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How do you try to hire people who currently have jobs with strict anti moonlighting policies? (Or maybe the answer is just don't bother, and you can afford shrinking the applicant pool without any big adverse effects)

If someone is experienced, you can talk through code and APIs and get a good sense for them.

But if you can work with someone before you hire them full-time, you'll greatly increase your hit rate. This may not always work, and it may not even work 50% of the time, but the more people you can hire that you have worked with either through internships or contract work or from previous jobs, the better.

> But if you can work with someone before you hire them full-time, you'll greatly increase your hit rate.

Sure but you also filter out a ton of good candidates. I can't do my full time job plus family life stuff and work for someone else on a side project.

And I'm not going to resign from a job for a "maybe" contract to hire type position.

So it's just a non-starter. And most other programmers I've talked to are the same.

It's different for younger people who don't have families but that's exactly my point. You filter out whole demographics with the contract to hire style.

Has anyone tried offering to pay but permitting candidates to decline payment? (My current and previous jobs have these restrictions, but they also pay well enough that I care quite a bit less than I did when I was a college student / funemployed / etc.)

It seems like it's likely to work similarly to bug bounties: it's not like you stop getting security reports from people who can't accept the bounties, you just don't get the benefit of the incentive, and maybe the money gets donated to a charity of their choice instead.

Not paying for the work doesn’t circumvent most moonlighting policies. The first company still likely claims ownership of your work. Enforcement of that can be tricky, but I doubt that’s a battle most people want to have.

Why wouldn't such a policy prevent you from writing code during an interview? (Amount of code?)

A careful reading of most policies would show that the company claims it does own the code you write during an interview. They just don't care to enforce it because that code never really goes anywhere.

These policies are actually fairly onerous as written. Most of us just get by because the company doesn't care to enforce.

I mean, an asshole company's incentives to enforcing "You shouldn't interview at competitors" are extremely strong. I'd expect that the reason that they don't enforce "You can't write code at interviews" is not that the company doesn't care to enforce it, but that either they can't legally prevent people from interviewing with industry-standard practices (nb, I am guessing this with zero knowledge/training in employment law) or that they know that this will end poorly for them PR-wise, because people won't interview for them.

So those incentives, I think, also apply to take-home projects. Those are also about as industry-standard these days as in-person coding interviews, and so any legal or social pressures against saying that you can't write code in person should also apply to saying that you can't write code for a few hours on an evening as part of an interview.

Meanwhile, the legal situation for "you can't get paid" is very different because so many legal things are different when money is involved, and the social pressures for "you can interview via whatever means they want you to interview, you just have to refuse payment" are going to also be very different.

Those people made poor choices for signing those policies. I personally never sign non-compete agreements. I've also seen agreements where any OSS projects you work on need to get approved. I walked away from that bullshit.

It depends on your state. Non-competes aren't valid in CA for the most part, but they are for most of the rest of the country.

You are right, but usually the people who come up with that crap aren't tech people. Most likely they are biz people who just googled NDAs and noncompetes on the internet and picked the harshest one.

personally, i think anti-moonlighting policies should be illegal.

> Want to work on my team? I'll screen the resumes, I'll do the phone interviews and then I'll bring you in in person. I'll be in on all of the interviews you have with various people.

FWIW, if I were one of the interviewers on OPs team, I will find this to be micromanaging and will be uncomfortable.

Also, be very sure you understand what you can and cannot say, or ask, when talking with a candidate. HR (in theory) are trained to avoid the landmines.

The main one for normal people is you can't ask them their age. Otherwise, be professional and only focus on the job requirements.

An offer of payment does not make silly time commitments palatable for me. I already have a job. If I wanted more cash, I'd just moonlight.

If I was being given a code challenge/take-home, I'd be more inclined to do it if it came with payment. Even if it's trivial, like $200. That's a small price to pay in screening and it at least shows the company believes your time is valuable.

