Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradlys | Hacker News Reader

I’m ambivalent. Sure, guess I’d like it as an industry practice. It would make my taxes very lengthy to do by having to deal with 40+ 1099 forms every year but for sufficient payment not a big deal.

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.

View on HN

You interview at 40+ places every year? If that’s true there is something very wrong with our industry.

How do you have time for that?

One minor note they only have to file a 1099 if you made more than $600 (of course you’re still supposed to report it).

The hirer is the one filing out the 1099, and interviewing 40+ candidates a year is easy. That said, you should only need to file a 1099 when the pay is $600+.

I think the OP was talking about interviewing at 40 companies per year, not interviewing 40 candidates at their company.

Also hey man! Are you still doing work for Fusion?

How's it going? I am still doing some work for them, though I've had to scale back my freelancing as things have improved substantially at my main role.

Going well here. Glad to hear that things are picking up!

Every other year is probably more accurate these days. But is what it is.

Last search I had something like 6 in hand offers (a few more that would’ve transpired but they realized they were out of their depth). It takes quite a bit of time. You have to schedule significant time off or sick days to do it. It’s not something that happens in a couple weeks.

For me, I spent about a year studying(leetcode and system design), mock interviewing (30+), and interviewing. Spent about 3 months without an actual job and interviewing+studying. (Something like 25 interviews in a week at times - 3-4 onsites per week when not doing tech screens)

Got the offer I wanted in the end - isn’t exceptional offer but I don’t have exceptional names on my resume either. Make $400k/yr. It was either that or another high growth startup and I wasn’t finding any that were that appealing on comp+culture after interviewing.

> For me, I spent about a year studying(leetcode and system design), mock interviewing (30+), and interviewing. Spent about 3 months without an actual job and interviewing+studying. (Something like 25 interviews in a week at times - 3-4 onsites per week when not doing tech screens)

Ok so there is something terribly wrong with our industry.

SV is very particular about the type of employee it wants. It’s not like they really like independent thinkers here. They want someone who they can mold and will do the work exactly as they say. Leetcode stands as a good test for that.

I’m more of a never attribute something to malice when stupidity provides a sufficient explanation type of person.

I tend to the think the whole thing is just a massive example of cargo culting. Like how 10 years ago everyone asked why manhole covers were round.

I upvoted this, although I am not sure if it is quite true as you have put it. Venture capitalists are very much aware of the risk of lower-ranking SWEs failing to recognise dangers out of insufficiently critical obedience.

> Venture capitalists are very much aware of the risk of lower-ranking SWEs failing to recognise dangers out of insufficiently critical obedience.

Are they? Please give me more context on this, because I haven't personally seen any evidence of that.

don't forget these parts

>Last search I had something like 6 in hand offers (a few more that would’ve transpired but they realized they were out of their depth).

>Make $400k/yr.

I would say this is just a case of someone taking on the process of getting a job as a full time job itself...which I think is appropriate. I've been in industry for 20+ years and have easily left well over a million dollars in lifetime comp on the table because I haven't really approached maximizing it as a primary objective.

I think it is completely appropriate for an individual to do this in their own self interest.

I think it’s wildly inappropriate that our industry rewards it though. Someone taking a year off to study the interview process itself shouldn’t be rewarded so much more highly than a year of real experience doing the actual job.

+100 to this. There is such a delta between interview skills (leetcoding, brushing up star formatting to suit target company values and leadership principles) and skills actually needed for a job that without mock interviews your success rates are significantly diminished. I know several folks who interview regularly just to not get rusty ... with interviewing! I blame commoditization of software engineering and plenty of NIH stack building!

You only have to do a 1099 if you get paid more than $600. Assuming $100/hr you'd need 7 hours for an interview to need a 1099. 40+ * 7 = 280+ hours of interviews to hit that level, which seems like an outlier to me.

Right on that payments is a challenge in implementing this. Companies need to pay candidates, who may be anywhere in the world, a small amount of money on a one-off basis without the hassle of paperwork.

Tremendous.com (where I work) does this.

Candidates can get payments, gift cards, or donate the money to charity.

(we've been paying candidates to take calls, do tech screens, and complete projects, and it's easily been worth the cost. at some point we'll do a blog post on the conversion rate differences)

We solved for this by giving Amazon gift cards - I believe you can have them go up to $2K

The form of payment doesn’t matter from a regulatory perspective. As soon as you hit reporting thresholds, you and the interviewee need to report.

So please don’t do this as a way to bypass regulatory requirements. It puts your prospective employees in a bad spot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com