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Comment by juliangamble | Hacker News Reader

My team at Vivint, the Space Monkey group, stopped doing whiteboard interviews a while ago. We certainly used to do them, but we’ve transitioned to homework problems or actually just hiring a candidate as a short term contractor for a day or two to solve real work problems and see how that goes. Whiteboard interviews are kind of like Festivus but in a bad way: you get the feats of strength and then the airing of grievances. Unfortunately, modern programming is nothing like writing code in front of a roomful of strangers with only a whiteboard and a marker, so it’s probably not best to optimize for that.

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The logical way forward is then to actually just hiring a candidate as a short term contractor for a week or two to solve real work problems on site, in a team with other employees and see how that goes.

The problem with that approach is that the company must commit. You can't embed 100 candidates into your team but you can easily send 100 identical homeworks and then only bother to analyze those that make it to the face to face interview. As a bonus, it optimizes for subservience, a perennial business resource.

An even bigger problem is that most good candidates have their current job and could be open to better opportunities, but would not consider going into this hung up state. Do you expect me to quit my job before doing the tryout? Even if not and, say, you like me, when do you expect me to quit my current job? I need at least a couple of months to cleanly exit without burning bridges and I am not going to even start this process until I have a firm offer from the new company.

Yeah. Because a programmer in a new team is likely to be productive after a week or two. /s

In my experience, good and bad candidates differentiate themselves pretty quickly. Being productive is not the expectation, it's about gathering more empirical data on the candidate's actual skills with real development.

Which is a really awful way of hiring. Forcing someone to go through the hassle of being a contractor for a couple of weeks, only so you can decide whether you want to hire them afterwards. I suggest you don't try this in Belgium, where employee protection is a thing and this sort of nonsense doesn't fly.

Unless, of course, you're looking for a long term contractor and not an employee.

What exactly is nonsense about it? They get paid for part-time work they otherwise would have to do for free during an interview or as homework.

Everything is nonsense about it. In most parts of the world, setting up to be a contractor (as opposed to an employee) is a hassle with various implications (tax, retirement, insurance,..). Doing it for a couple of weeks as part of a hiring process? Get real.

Getting someone to do actual work during an interview is also a no-no. As soon as someone walks through your door and you ask them to do actual work, they're your employee, period. They are now automatically entitled to compensation and a minimum severance period. You can interview people in almost any way you want, but as soon as it involves doing actual work, you're toast. This may be different where you live, but it strikes me as being unethical at the very least.

Hiring is hard. But exploiting people (by expecting them to do actual work, homework, forcing them into temporary contracting) is not the answer.

This is kind of getting off topic, but this would not at all work for me, and I suspect most job-seekers. When I am job-searching I don't put my search or my current job on hold for a couple weeks while a potential employer 'evaluates' me.

EDIT: this would be nice on the other hand to get to experience the 'real' culture and work environment at a place before I decide to commit to them.

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