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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

> This works, but make sure they spend the 2 hours in your office and not 12 hours at home solving a 2 hour problem..

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.

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> 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.

Any company trying to enforce such a non-compete against someone who just earned $200 would spend a lot more than that in legal fees. This feels like legal paranoia to me.

Furthermore, in German we have a saying: "Where there is no judge, there's no executioner". Maybe this attitude is more popular in Switzerland than in Germany, but the basic meaning is: don't sweat the legality of small exchanges that (a) don't affect anyone negatively and (b) aren't in some government agency's crosshair. That being said, your mileage in different legal systems may vary - in our civil law system it's probably more common for a judge to simply throw out such trifling matters and people are generally also way less inclined to start a lawsuit.

USA is kind of special regarding legality handling. An unhappy candidate my find legal arguments to complain. In Europe, states may be unhappy that work has been done without tax payment.

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.

> In Europe, states may be unhappy that work has been done without tax payment.

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.

To me it feels like classic "A-ha! I discovered an edge case so the entire solution is invalid!". Just handle the edge case differently to how you handle everything else.

HR don't care they can afford the cost where as an individual employee is unlikely to be able.

Then the candidate says something like "Well, you know, I can't take any payment before I'm out of this job. Can't I just do it for "free", and payment come as a bonus on hiring?"

I wouldn't do that. But then, I don't work for free.

What if you don't get an offer or if you decline their offer?

It's a risk you take, or don't, it'll certainly depend on how compelling is the job.

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.

There can be legal issues from the candidate's side too -- people on an H-1B visa in the US may not be able to accept payment for work outside of the company they've been hired by.

In the minority of cases where this is true, just handle it differently.

Actually its common for many if not all employers to ban outside work with out approval from your manager.

Which is bullshit and absolutely none of their business.

And also not very enforceable in some areas. I got legal advice on this from my own attorney some 20 years ago. I had created a piece of software on the side while working under a contract that said something similar. The software took off and I was worried about it. He advised me that worst case would be paying the company the money I earned while under that contract, but even that was a stretch.

In addition to being bullshit it is also a hint you should be moving on.

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