This works, but make sure they spend the 2 hours in your office and not 12 hours at home solving a 2 hour problem..
The other problem is that when you pay them you generate all sorts of nightmaris legal liabilities.
The other problem is that when you pay them you generate all sorts of nightmaris legal liabilities.
This goes against the core message of the article. The candidate is supposed to think about a problem on their own, and propose a well-reflected solution on Monday. That's pretty much the opposite of "sit down in this noisy corner in an unknown environment and give us something in two hours".
> The other problem is that when you pay them you generate all sorts of nightmaris legal liabilities.
If hiring a freelancer to do a little thing tends to generate all sorts of nightmarish legal liabilities, your company is either a government contractor or it has even bigger structural problems than hiring.
It might not be an issue for your company, but your candidate might have a non-compete (or other clause) preventing them from accepting compensation or even performing work for another company at all.
Things get trickier as soon as money is involved.
This payment looks like easy money for cheaters who would copy ready made solutions or ask friends for help. I'm not convinced, but this is indeed how things should be done in an ideal world.
I guess we could also ask candidates to pay. That is what is done in engineer schools in France. Not sure this is a good filtering method because of the Donner Kruger effect.
Well, it's a good thing we have (now domestic only) banking secrecy in Switzerland, for exactly these reasons. You only get into trouble when your livelihood doesn't make sense from what you earn and own - as long as you pay what's generally considered a 'fair' amount of tax, no-one will blink an eye and come after your documentation. And even if for some reason the government finds out, all that will happen is a penalty tax ranging from 20 to 300% of the missed revenue, usually 100%. There is an explicit difference between tax fraud (document forgery, which could mean jail) and tax evasion (when you 'forgot' to declare something, which leads to above penalty.
Overall, the system is set up so that the government can't abuse its asymmetric power over individuals, instead keeping it as close as possible to an 'employee' of the people.
But you are the one that placed yourself in a bad situation. They have a sane procedure that fully respects you, but isn't fine-tuned to your current problems. You can try negotiating their procedure too, but in their place (what I'm not, I'm in the "can't bill you" place right now), I'd refuse to.
Yes. And to make sure they don't cheat on it, maybe don't let them use a computer or the internet. A whiteboard ought to be enough. And just to be really sure, make them explain what they're doing in real time as they do it.
That will do quite well, and offer a wonderful alternative to the standard, awful, whiteboard coding interview.
Did you read the article?
That's what the article author is saying not to do, they prefer to see a well worked solution after you define a particular technology, showing they are adaptable and have thought it through properly.
Limiting them to your office, timeboxed, advantages people who spit out lines of code quickly, which is definitely not the right fit for a huge amount of coding positions, especially when you are emphasising logical choices and design decisions.
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
As I understand it, the more common form of pressure would come from having to deliver things in a tight schedule, and perhaps in certain kinds of meetings and presentations. Not from being forced to work in a foreign environment with foreign computers & tools and unknown people hanging around, watching and JUDGING you. If a company puts an engineer in the latter position very often, it might be doing something rather wrong. Whereas in the former situation, employers can find relief in at least having colleagues they are familiar with and an environment they're used to & comfortable with.
I was wondering about the tax and legal implications around paying someone for an interview challenge as well.
The overall idea seems fantastic, but paying or receiving money for an interview coding challenge is a little weird.
A company recently asked me to do a task they expected me to take ten hours, unpaid of course. I told them I thought it was kind of ridiculous.
"Well do what you can in two or three hours and if you really impress us with what you have done..."
The company really didn't impress me enough to bother.
But probably only 10-20% of people will have set that up, and for people who don't have an ABN, you have to basically fill out all the forms you would to make them an employee (you need their tax file number, have to submit a form to the tax office, have to get their superannuation details so you can pay them the mandatory 9% additional retirement savings on top of what you pay them, etc.)...
To save dragging people into an office for that time period, I set up a custom git server that marks the timestamps of their pulls and pushes. The instructions for the task are contained in the README of the repo, so as soon as they pull it they've started.
https://github.com/Prismatik/codescreen
It's critical to me that the limit is adhered to so that over time I can compare candidate responses on a level playing field.
I prefer to see what people write in their normal way of working when they're not under extreme time pressure.