SWE interviews should be paid

I.e., the employee would have to let his employer know that he got paid to interview somewhere else! Failure to disclose would result in disciplinary action from regulators, possibly leading to a suspension from the industry.

Interviews are expensive in terms of employee time. Paying a candidate for their time as well wouldn't be the most expensive part of the process, but in general increasing the cost of an interview will serve to decrease the breadth of the process. Companies will probably start to become sensitive to people they perceive as profiting from the interview process and restrict access accordingly. I think this would be ultimately detrimental to the goal of scouting new talent.

I do worry this would raise the bar even further though on expectations because now they’re paying for time. They’d take even less chances on who they interview because it’s 2x as expensive as it used to be. And I don’t think it’d become a world of doing “practical” assessments - I think leetcode would still be very common.

Only once have I seen an employer show a new employee the door within that “six month probation period” they talked about.

This is basically the ultimate form of paying people for an interview: the interview happens on the job for a while.

It also would help with an issue I’ve struggled with a lot: learning that the person is a jerk who doesn’t work well with others and has loud holy war opinions on minutiae.

A valid criticism of this approach is that it can be expensive and disruptive to turnover a position in three months.

I’ve done hiring before and the fact that the cost of considering a candidate is relatively low both in terms of cost and time, meant that I could consider candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. A resume and job application only tell you so much. If I was on the fence about someone it was easy to jump on a call for an hour with them to get more data. Sure the signal you can get from an hour long interview isn’t great, but it’s something.

If there was a higher cost associated with bringing a candidate in (more than the wage, I’d be worried about the paperwork involved), employers might start relying even more on signals like alma mater status, current employer pedigree etc. as first pass filter before bringing someone in.

This seems to be more about internships than interviews for a qualified professional (or whatever you want to call those candidates).

Just make unpaid internships illegal. If you do work for a company that a paid employee would normally do, then you should be compensated.

But not paying someone to run around and get you coffee is just completely nonsensical these days.

I'd laugh all the way out of the door, and my country has a 40% unemployment rate. I'm just not going to do work I don't get paid for, because it turns out living is expensive.

At most of the companies I've worked for, there is a bunch of up front ramp up before someone can complete even a simple task. You have to become familiar with a team's frameworks, the business context, and the structure of the code base. To do one real task then requires all that ramp up first (or else, you'd need to simplify it so it's not a real task).

How big a task? If you are interviewing new college grads, it might not matter, but people who already have industry experience either have to use a large chunk of vacation time or leave their current job if the task is non-trivial (taking, say, a sprint or two to do).

How much do you pay? Do you have a fixed bounty? Do you pay senior engineers more?

I get how you want to see someone do this for real, but I've already built something like this 20 times. If a company trying to recruit me asked me to build this, I could spend a few hours building it again, or I could just tell you about the times I did something like that (and the challenges I ran into), which would take 30 minutes.

Companies are starting to adopt this, but it still blows me away that we aren't getting there faster.

But even more than that, I'd like an interview that doesn't take 4 hours.

> the strongest candidates self-selected into this paid screening challenge

...

> to make developer interviews more valid & inclusive, introduce payments.

This still makes them exclusive. Someone with a full-time job who's busy with life could easily not care about $600--they're time-limited, not money limited.

They also provide little evidence supporting their motivation of hiring better engineers. I buy that better engineers are better for the company, they just didn't show that paid interviews select better engineers.

All that said, I agree that a long-ish, real-world problem is a great indicator of job performance. Paying people just means you're not taking advantage of them. The bigger problem is still around time.

I tend to reject take home projects out of hand because they take up my time but not the company’s, unlike a phone interview. I need to know the company is serious and values my time.

Also, giving someone an actual backlog item would turn off most companies, but building a representative task where you vet performance against your current staff seems to be reasonable.

Was the first interview sprint planning?

Why is that other industries don’t need 6+ rounds of interviews for experienced candidates?

That being said, this article makes no sense. The justification it gives sounds like it was autogenerated by a bad markov chain.

First it claims without justification that market salary equals "mean productivity", which already isn't true. But suppose that we believe that.

Then it says that there is a large productivity difference between good and bad engineers. Ok.

Finally it says (paraphrasing), "because good engineers are so much more productive, it's rational to pay them for interviewing." But that's just a restatement of the title of the article, not an argument.

For single day interviews, I think the opposite is true because of adverse selection. Good engineers aren't looking for 1 day of pay, they are looking for a job. The people who value your 1 day paid interview the most are people who are not looking for a job.

* The interview pressure of knowing you’re being assessed based on every interaction and piece of output, but for an entire week.

* A week isn’t enough time to truly assess what it’s like to work with someone…

* …yet, is long enough such that it’s only a viable option for people with capability to dedicate a week. Which basically means the unemployed, or those working at companies where they can take a week off at short notice.

* The tax situation can be complicated, which adds to the stress of it all.

My anxiety and stress levels have never been higher, and this was after being laid off and a subsequent 6 months of unemployment. If they hadn’t decided against hiring me (apparently my code and product mindset were great, but I didn’t work fast enough), I was ready to decline them on the basis of concluding that this approach to hiring (it was mandatory) was inhumane.

This is a common canard. I can see how it might make some intuitive sense, but it appears to be utterly mistaken. When I brought up the idea at my current workplace, we ended up choosing not to pay candidates, because almost 100% of our female software engineers declared that they would not have started an interview process where they were being paid unless they were VERY certain they were qualified for the role.

[0] One could, for example, argue that different people take a different amount of time to get started, but be similarly productive in the end.

I understand the point being made in the article but that amount of money just isn’t the best incentive

2. Make an article with a self-serving title encouring paid coding tasks.

3. Provide no justification.

4. Cover up the lack of justification with a graph of a normal distribution. Mention standard deviations for additional perception of credibility.

5. Share this with people who would like to be paid for things they would do anyway. (The CEO of the company posted this on HN)

6. Profit?