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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I was just speaking with a co-worker about how I consider this interview culture to be a race to the bottom in how much unpaid work companies are getting from prospective employees. When I interviewed with Facebook they do back to back whiteboard interviews for about 6+ hours then sometimes they give "homework" problems, etc. Even skilled candidates can't refuse because a less skilled candidate will come along willing to make the sacrifice.

I don't have any solutions only complaints and bitterness, sorry.

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Do you think Facebook is taking pictures of whiteboards after interviews and putting the code into production? I agree day-long interviews are a problem, and homework problems are offensive (plenty of folks refuse them btw), but it's a stretch to say companies are using interviews as a way to get unpaid work.

Man, it would serve them right to have tried using my whiteboarded regular expression parser. /still bitter

The premise is not that they're getting unpaid work in the form of programming, just unpaid work in general. If they replace 8 hours of reviewing a candidate's open source contributions and/or side projects with 4 hours of random walks through an undergrad CS textbook, then they're using the candidate's unpaid work to cut down on their HR spending. "How many round piano tuners are there in Fizzbuzz" isn't programming, but it is HR.

Do most programmers have significant amounts of open source contributions? I only had a couple of years of life when I had the luxury of enough time for that sort of thing.

At my startup we pay interviewees a decent hourly consulting rate for take-home problems or full-day followup onsites (after the first interview).

We only do them when we are pretty excited about a candidate but need more information to make a hiring decision.

It's cheap, really, considering the cost of sourcing candidates and the cost of making a bad hiring decision.

When I'm looking for a job, I usually have 3 or 4 strong prospects and looking back on my spreadsheets that I keep when I am looking, it usually takes about 2 weeks from the time I reach out to my network of recruiters and I have an offer (the shortest was 4 days from looking to having an offer from what was then a top 10 Fortune 500 company).

Why would I go through that trouble? I have 20+ years of experience that I can explain how I architected and developed from the website, to the middle tier, to the database to multiple VPCs on AWS and dev ops. I'm not going to do homework.

When I was first starting out I might, but living in a major metro area that's not on the west coast, there are more openings for senior devs/architects than people to fill them.

If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three weeks between employment.

Just to provide another perspective...

We have a take home test. It is an obviously fake problem, but we review it to the grade we would for our production code.

We don't find that candidates turn down taking the test - it's capped at 3 hours so that it can't take up lots of time. We do find that we have a low pass rate, and even among candidates with 10+ years experience, we still find candidates who write code that is just not good, and who haven't read the spec.

I'm not at all suggesting that you might be in this category, and if you can find jobs you want that don't require tests that's great.

However, there are people with plenty of experience, who can architect things brilliantly, and who can't write a ~300 line program in Python in a way that satisfies a spec or in a way that anyone would be able to maintain. That's important for many companies, and so I think tests can be one useful part of an interviewing process.

> If a company wants to try me out, I'm more than willing to do a contract to perm, but my hourly rate is going to be enough to cover self employment taxes, make up for not getting paid for time off and at least two or three weeks between employment.

What does that number look like? 10k a week?

For a 1099 contract where I'm responsible for my own self employment taxes....

2080 - hours in a work year

-80 Paid Holidays

-120 Paid Time off

-120 Gap between employment (based on my history)

= 1760 work hours per year

FTE Salary * .028 (Employer Medicare Contribution) + $7967 (maximum social security amount - 128500*.062) = minimum salary

minimum salary/1720 hours = pay rate.

Take a reasonable salary for my market as $140,000, that is about $152000/1720 = $88.37/hour minimum.

Adjust the number based on market, skill set, and the amount of time you estimate between jobs. I'm also not taking into account health benefits that you would need to pay yourself because I'm covered under my wife, or 401K matching. I would add 4% to the hourly rate to cover 401K matching.

A good rule of thumb is 3x the rate you would get as a full time employee this might not be enough in the US given the high cost of health cover for a self employed person.

I'd recommend dropping the full day onsite. I mean what the hell do you talk about for a full day? The small talk must be unbearable after the first 30 minutes.

So you want a company to hire somebody after talking them for 30 minutes? Based off of what? You honestly can't imagine talking about technical software problems for more than 30 minutes? That's a pretty big red flag to me.

I'm assuming you are technical yourself, otherwise please disregard. What you are unintentionally implying is that you can't spot a fraud by talking to them about your chosen profession within 30 minutes. If you can't, you shouldn't be doing the interviewing. If you can, why waste 5.5 hours of the company's time per candidate?

