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Comment by gacba | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of actual project-based coding interviews where you get to see all aspects of the candidate's abilities (communication, technical chops, design skills/trade offs, etc).

But I'm a little skeptical about the statement, "And this is so much more scalable..."

Now you have the overhead of possibly paying each person for some work, the paperwork that goes along with it, the management aspect of it if it goes wrong (and it will go wrong, the fact that it didn't in 8 interviews is just the reality of a small data set), not to mention the review time for the team on each project.

I don't doubt that you get better hires out of this process, but calling it scalable is a stretch on reality for companies greater than 20.

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For the one-day projects, we typically do not give projects of things we might use, for that reason. We give a sort of related simple app. We are currently < 20 so we'll see how this goes once we expand beyond that =)

I love the idea of actual project-based coding interviews

The best interview I ever had was a project-based interview with a YC company. We spent 9 hours implementing production code using a language (python) and framework (django) I'd never worked with before. Fortunately, python is close enough to ruby that we were able to successfully complete the project.

The position was a first-hire engineering lead so the length of the interview made sense. Obviously, this isn't reasonable for a normal position, but a scaled down version is a good approach. I would have loved to accept the offer and work with them but had to go with another company in the end. I was moving to SF with my family and needed a higher salary versus mid-salary + equity.

Now you have the overhead of possibly paying each person for some work, the paperwork that goes along with it...

I wasn't paid for this work and wouldn't expect to pay a dev for a 2 or 3 hour interview, which is what I would expect for a normal position.

She did mention that Pulse only pays for code or projects that would be used in production. Agreed, paying people for all interviews would not scale. :)

Ouch, that may be a serious problem. Are all of the projects intended "for production"? That is, are there some projects that Pulse won't pay for even if they're completed successfully (internal stuff)?

Now you're excluding all candidates who aren't willing to spend some time (a week?) working for what might be free. And some of these candidates will be the highly-skilled programmers you'd love to have, but who won't be willing to jump through hoops when they can easily get a job elsewhere with fewer hoops.

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