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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

So say you are at a job. fairly happy. Maybe not your dream job, but you decide to look around and interview with me.

I could present you two options:

1) I just hire you after a 30 minute chat. 50% you don't work out, and we fire you after 30 days.

2) We have a longer interview. We whiteboard. We take home test. We whiteboard some more. 90% chance that you don't get fired after 30 days.

Which would you prefer? As a business owner, I am happy to just try people I don't know well - IFF they are willing to accept that there is a very good chance they are fired within the first 30 days.

There is such a huge range in developers. The haves vs the have-nots can be a 100x different productivity difference. I really want to try to tease that difference out. It is really really hard.

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Actually I would greatly prefer option 1. I am very confident that given nearly any situation I will prove my worth and have never had an employer disappointed with my work. I am not as confident I would complete a contrived coding skill challenge on the spot on a whiteboard because I never work like that in reality. My job is to sit here and solve unique problems by any means available to me in a maintainable and scalable way. I do that very well and that is hard to test via whiteboard implementations of contrived examples.

That is how it works in other fields. One of our managers asked his friend that owns a body shop how he finds good employees. He basically has a chat with them, feels them out, then hires them. If they don't work out he hires someone else. Perhaps it shouldn't be as stigmatic as "firing" after 30 days but you have instead hired someone on a 30 day contract with option to hire permanently. If they don't work out, that option is not exercised and that person is free to go try somewhere else. I can tell pretty quickly from chatting with a developer if they are a total fraud. I can't tell really quickly who will become a great dev, I just know when someone has the chops to have potential.

#1. I'm totally fine with firing after 30 days if I don't work out. I'm positive it won't, so I'd prefer to prove myself doing real work.

That's the way it used to be done and I think we should go back to doing that. Read the resume, ask some questions about the resume, 30 minutes to an hour full interview, done.

You get hired on, put on a probationary period, if they don't work out, fire them.

> 1) I just hire you after a 30 minute chat. 50% you don't work out, and we fire you after 30 days.

Personally, that's my preference. If I don't think I can do the job I'll know after a 30 minute chat.

Right, then maybe it would self select out those that can't do the job.

Interesting idea. If you fire fast enough it may not actually cost that much more money to a business to hire a bit more as long as you fire the bad ones fast.

Same here. I feel I have vastly more control of my work performance over the course of 30 days than I have control of the assessment of 6 interviewers after seeing me for 30 minutes.

In other words, I think there is far more than 50% chance that things work out after 30 days and far less than 50% chance that I impress 6 interviewers.

> 2) We have a longer interview. We whiteboard. We take home test. We whiteboard some more. 90% chance that you don't get fired after 30 days.

But a 400% increase in that you find some sort of excuse not to hire me and I won't even get hired in the first place. Your percentages only make #2 more attractive if there's a more-or-less equal chance of being hired both ways.

Well, #2 makes more sense if you value stability and not suprises.

I suspect many people would rather do 10 interviews and then get 1 job they keep for a year+ compared to 2 interviews and a 50% chance the job that hire them, fires them in 30 days. But I could be wrong, mostly basing on what I would want.

There's such a thing as contract-to-hire for this exact scenario.

Why did the industry seem to forget this?

Most good developers are already in a stable job.

I would not leave a w2 job for a contract job. Nor would any good developer I know.

This is why the industry "forgets" it. It's not that attractive to a good candidate.

I've done it many times. It's attractive if the offer is attractive. Last one I took was a $20k raise over the prior job. The one before that was a $30k raise. It's only risky if you're not confident in your skills.

No way! The lamers you end up firing (after 30 days' pay) will easily make a living out of it. They could even be PARALLEL lamers, pulling 30 days pay off multiple sucker companies.

Hah, you should be able to see the pattern pretty quick?

Wow, 8 jobs last year? Busy life?

It seems like they could easily drop half of those jobs off of their resume. That's usually the advice given for people who leave jobs after a short period.

At my current company, we fired a guy after 3 days because he misrepresented his skills. I didn't interview or hire him, but I suspect his buddy did the interview.

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