Plenty of people are great talkers about profession, big picture, architecture blabble and so on. It does not correlate with coding ability.

Its not causation, but I'd say it correlates to being a thoughtful person. Drilling down on the architecture blabble to see how deep their understand goes will absolutely tell you whether they could code a solution.

Is there a person who claims to be a coder that has configured and launched a multi-environment microservice with several attached artifacts like DBs and queues, that knows in depth what each is doing, that can't code? At that point you're just testing whether someone has memorized syntax details that they might usually get from an IDE or a 3 second google search in regular development. I have been writing production JS for years but still have to occasionally look up Array.slice vs Array.splice parameters, especially if I haven't done a lot of data munging in a while. That may indicate to a person giving an interview that somehow I'm "faking" it, when in reality its just a momentary stall-out in my brain's lookup tables.

> Is there a person who claims to be a coder that has configured and launched a multi-environment microservice with several attached artifacts like DBs and queues, that knows in depth what each is doing, that can't code?

Funny that you mention it. I know a person who can't shut up about microservices, Kubernetes and CI and can't code their way out of paper bag. They had no problem passing one of those interviews.

And sure rote API memorization isn't the point. But if a candidate can't code say bubblesort (or any kind of sort) in 30 minutes they are not very good at coding - and it doesn't matter if they can quote their architecture patterns by heart.

> But if a candidate can't code say bubblesort (or any kind of sort) in 30 minutes they are not very good at coding

Thats bullshit. Sorry. Most developers will NEVER implement a generic sorting algorithm except in a code interview. You say you don't want rote API memorization, but you do want rote sort method implementation memorization. Yes you can be a system or tools developer and maybe have a higher chance of doing it, but its 99% likely even then that you just use a library for it for the language you're using, or copypastaing it from someone who's studied the specific implementation for your lang.

I disagree. You aren't asking the right questions or probing enough.

When you start probing enough it quickly becomes practical/coding interview we all come to detest. Sure enough, that way you might not even need 30 minutes. But shop talk alone doesn't cut it.

Maybe your “shop talk” is different from mine, but I can suss out fakes from the first sentence usually. You’re correct in that they go straight for the broad architecture strokes, and they speak in vague terms. Trying to get a solid grounded answer is like trying to nail jelly to a tree. That’s when you know they just read some wikipedia articles and don’t know the practical applications of the words they’re using.

Those have to be really clumsy then.

There's a number of people with CS or SW engineering degrees who can't actually code. Those can often quote you Gang of Four patterns, discuss broad slices of tech and draw architecture diagrams on the board. But still can't code.

I know, I work with several. I’m pretty good at spotting them because I studied them while working with them. Fun fact: if you poke in the right places, you’ll see that they don’t even understand GoF and architecture, they just regurgitate the what they memorized.

I find that highly dubious. CS degrees from where?

Interesting and the first I’ve heard of this and the first confirmation I’ve heard that cost-wise it’s not egregious to do so.

It still seems strange to me to pay for throwaway work but I can also see how that’s really just my personal sentiment / bias and this is probably a pretty good and balanced approach.

Except some of us already have full-time jobs and don't want to spend the weekend working on quizzes, whether it's paid or not. And unless you're very generous with timing taking a day off of work can be a logistical issue, not just a pay issue.

This type of interview self-selects for people with fewer family/non-work obligations, who are willing and able to spend their free time still programming.

Sometimes you might have to inconvenience yourself to improve your career.

Ya, if you paid double market rates, I'd do it. I suspect most people who do this sort of thing probably pay market or worse.

Cost of doing business. Not willing to put in your free time? No need to worry about getting a new job.

Are you also job hunting at work, doing interviews on your employers time, etc?

You're ignoring the context of the comment you're replying to.

That guy already has a good job. Another company is trying to poach him. Why would he, or any other qualified and gainfully employed candidate go through that unnecessary homework bullshit for a company that's trying to recruit them? The company has its priorities misplaced. They should be trying to convince the candidate to join them, not putting up barriers to their most qualified candidates.

I would totally do homework bullshit for a company/opportunity/compensation that I saw as “better” than what I have currently, but would not do so for anything else.

So your salary + $1? How much better? I'm curious. I'd probably go through this for maybe 50% above market rates.

