Comment by skewart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skewart | Hacker News Reader

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> Rather than trying to read subjective, noisy signals from in-person interviews, give candidates a small battery of work-sample tests. These can be bug-fixes, small features, diagnostic challenges, or even specification writing assignments.

I agree that work sample interviews are a huge step in the right direction.

Recently though, I've been thinking about taking things even further: instead of giving sample projects, why not give candidates actual work that you need done, and pay them for it, like you would a contractor? Sample projects are inevitably going to be somewhat contrived, and they'll never be evaluated in quite the same way actual code submitted in a PR will be.

This approach lets the candidate and the company "date" for a while, letting each see how the other one actually works, before they decide to tie the knot of full-time employment. I think it's the most natural way for professionals to get to know each other, build trust, and develop well-informed opinions.

Of course there are plenty of practical logistical challenges, but it does seem like a freelance-to-full-time process could lead to better outcomes all around.

There are all sorts of problems with this approach.

Contract software development --- relatively short projects with no up-front commitment to long-term work --- is, when sold and delivered competently, much more expensive than salaried software development. That's why people hire full-time.

The very best software developers know this. They're not as a rule especially good negotiators, but they're familiar with the market. For every firm offering them temp-to-perm work, there are 4 others competing over who can offer the most attractive immediate full-time offer.

That makes the "standard" recruiting pipeline for temp-to-perm companies an adverse selection problem. And, I believe, it's also often an exploitative one. People taking these temp-to-perm contracts aren't getting paid 2-3x their salaried rate to work on temp terms. But that's the lower side of what contractors demand to accept the kind of risk we're talking about with these projects.

Really, companies that do temp-to-perm are telling the market, "we're so bad at qualifying candidates that we're going to fob the entire problem off on our candidates, and hope there are enough competent people with such poor negotiating skill in the labor market that we can get away with that indefinitely". For now, they're probably right --- although taking this pathway is, I think, doing damage to the long-term integrity of their team and processes. But I wouldn't bet on it.

You make a lot of good points. Temp-to-perm could easily turn into an adverse selection situation, and there is potential for it to get exploitive.

That said, I do think there is appeal for candidates in contracting for companies as a way to get to know the teams a bit better before deciding where to take a full-time offer. At least it's something I've been glad I've done at times, and wished I could have done at other times.

Plus, most developers are not the very best developers, and they won't have four competing offers after only a couple of weeks of job searching. For an awful lot of developers they'll need to spend hours prepping for interviews, working on take-home projects, going to onsites, and talking on the phone with hiring managers and recruiters. They spend a lot of time and effort for which they're not getting paid anything, and which is largely orthogonal to their actual work. When they do get a few offers they have to make a decision with limited knowledge of what working at each company will actually be like.

I dunno. I still think it would be awesome if job-seekers and hiring teams could get to know each other in some more natural and meaningful way than the feats of strength performed in today's interviews. Maybe temp-to-perm is too problematic though.

For my first job-search out of school, I actually started off by accepting a temporary, fully-remote contract position for one of the first startups I was interviewing with at the time.

After a short 1 hour pairing session with their front-end lead, I was offered a choice between going through the full 1 day interview gauntlet onsite at SF to arrive at a full-time offer on the spot, or a 2 month remote contract to give us both some more time to decide if we want to proceed with working together full-time (the actual length of the contract was negotiable, I just went with 2 months because I felt that's about how long it'd take me to finish interviewing with all the companies I was interested in). They made it clear that I could continue to interview at other companies during that time frame, as long as it wasn't so disruptive that it impacted my quality of work, and that I should feel free to turn down the full-time offer at the end of the contract if I find a better offer elsewhere. I felt the latter option suited me better at the time, because it was still fairly early in my interview process, so I didn't have any offers coming up on the immediate horizon, and I was still definitely interested in exploring my options some more before deciding on my first full-time job. So I accepted it.

I had a blast working there for those 2 months, learned a lot, and among other things, completed a decidedly non-trivial addition to their app. At the end of the contract, they offered me a very generous full-time position, but I ended up taking a competing offer at my current employer instead. There was no hard feelings, and we parted on good terms.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, yes, temp-to-perm definitely isn't right for every candidate (or most candidates, for that matter), but it will give both you and the candidate much more confidence in the decision on whether or not to go full time than any interview process ever could, and there's nothing wrong with offering it as an alternative to the standard interview gauntlet and letting the candidate decide what's best for them.

You definitely have to come to terms with the fact that it's a 2-way street though, meaning you have to accept the risk that the candidate might find at the end of the contract period that it's no longer in their best interest to proceed with a full-time position at your company, and that they are free to act on that realization. Otherwise, if you try to place limits on that aspect of the arrangement, the only candidates who would likely accept it would be the truly desperate ones whom you were probably never interested in hiring in the first place. I for one certainly wouldn't have accepted the arrangement if I wasn't free to continue interviewing during the contract and free to turn down the full time offer at the end of it.

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