A lot of companies will reimburse you for travel and lodging where applicable during the interview stage. It's not a far stretch to think that they should do the same if they are having you do actual work on your own time, also during the interviewing process.

> This is common in a field like journalism. Want to do a one or two day trial of a reporter? Pay them to write for you! Have them work in a real environment and do real work for publication.

Doesn't journalism also have a lot of sites/publications/companies trying to get people to work for free full time? I know quite a few pass it off as working for 'exposure'...

You can't legally do this with people on a work visa.

Exactly. Just a week or two of contract work will tell you if the candidate is a fit or not. A 30 minute phone screen will tell you if a candidate is worthy of a contract. I think companies don't do this because a. They don't want to pay and b. They don't get to gloat 'we have a super rigorous hiring process'

There is an additional difficulty in many cases: the law.

Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them. To "hire" someone formally for a week, though, entails a lot of paperwork and has, depending on the country, legal consequences (e.g. voting rights in worker councils, minimum employment durations, right to sue for wrongful termination)...

The optimal way would be if lawmakers could create some sort of "employed contractor", however I can think of a dozen ways for employers to screw over poor people with it...

Perhaps this is different outside the US, but this is not really a big problem inside the US from my experience. If you're doing "contract-to-hire" you do need to be somewhat careful that you don't treat them as employees before they are, e.g. don't give them equipment (laptop etc), don't require them to arrive at a certain time, probably don't buy them lunch, etc. IANAL (this is not legal advice), but it seems quite easy to keep a software engineer correctly classified.

It's not like the job "Uber driver" where the fundamental nature of the job means you can't be a contractor.

>Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors, so you want to hire them.

At least in the US, this isn't a problem. You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year. No need to have any kind of established company/status, because by default anyone running a business without incorporating or organizing is operating a sole proprietorship--it's basically 1 extra form at tax time.

As long as the person you're paying is doing business under their name, they generally won't even need to open a second bank account (they might want to if they do this more than occasionally).

> You just make out the check to the individual, and then send them a 1099 at the end of the year.

Wow, that's awesome. What happens, for example, if someone is unemployed, then doing work for you and either gets sick on his own or gets injured on the job?

In Germany, for an employed person, the medical insurance would cover #1 and the Unfallversicherung (accident insurance) of the employer would cover #2. Let me guess: the (potential) employee is totally uninsured in the US during such an relationship?

>What happens, for example, if someone is unemployed, then doing work for you and either gets sick on his own or gets injured on the job?

For the first case--nothing at all.

For the second case--generally nothing as long as the person is really an independent contractor.

In the US there are guidelines that determine whether someone is an employee or a contractor. For example is the person flexible to work whenever they want, or do they have to be in the office from 9-5. Does the person have to wear a uniform etc. Is the position short term etc...

So if someone were injured on the job, they could claim that they even though the company said they were an independent contractor, they were actually an employee because of xyz.

Most employers know this so they take steps to ensure independent contractors actually fit the guidelines for independent contractor. And in the case of paying a tech contractor for a few weeks, it's usually pretty clear cut.

Yeah. This is no different for me being paid to write a book or receiving an honorarium for something while employed by someone.

Yeh but the rates for these 1099 contractors are so low to what I would expect.

What do you mean? I generally made much more per hour when I was working as a contractor.

I've see quite a few comments on the workplace stack overflow where a 25-35% premium for contractors was considered generous and considered "normal" for the USA instead of the 200% / 300% id expect in say the UK

Unfortunately it's not as easy as that.

The IRS has guidelines on who is considered an employee. If you set their hours, provide equipment for them to use and there's a few other things I forget, they are a de-facto employee regardless of how you pay them: 1099 or W2. This is why a lot of larger companies will not employ sole-proprietors directly. They require you to either go through a contracting company or set up some corporate structure so that you can't claim to be one of their employees.