Insane. Let’s say it’s half that and you make $100k a year. You wouldn’t put in 2 hours for an extra 25k/yr?

I mean this isn’t a lottery, and hopefully you’ve reasoned there will be a high probability of getting hired; say 50%. So then the expected value of your time is $6.25k/hr.

Go, take the moral high ground, and don’t do the homework. That helps rational minded folk achieve an even higher hit rate.

I'm already at top dollar in my area and have been for years. Maybe that's why I despise it so, I have nothing to gain from the trouble. I haven't had to do a cold interview since 1999.

There are much better and less humiliating ways to get top dollar. Work your ass off and build reputation is the biggest one.

If you are a company and you have to call a recruiter, you're already behind. Putting people through that stuff just makes it worse.

Not sure! I guess it depends on how much homework.

We aren't paying for the work-product, we're paying for the time and inconvenience. It's more to show respect for the candidate's time than to actually "hire" them to do an interview.

I mean, even "discount" recruiting platforms like Hired and Vettery will cost 5-figures when we make a hire through them, and traditional recruiters often charge 20% or more of the new-hire's first year salary. A few hundred bucks to get some more information about a prospective coworker is cheap.

Reminds me of the old joke about a scam company who breaks up all of their problems into interview questions and never actually hires anyone. Obviously the composition, decomposition work and quality control would be more labor for worse results but it is easy to see how frustrated interviewees got the concept.

I've seen companies that maintain open source projects have interviewees work on that actual open source project for 4hrs as an interview.

I recently interviewed at a company who wanted to be as hot as Google and Spotify and had copied their interview process and their organization schema.

I said no thanks and moved on to other companies. Felt good. I just avoided working in a culture where there will be high pressure to always perform. :)

Yes, companies don't realize people can get incredibly wealthy working for places like Google. That's why people tolerate that as well as the prestige of having a place like that on the resume. They are so self centered, they think Acme Trucking holds the same allure with "market rates" and shitty benefits.

I'll just point out that companies are spending a lot of employee time doing these interviews, and if they're picky, that greatly increases the cost. Every day of interviews of someone they don't hire is money down the drain.

They can afford it, but still, it's far to say that the wasted effort isn't entirely one-sided. Hiring is an expensive and inefficient transaction.

Figuring out how to make this both more fair and more efficient is a really tough problem.

So the standard FB onsite interview loop is 5 * 45 min, with a 45 min break at some point. Those aren't all whiteboard interviews. It might vary from role to role, but I don't think homework problems are common.

I did get the 45 minute lunch break and dined with another FB employee during that time, but I was in the room doing whiteboard problems the entire time otherwise minus them showing me the office space as we went up a few floors when I first arrived. This was in Seattle, if that matters. I think the room was labeled Occam's Razor and was super small, barely enough room for 3 people to stand.

So not only are you dealing with the standard fare interview nervousness, etc..., but you're also feeling claustrophobic the entire time. Brilliant process they've got up there. People look at me sideways when I tell them that I have no interest in working for places like Facebook or Amazon or Google and these sorts of anecdotes are some real high-quality validation after having had to justify that stance for years.

I would never work for one of those large companies. You really only need one household company on your resume during your career, then you can ignore them.

Those companies are the most visible places to get a high-paying job. They pay at the top of the market. Sure, a niche software company may pay its senior engineers higher, but even well-connected developers may never get any exposure to them.

If you want to get that first house downpayment for the Bay Area, I'd say it's almost essential at this point.

That is exactly why I applied. I run a startup and we wanted to get the clout I was going to spend a year at FB as "time served" for the startup.

I think a lot of these reactions (and this website) are bitterness following a rejection. I'm not sure why people take it so personally when a company doesn't accept them. I've done whiteboard interviews and got a rejection before, and I thought it was fine. Maybe if you're putting all your eggs in the same basket and want THIS company to accept you, that might be annoying. But that's not a very good life strategy.

Is the implication that they're using your code in production after an interview?

No, I don't think any of the code is of any value, it's the time and energy up-front investment is increasing significantly. I understand they are trying to protect their investment (2 years at Facebook would have been over $500K in cost to that company all things considered) but when is it too much and how would we stop it before it gets there?

Having gotten contacted by Facebook, I eventually refused when I realized they were going to ask about algorithms for a technical role that is in no way relevant to that on the job. Skilled candidates can refuse just fine and wait for something better and more realistic that comes along.

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