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Comment by BrandonM | Hacker News Reader

I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true?

One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job.

Personally, I don't like my current job but am growing frustrated with job hunting. I'm very close to just looking for a bartending job to go along with the part-time valet work that I picked up between jobs, and then maybe doing hobby programming in my spare time for pleasure and profit. I'm serious here: ridiculous interview processes are making the quality of the programmer pool worse by nudging programmers out of it altogether.

Why is it so unreasonable to bring people in on an intern-like trial basis?

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It is really true. As you would know if you'd been on a team that needed to fire the wrong hire.

As for why not to try people before you hire them, a lot of experienced people already have jobs. They aren't going to want to accept a "maybe yes, maybe no" position without a really strong incentive.

That said, a number of companies do have policies of liking to hire contractors, then make some of them permanent. This kind of works. But the best contractors they'll find generally are contractors from choice, and so aren't likely to want to make the transition.

To me, this is one of the big unspoken about benefits of working in a startup. There is no room for slack and if someone isn't doing their job it's immediately apparent. Nothing kills my motivation more than working with someone who is technically incompetent and/or generally unpleasant to be around.

Want to work in Chicago?

Our interview process mostly consists of asking you questions you should know the answer to. If your answers make sense and you seem pleasant, welcome to the team. Oh, did I mention you'll probably make twice as much here than at Google?

Incidentally, more people want to work at Google than want to work at Bank of America, even though there is plenty of interesting code to write at the Bank, and plenty of boring paperwork to do at Google. It doesn't make sense to me.

I love Chicago... that sounds good to me.

Could you please give some examples of interesting code at Bank of America?

Fraud detection.

So, BoA wants to detect itself then?

What language(s), tech, framework is used for the software (web-apps? desktop? etc) at BoA?

There are something like 70,000 developers and 300,000 total employees, so it's hard to say anything other than "all of the above".

I mostly use Haskell and Perl. The rest of the department is mostly Perl. Sometimes I do C. Other groups are Python-heavy. There is a big Java and C# presence, and of course a lot of people that think C++ is the only real programming language.

There is some initiative to standardize on C++ and Python, but I doubt that is ever actually going to happen.

You forgot to mention that you would be working for a giant corporate behemoth that is evil to its customers.

I recently went through financial difficulties that involved problems paying 5 different credit cards. Bank of America was by far the most helpful company, actually recommending that I enter into debt management to allow me to pay off my cards at a markedly lower APR without taking a huge hit to my credit.

How exactly are they evil? They borrow your money at a certain rate, and loan it to other people at a higher rate?

Without getting into the evil/not evil argument: This is not quite correct. A bank can lend more money than they have/borrow. The bank must only maintain a specific ratio of equity and loans. For more details see Basel I, Basel II and the upcoming Basel III, which (should) regulate the loans of banks.

> Why is it so unreasonable to bring people in on an intern-like trial basis?

We do that, in addition to an interview process biased towards false negatives. We still find it expensive to make hiring mistakes, enough that we are still circumspect about candidates.

Not only does it take a lot to build up someone new, it's emotionally costly to tell them at the end of the evaluation period that they didn't make the grade -- and still give them full support and a real chance the whole way, in case they can turn it around. It does happen; sometimes it just takes time for ambient culture values and priorities to sink in before people "get" what's important to succeed.

It's much harder to do this trial period with option to buy, than for interns who are going back to school, where the expectations and time frame are clear. It also seems that the most capable candidates aren't as interested in being hired on a trial basis, since they have other options willing to commit more fully to them.

These are a few reasons it doesn't work as well as you might hope.

(* note, not talking about google here)

Maybe programmers nudged out of the process is a feature not a bug. People who self select out of a hard hiring process may meet not Google's criteria for certain attributes they want to see in their candidate.

Reminds me of property management: When screening possible tenants, merely saying that you will conduct background and credit checks will deter some people from even applying, most of them being people you wouldn't want to rent out to anyway.

Are those interviews so frustrating that you are willing to take 2 low-paying jobs instead?

As a bartender and a valet, I've easily averaged $15-25 an hour. Right now I'm making $25 an hour when I'm billing, and once I get home I'm not in the mood to do much computer work. Additionally, you can find service jobs anywhere, and start up very quickly.

I'd rather have the flexibility to move anywhere, the stimulation of constantly meeting new people, and some leftover desire for personal projects when I get home than to have a programming job I don't like.

Fair enough. Note that I'm not looking down on your choice of jobs (recently I've been thinking it would be cool to get a part time job as bartender but it's not feasible now) but I suppose they inevitably come with some hassle and that will be worse over time than the one-time hassle of the interviews. Besides I assumed your programming job would pay much more (well, it should).

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