Very few people who are successfully employed would take a risk / have a luxury to forsake their certain employment for an extremely short term contract (with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!) and extremely limited chance of gainful employment.
(it's perspectives like these that make me realize how much of a grouchy old man I am and have always been - always being a buzzkill by thinking things through next 3 steps! :P)
It's not if you are in the US.
You will get a 1099 from where you worked, you write it on your 1040 and include the 1099 with your taxes if I recall from when I was an independent contractor for a while.
It takes maybe like 10 minutes extra and 1099-ing is incredibly common nowadays (unfortunately) so not a super weird case.
And it's not regulation. You don't need to worry about anything besides getting the 1099 like you would your W2s and appending it.
What if you don't have any other 1099s (so you have to pay self-employment tax just because of that one interview, at least I had once when my moving expenses were paid with a 1099).
Not even getting into possible illegal work for the candidates on work visas.
>It's not if you are in the US.
Its also not if you are in Australia. I'd suggest that the number of developers and designers who at least occasionally take on paid side gigs or who have revenue generating side projects (even if it barely covers hosting etc) is about 1/3.
What you are saying in effect, is that hiring regimes can't be (or ought not to be) designed to include a group that is (commonly) discriminated against, if that discriminates against anyone, particularly the majority.
Implicitly, I see you defining the optimum as where everyone uses the same criteria that are as inclusive as possible, and just shrugging and saying "we're doing our best" when some are left out in the cold completely.
But isn't there an alternative vision where the optimum is employers using different ("diverse") sets of criteria that individually discriminate but create a society where there's a place for everyone?
My best effort:
* Who/what is the group you feel is a "commonly discriminated group", that would benefit from "contract first" hiring practices?
* If a company uses a practice that "discriminates against a majority", is that a practically beneficial funnel/sieve/practice for the company? Alternatively, if we are discussing companies which are making a stand / moral decision through hiring practices, I feel that's a very different discussion than what I interpreted original poster to posit as "best hiring practice for everybody in all situations / everybody should do THIS".
* I feel your last sentence is proposing each employer using different criteria in hope that cumulatively they'd create an overlapping and comprehensive venn diagram. My response to that notion would be a) I don't trust either free markets or regulation to make that venn diagram complete and b) that kind of stratification of the market sounds horrible... no matter what, I can only go to specific companies who have specific hiring practices that happen to match me? (I fully understand the irony in that this may in fact be the underlying unspoken reality of the market! my point is that it should be something we move away from, not explicitly design as a goal).
But again, I may be misinterpreting your argument and inadvertently taking discussion in the wrong direction...
Not exactly; whether my message is politically correct depends on how you generalize it and what groups you apply it to.
You could use it selectively in other contexts and demonstrate either a left or right wing allegiance, but right here and now, I'm talking about people suited to whiteboarding vs. take home tests as the groups.
>that kind of stratification of the market sounds horrible
It's what we've got though, and always have. In your words, "the underlying...reality". Of course we agree things can be improved somehow. I think hiring should be more inclusive, and I think most people would at least give lip service to that.
But if different people are always going to be different, then a hypothetical convergence on a single "fair" standard means telling some fraction of the population they have no place in society at all.
Eliminating whiteboarding, strictly speaking, seems reasonable to object to. It would be unfairly discriminatory. But wanting that to be the only standard also is an extremist position.
If you want to draw a more general opinion out of what I wrote, one of the things on my mind is the general scourge of optimization by tech people who assume the solution to anything is to find the one best answer based on some metric.
I prefer take home projects as opposed to whiteboarding, because my personal situation better allows for it - no wife or children, preference for building things, no NDA at my current job, and so forth. For me specifically I would prefer take home projects followed by a debriefing where I explain my design decisions over solving whiteboard problems. But that's just me. Why can't there be multiple accepted ways of interviewing instead of forcing everyone through a whiteboard gate, if whiteboarding isn't the best way for you to prove your competency?
At least we have lists of companies with different hiring processes as in TFA, so there is a small amount of choice. But we're still dependent on the goodwill of companies to make their hiring processes more tolerable.
source: work at a place that does this
It is a good idea, but nobody is going to be quitting their current job to be a contractor with a job MAYBE attainable. It remains me a lot of retail seasonal employees who work their butts off to MAYBE get a full time position.
I'd also want there to be a clear decision-point (i.e. it isn't a way to get you to be an indefinite contractor, they make a hire/no hire decision within some set timeframe or at the end of the current work).