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Comment by shadow0 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I interviewed with them once. Their interview process was pretty strange: after a technical round they wanted me to work full-time for them for a week as a next step. Wat? How do I do that if I have a job? Plus, it seemed like they pay their engineers way below the average. Not surprising they are having hard time hiring and had to move on to hiring remote workers.

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I also interviewed with them, and they gave me the same offer. I told them that was disrespectful to seasoned engineers, and that they could bone off, and I ended up getting a job at a much more interesting company, so it worked out in the end.

That sounds like relatively inexperienced technical people attempting to hire more experienced technical people, to over-simplify a bit.

If you want to build a house and you're not sure how to best build a house you're going to be very cautious hiring someone to build a house because you don't know if their way of building a house is any good, because you don't know how to build a house.

That is a tough problem for a group to solve.

I'm always a bit disheartened when I see misinformation and negativity spiral like this.

The work trial is no longer required, but it is an option since some candidates really enjoy working with us to get a better sense of what it is like before deciding.

I think it served us really well in the early days but you're right it doesn't work for all people (especially more senior folks). And of course we offer to pay people for the time.

In terms of overall comp, we pay more than 7 out of 10 comparable companies (sub 200 employees, tech, in the bay area) across both cash and equity according to http://conneryconsulting.com/ who we hired to help us with this.

Overall, our hiring process (especially in the early days) was weighted toward not making a bad hire, so this means we missed out on some good people occasionally, but ended up with a stellar team. Given the chance to do this over again, I'd make the same choice.

Finally, I'd suggest reading some of Paul Graham or Sam Altman's advice on this topic, for example: http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire

"Have people audition for roles instead of interviewing for them" "A single bad hire left unfixed for long can kill a company." etc

We definitely didn't have it perfect early on, and still don't, so apologies if you had a negative experience. It is something we are always working on.

I concur. I've had interactions with that team, and they've all been strange. The engineering and security are buggy and poor, and attempts to get to the bottom of issues are stonewalled and shunted.

Is it so strange? If their engineering and security are poor, they wouldn't want that fact exposed by somebody outside the company. A reputation for poor engineering is the touch of death for a startup. Especially a bitcoin startup.

Looks like that "on site work trial" thing is still part of their hiring practice. It is mentioned right above "How to Apply".

I imagine this strategy works against them as I can't think or a single respectable engineer who would be willing to do this. It may work in their favor of recent college grads.. but certainly not seasoned engineers.

Yup, their logic is very hard to understand. What am I supposed to do, take a week of PTO? I'd think they want to find people who badly want to work at their company, but they are just not that kind of company yet.

Not have a job. Be a contract worker.

Sacrificing a week of PTO to just interview is a bit much already.

I was thinking that maybe it would be kind of interesting and even possibly beneficial to work there for a short period before joining permanently. But could you do that in one week? I guess you could get a look at their tool chain, but you aren't going to learn much about what it's really like to work there in such a short period.

Yeah, if there's a hackday component it's a red flag. A hackweek is just plain laughable. This reeks of horrible incompetence at the highest levels.

Why wouldn't they pay for that week? They probably have money.

I don't think his issue is being paid. It's taking a whole week off from his current job to basically do a test run for a job that had no guarantee.

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