Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Sincere question: What are you all doing accepting these multi-hour, multi-day take away free consulting gigs?

Say NO to this bullshit. Establish a deadline and clear guidelines and expectations:

1. I will not be doing any take away work at all.

2. You will explain how my GitHub repo, resumé, previous experience is insufficient to qualify me for the job in 100 words or more.

3. You will sign an NDA for whatever solution I created to whatever problem you task me with. You do not own my solution’s IP and may not share it outside of the people involved in my hiring process without my consent. 4. In the case where I fail the test you will explain in 100 words or more why my solution was unacceptable. 5. In the case my solution doesn’t compile/run you will allow me 3 attempts/1hour to provide you a solution and/or give me a Dockerfile representing the env where my solution will be tested.

Have you ever established these guidelines and expectations with a potential employer and subsequently been hired by that employer?

Definitely a solid way to avoid bad interviewing experiences.

Any interviewing experiences, really, but bad ones too.

Unless you are a critically important hire / executive level, asking a company to sign an NDA for an interview would be the kiss of death for the vast majority of candidates. To get an NDA signed, I would have to get company lawyers and my upper management involved, which is not something I would do unless we desperately needed your skillset and had zero other options.

I give candidates the option to do a take-home or in-person assessment. For the take-home I communicate that they own everything they produce, and I create an EC2 server for them to use for the interview so that whether or not someone owns a server is not a barrier to entry.

I would definitely decline to continue to interview a candidate if I received this list of demands. The tone is unbelievably entitled and screams "difficult to work with". The suggestion that I would sign an NDA on behalf of my company is absolutely absurd. I would never sign something on behalf of my company without consulting our legal counsel, and I would never continue an interview if I had to involve my legal counsel to determine whether or not a person can code.

Some people need to find a job at some point. It's nice to have principles, but it's nicer to earn money.

I have tried a milder version of this and as anyone can guess - it did not work. The supply is too much and demand not so, the organizations will always pass. Only if you can get the demand-supply to work in your favour will this work.

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