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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

>Genuine question here: what's the better way?

One strategy that's been successful for me is skipping the technical screen and jumping to a narrowly-scoped paid assignment. If they do well, I give them a larger paid assignment, and we work our way up to regular work together. If they do poorly, I pay them for their time but tell them it's not a match.

I'll add the caveat that I've only used this to hire junior to mid-level developers for part-time or short-term work. I've never tested it on a full-time hire, and I imagine that would be more difficult.

I've never written in detail about hiring developers, but I've shared similar strategies for hiring writers,[0] illustrators,[1] and editors.[2]

[0] https://mtlynch.io/hiring-content-writers/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/

[2] https://mtlynch.io/editor/

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I do gig-to-hire too. Works a treat! I've found loads of talent this way, up and down the skill chain. But, for a CTO like role the gig has to be 3mo or more.

I'm confused. You are saying that you have had CTO interviewers that did a gig role for 3 months as a CTO? Did they also have another job at the time or was this their only job?

This one is a bit harder (naturally). A recent/typical case was a CTO type candidate, they participated part-time in some meetings, had some exposure to the team, talking through issues with other CxO. During this time candidate is also shopping around too. It's basically buying consulting while you decide to hire. It does not generally take 3mo - but you'll add a probationary period that gives you maybe 12mo room.

Thanks for the clarification! I had no idea C-suite hiring was at all like this. Naively, I figured there would be clean breaks and legal 'firewalls' about such dual responsibilities and obvious conflicts of interest.

It really explains a lot about the C-level people and their lack of engagement with work (for my company at least!); they don't seem to be doing their full jobs as, well, they aren't. I really need to figure out how to get on this carousel.

I realized I wasn't super clear, let me add more. The case is where the candidate is NOT currently on W2 wages anywhere else. Typically, these candidates have enough cash reserves to be able to take a few months to find the next gig. A little highriing bonus takes the edge off.

Ok, cool, got it. Thanks!

>One strategy that's been successful for me is skipping the technical screen and jumping to a narrowly-scoped paid assignment. If they do well, I give them a larger paid assignment, and we work our way up to regular work together. If they do poorly, I pay them for their time but tell them it's not a match.

Kudos to you. You have worked out one of the fairest ways to gauge someone. May your tribe increase!

This is replacing a 1-hour phone screen with a 6-hour project. You're still going to rule out a bunch of good people who will refuse to spend that much time on a first-round interview.

You don't simply fire off a 6-hour paid project to everyone who applies. You do some screening and conversation before-hand.

It always seems strange to me that people won't bat an eye at taking a day (or more) off work to come on-site for technical interviews, yet the idea of giving someone a 6-hour project do at home, at their leisure, is somehow a bridge too far.

In real-world hiring experience: I gave candidates a choice between on-site interviews and take-home projects for a while. Zero people chose on-site interviews when given the option, so I stopped offering it.

The bottom line is that interviewing requires time. If someone isn't willing to lift a finger or allocate a few hours to an interview, how are we supposed to gauge their competency? The "just trust me" model doesn't work at all.

> It always seems strange to me that people won't bat an eye at taking a day (or more) off work to come on-site for technical interviews, yet the idea of giving someone a 6-hour project do at home, at their leisure, is somehow a bridge too far.

One of the key differences is the company has "skin in the game" at an interview, but not in the 6-hour project.

When you interview, you know the company has included you in a shortlist and they will put time into getting to know you. For the time put in, you have a chance to pitch yourself, to at least get across your general abilities and personality, and some people will pay some attention. Also you can learn more about the company and the people you might work with.

When you get a take-home project, it's like the way spam is cheap: It takes almost no effort for the company to send the same project to a lot more candidates at low cost.

You do the work, but there's no guarantee the company will really assess it. Sometimes the company drops the ball and just "forgets" the application, or discards it the same way résumés are filtered: By skimming though 6-hour project submissions and casually throwing some of them away. It's not uncommon to not hear back anything from a company after sending the result of working on their project.