It's fairly easy. You just have to follow the guidelines. They are also guidelines not hard and fast rules. If you ask a contractor to come in from 9-5 for a week because that's when you're company is open, but it's a short term engagement, you don't buy them a computer, you don't prevent them from working for other companies, you don't offer insurance or vacation, you don't reimburse them for business expenses, and you have a written contract, you're not likely to run into problems.

>This is why a lot of larger companies will not employ sole-proprietors directly.

There are plenty of large companies that do contract directly. For example, Coke does it all the time.

As far as I know this isn't a problem in India, UK and US. Reporting additional income for tax purposes is fairly simple and there is nothing legally wrong in doing multiple jobs at the same time, unless you are on some kind of Visa which prohibits that kind of employment.

Most people are not contractors with an established company/legal status as contractors

Is this problematic? Here in Portugal I just update my status in the tax authority website, then declare the extra income when filing my taxes (plus possibly pay social security for that month). You don't need to create a company or anything like that.

How many engineers would accept an offer which is conditional on "a week or two of contract work"?

Most of the engineers that I've hired came from another job (not all though), and so they need a confirmed offer before they are willing to jump ship.

So this practice introduces its own selection bias; you'd only be sampling from the pool of currently un-/fun-employed, and those who hate their current job enough to quit without a safe landing.

I'd vastly prefer to have a week or two of paid contract work from each candidate before making the decision, but it feels insulting to even ask.

What we have done is hired people as contractors when we have overflow work. We'll pay you a high overly rate to do extra work for us each week. They usually already have gigs and want some extra cash. Others might be doing contract work full time. But if we really like working together, we chat about making the arrangement permanent.

But I wouldn't just do this. I think any company of any size needs a strong internship program to build their own pipeline. I also feel that you should be able to hire people without them doing contract work for you or other kinds of assignments. Talking with someone, going over code and APIs, etc. is usually good enough to gauge someone. If someone has years of experience, has stuff on Git and can talk coherently about what they are doing and why, they probably can program.

What I was saying is that if you insist on seeing code first, pay them as a contractor, don't ask them to do a bogus assignment for free.

Agreed. I guess you could make the contract route optional. I mean have the standard interview route or the contract route - ask the candidates to pick what they want.

> How many engineers would accept an offer which is conditional on "a week or two of contract work"?

Unless you work on Google or something with the same size, more than you expect to hire.

And yes, you will biasing your candidate pool. Every kind of procedure will bias the candidate pool. Again, unless your company is Google-sized, the only important thing about that bias is if it align with the preponderant bias (what is bad) or not.

> Again, unless your company is Google-sized, the only important thing about that bias is if it align with the preponderant bias (what is bad) or not.

If you mean (which is bad) then I agree completely. You want your set of biases (biases being errors in hiring, meaning the things you select on that don't match with what the job needs) to be as different as possible from the rest of the industry. Whenever you can pick up people who are good who aren't getting picked up by the rest of the industry, everyone wins.

That's what I meant. Ideally, job offers should have the largest possible diversity of biases (this is better for both sides). That's very hard to happen on practice for many reasons, one of them being that a few companies concentrate most of the offers.

If you are not one of those companies, your focus should be on making sure you are not biased the same way as them. Other means of avoiding rejecting good candidates have a much lower return.

I wonder if having multiple ways you can hire would be beneficial here. Behind Door number 1 is a confirmed job offer after 5 hours of grueling technical interviews. Behind Door number 2 is a 30 day probation offer after an hour long soft skills + tech interview, etc..

Maybe the lesson here is that the "optimal" strategy is to simply not abstract the problem. Its not "a person" you're hiring, its Bob. And Bob is more comfortable doing X or Y or Z, and Bob is best tested for his skills in ABC manner, etc.

This is the most reasonable thing I’ve read in this thread. Totally makes sense.

I agree.. especially if the candidate is just looking for an "upgrade". Personally I left a very stable telco job for a 6 month contract with high chance of renewal or offered FT. The thing that made me say yes was the contract rate was ~50% more compensation than my previous job and I had contacts there. If it was anything less, I wouldn't have left.

