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Comment by clay_to_n | Hacker News Reader

Great roadmap for startups to follow. Much of the writing about hiring software engineers comes from larger companies, and in my experience don't seem like reasonable processes for small companies.

Two questions: 1) Do you think the large coding assignment eliminates good candidates? I'd be concerned that after one phone interview, good candidates might not be invested enough to spend that kind of time.

2) What are your thoughts on behavioral / situational interviews? We've been doing one where we ask deeper questions about the candidate's previous roles, what they liked and didn't, what they think good vs bad teams and process look like, etc. Do you think these are valuable, and if so are you doing them during the in-person interview stage?

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My experience is that the programming exercise never deterred a candidate I really wanted to interview. That might be a little surprising, but I always work very hard to make sure there's a good conversation in the initial phone screen, so I think that helps a lot. Also, programmers (myself included) always underestimate how much time it will take to write a given piece of code, so maybe that helps, too!

I do think it's valuable to talk about previous experience in the ways you suggest -- what do good teams/processes look like, etc. I usually try to do that in a pretty casual way, during the in-person interview, and have those conversations bleed over into the lunch/dinner discussion, too. Basically, I'm interested in learning about how a person thinks about their work. And introspection about team dynamics is definitely part of that.

You might not have that experience, but I've seen otherwise. A company I worked for hosted an on-site two hour coding exercise (they gave you a computer, some boilerplate code, and a several tasks that were complete when you passed their unit tests) that was outlined during the phone interview so candidates knew what to expect.

But while I worked the boss would regularly complain about people refusing to do the onsite exam, people cancelling last minute, people refusing the exam once they were shown what they were about to do, people excusing themselves in the middle of the exam and ditching, etc.

These are people with 5-10 years of experience on their resumes given to him by recruiters.

I personally thought the test was a little overwhelming (not hard, just too much considering the intense pressure of an interview) but I managed to get through it, and so did everyone else he had hired up to that point. He churned through a lot of people, though.

I don't think I would do an assignment that takes me several evenings. That's what probation is for. But I am probably not a good candidate anyway.

The "We expect you to do this work for free to prove your worth to the company" interview model tells a lot about the company, in my opinion. If they'll ask you to do it once, they'll ask it a thousand times.

I've never asked someone to do 1,000 non-trivial programming tasks before hiring them. :-)

You have clearly missed my point. :-)

Would "keep track of your hours, we'll pay you $rate/hour for the exercise" during the phone screen be better signaling?

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