Some candidates will enjoy doing a project more than an interview, but that's not the only consideration in determining their value to the candidate.

Personal opinion: take home tests are way less work for the employer and than the candidate in an already asymmetric relationship (or can be).

Personal experience: I have never had an interview last more than an hour. I have also been hired twice on a "just trust me" model and it worked reasonably well.

They said they skip the technical screen.

Replacing a day of interviews with a 6 hour project sounds fair. That isn't how most companies use projects.

Right, but it's a 1-hour unpaid phone screen vs. a a 6-hour paid project.

I can understand not wanting to do that if you're a full-time employee, but if you're a freelance developer actively looking for jobs, why would a paid project be worse than an unpaid phone screen?

They are getting paid, though, for the 6-hour project which seems like a positive over a 6 hour take home test (used by some companies) where you're not paid.

Wouldn’t this completely exclude anyone on a visa (since they need another visa to work for money) and also partially anyone with a lot of family obligations?

I'm not sure what you mean. If they're applying for paid developer positions, they would need a work visa anyway. I've only ever hired for remote freelancer positions, so I've never been involved with any of my contractors' visa details.

Why would this exclude people with family obligations? When I say "narrowly-acoped project," I mean 5-10 hours of work. I've never gotten an offer for a dev role where the application interview process took less than 5 hours, and those were unpaid hours.

Most US work visas are limited to a single specific employer. Some can be transferred to another employer, once that employer extends an offer - but this transfer has costs in processing time & fees.

In other words, some visa holders in the US are very much allowed to work, but not contract work.

Typically these are candidates, most of whom are already working right? So their visa would be tied to their current employer and they are not allowed to work for someone else.

5-10 hours would be similar to a typical interview loop yes, and if that was the entirety of it then it's not more time consuming than the typical engineering interview.

Good luck getting any top-tier candidate to agree to this.

Hiring manager here. Top-tier candidates do this all the time.

The alternative is to have them take time off of their dayjob and travel on-site for technical interviews.

In the real world, candidates are greatly appreciative of take-home assignments that let them work in the comfort of their own home, on their own equipment, at times that work best for them.

I'd be very worried about a paid assignment conflicting with clauses in my current contract.

Giving somebody a ~1 day takehome assignment, sure. But you aren't going to be able to actually do any real work in this amount of time.

Why wouldn't a top-tier candidate agree to this?

I feel like this is the solution that values candidate time the most. They don't have to do an interview, and I'm paying them for their time immediately.

That was my thought. Why would a top-tier candidate, who supposedly is already making enough money, bother to go through this process?

Is it really worth it to lose a day in your weekend for a couple hundred bucks and the hope of getting yet another assignment or a job?

If you're "top-tier" and you want another gig because you're not happy with your current one doing a 6 hour paid gig vs. doing a full day interview somewhere (which isn't paid) actually seems like it would be a lot better. It's not like you don't lose a day (or days) when interviewing. No reason it would have to be a weekend day.

I'm a "top-tier" candidate (at least, tech companies offer me a lot of money to work for them) and I don't think I'm alone in not really caring much about the process, as long as it's sufficiently technical that I'm not worried about working with people who can't program. If the full time job at the other end is interesting enough, the 6 hours of whiteboard/takehome/code review is just an annoying cost of doing business.

And, if we're being really honest here, there's a ton of informal backchannel talking that goes on, so your interview "performance" regardless of medium is affected by that at many places. I think if you aren't actively working to make your interview process objective, it's being strongly affected by many biases and informal relationships.

That's all to say that on the balance, taking up "some" or "all" of a candidates time isn't that interesting of thing to think about because the process is so broken in so many other ways and this one doesn't have a huge impact.

Adding to what the other person said, I've leveraged interviews to get flights to cool places. A free day trip to Seattle, nyc, or sf is a nice perk, and in my experience companies are flexible on travel arrangements (eg. Can you put the return flight a few days later, I'll handle any extra hotel costs).

I can't get that from a take home assignment.

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