures the problem in their mind. It also give you some easy jumping off points to discuss with the applicant - Can you explain why you used data structure X here instead of Y? Change this requirement, and how would you do this differently? etc.