Companies don't do this because it will wildly cut down their candidate pool.

There is _literally no chance_ that I am going to leave an existing job for a "week or two" contract with a company. If that's part of their hiring process, I will simply look elsewhere.

We don't do this, but we do have people work for us on a contract basis for a period of time while they still have another job. We have a lot of people who are looking for extra cash or maybe they like to just do a bunch of contract projects. But one thing can lead to another and then you decide you both want to work full time with each other.

Which is flat out gross misconduct for 99.9 % of all full time employees in the engineering field.

Is that true? I’ve never had a contract that forbade me to work on side projects for cash.

Oh you mean working in the black economy I am sure the IRA will be interested.

There's often a clause in the Employee Handbook you're asked to agree to periodically.

And with Anglo Saxon law it's probably an implied term as there is so much precedent after all we are supposed to be good servants to our masters :-)

The clause is unenforceable in most (perhaps all) US states.

No one here has a contract that forbids working for other companies in your own time. I haven't seen that in the DC area.

Maybe that's a Silicon Valley thing?

People might have clauses to prevent people from working on similar work for competitors, sure, but I haven't seen anything that bars working on other kinds of projects outside of work.

Standard in professional jobs - the US in particular tends to have laws that vastly favor the employers. SV is actually one of the liberal states.

Though as you say your a journalist they tend to be exceptions.

I agree with your general stance on CTH - but this seems a little sketch. If you're already a contractor and are used to trying to keep multiple projects going, or have some idle time, then by all means. From the candidate side its nice to sign up with eyes open to the bad as well as the good.

But if you're working someplace salaried, it seems fairly dishonest to spin up a short contract. especially when most of the attention is consumed in the process of getting started (environment, implicit policies, platform, etc).

plus on your side, you don't really know how much of that person you're getting. if the work is great, thats fine, but if it seems slow or misguided, is that a fundamental reflection of ability, or because they tried to cram it in between 8pm and 11pm every night?

It should be one of many options. CTH is how I got my foot in the door as a junior guy long ago, but now that my career is established, I would not even consider it unless the alternative was unemployment.

It's typically a 3 month contract, not a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks isn't enough.

I left my previous employer for a 6 month contract at ~50% increase in salary for the contracted period. If it was a 3 month contract, I would have declined.

I personally would never, ever accept a week or two of contract work.

Companies dont do a week or two of contract work because people that have strong experience will just say no.

I agree it's the best way to tell if the candidate is a fit. But, I think resume + phone screen (or 2) + an on-site can be almost as good, and not limit your talent pool. The on-site could even include working with the team. What you describe would require me to take PTO from work... to work. Sure I'm getting paid, but I'd tell you no thanks. Others without decent PTO and full-time jobs wouldn't even have that choice

Thank you for an excellent write up of the duties of a hiring manager.

Contract before hire is a practice that is slowly growing, and not fast enough.

I find test paid projects are the best interview technique for detail oriented work, whether it's software or otherwise.

It's far better to select a task that is simple enough for the potential candidate to be a pinball through the code base or problem domain, ideally to solve a small problem that will be directly transferrable into the project they will work on.

I also make myself available to answer any basic questions or assumptions to save them time, because that would be the case on a normal team.

This results in a far lower expenditure of time trying out different resources to find relationships that work.

Unfortunately a lot of technical hiring is still done by non-technical people, or tech folks need to level up their hiring skills.

I, for one, hope it doesn't really grow. There's a lot of abuse in the "contract-to-hire" space, where the company tends to dangle that carrot of getting the job at the end of the contract period to get the applicant to work lots of extra hours at lower pay, only to be told at the end, "nope".

Employees don't deserve poor employers either.

I wouldn't condone a practice like you've described. It's far better to engage a potential candidate at normal rates for a short period to see if it's a mutual fit.