Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
>People work at Gumroad as little as they need to sustain the other parts of their lives they prefer to spend their time and energy on: a creative side-hustle, their family, or anything else.
I was way more green back then and looking over the project I sent him now, I understand what wasn't "up to par" about it, but I think it's fucked up to immediately send someone a take home without a quick phone screen unless you know them already, and also to ghost on someone who's put in a ton of work for you without giving any feedback or advice, especially when you claim to be interested in hiring nontraditional candidates.
Anyway, as a result of that experience I no longer do take homes as a rule, and I am continually rubbed the wrong way by how much love Sahil's blog posts on being such a progressive employer get in these parts.
My understanding is the policy is intended to avoid pointless debates and inadvertent legal liability (e.g. "when you told the candidate 'good luck with the new baby' at the end of the rejection convo, it created the impression they were not selected because they have kids.")
Why did he owe more feedback than "this isn't up to par?"
Based on past threads on HN I'm in the minority in preferring take-home projects and not feeling I'm owed compensation for the time it takes to complete them.
I like them because you have more of an opportunity to demonstrate your craft versus a standard leetcode whiteboard session where the 45 minute time constraint means you need to focus on pumping code out as quickly as possible. Also a good one can be an entertaining diversion in it's own right. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.
I've experienced take home projects that were expected to take "10 hours". If I spend 10 hours on a take home instead of my consultancy I'm out thousands of dollars.
I understand preferring take home projects, I prefer it over whiteboarding too, but I don't understand why you wouldn't be owed compensation. In my opinion the best evaluation is to work with the team on an actual story, task, ticket, etc. where you are paid the listed salary pro-rated for your hours.
My reasoning for not demanding I should be compensated:
1. Presumably something about the opportunity on offer is more compelling than your second best option of working on your own consultancy earning $200+/hour, otherwise why are you applying for the role in the first place? I'd argue that if the opportunity is otherwise compelling in the long term, demanding breakeven for one day's work is being penny-wise and pound foolish. Taking it to an extreme, if there was a job that paid $10 million/year but the interview process was so involved I needed to burn an entire year's worth of vacation time to interview for it, whether I'd do it would come down to expected value of the decision (i.e. probability of passing the interview), not the absolute investment I was making.
2. I'd consider this form of cost-analysis rationale a weak one because it can be applied to basically any decision in life yet it gets applied selectively, so it's kind of a roundabout way of saying "I don't want to do that." Nobody (probably?) is applying this analysis to sleeping 6 hours a night versus 8, yet that would yield 10 more billable consulting hours (per week!) too.
Also the cost is prohibative. I'm not paying dozens or hundreds of applicants to spend 3 hours writing code when most of them are going to be utter shit.
If you want to deselect yourself by not doing it without pay, feel free.
But then I remembered my own experiences of putting in a lot of work to apply for an opportunity, and then getting a curt denial saying I wasn’t what the employer was looking for, or not up to the task at the time.
I think it’s important to remember the feelings of getting rejected like that. Later on, when I was in a position of rejecting candidates, I volunteered the time to send longer responses with minor feedback despite the opportunity cost, just because I remembered what it was like to be an applicant.
Steve Jobs is famous for his very short emails and I suspect they evoked similar responses from people.
I like to give more detail in my own correspondence, but it does take significant time.
And this is why I'll never do a take-home project for an interview.
The time commitment is completely asymmetrical. The company can easily send the work to hundreds of people they have no interest it and it costs them nothing other than ~1 minute to send the email with some links.
At least in an in-person interview every minute I spend on it, the company has to spend the same amount of time from some employee.
You're being unfair to him
Unless I have some personal backchannel to pass feedback through I typically send a form-based response. While I tried to make sure any messaging isn't worded cruelly, it's still a rejection at the end of the day and that doesn't feel good.
Anyway, something I've learned both about prospective employers and relationships in general is that if someone takes an adversarial approach to any relationship, especially when there's a power differential that's not in my favor, it's worth steering clear. In the case of prospective employers, it's pretty much always a sign that I'm going to be treated like pure utility and not much else.
I'm solely referring to offering to rejected candidates the opportunity to discuss specific critical feedback about what factors contributed to us turning them down instead of the standard boilerplate responses like "we went with someone with more relevant experience".
I'm not sure whether you consider declining to provide critical interview feedback to be taking an "adversarial approach" but in my experience it is extremely common.
In most cases a followup call really is rewarding for both parties, and if I have some social connection to the candidate I still offer it. And even when I don't I still sometimes do it despite reservations. But after having candidates become argumentative and having a coworker get burned by a litigious candidate I'm more wary of spending the time and incurring risk as a general practice.
If I was running my own company then I hope I would go back to offering a followup call because I think it engenders goodwill and the overall utility vastly exceeds the risk. But at a BigCo my risk/reward ratio is different. If HR and Legal get involved it doesn't matter how meritless the accusations are, everyone is about to have a Bad Time.
I mean, there might be a couple people who do that? I don't know of any. (And it's been tried.)
In general, companies don't donate - they need a concrete benefit they can show to the tax agency. Eg, they will pay to contract you to add features.
So you're left with individual contributions, who have less money than companies. And the overhead of dealing with payments.
Daniel Stenberg, of curl fame, confirms that it's hard to make money off of donations, starting at https://youtu.be/jVT37EmND8I?t=1688 .
We can look to curl as an example. https://opencollective.com/curl#category-BUDGET say they've had $200K in contributions, which after fees is $178,598.94 raised.
Over a period of 3 or so years.
After decades of development, and as one of the most widely distributed software packages in existence.
Find a customer willing to pay you to work on it.
Figure out the market size, and what they are willing to pay.
Figure out at what point you're willing to give up dream, in case your plan (and pivot(s)) don't work out.
But do not, not, NOT, depend on donations to meet your financial goals.
You're looking at SBIR/STTR funding, phases up to $20M for final phases. Other funding vehicles also exist.
Check out https://www.sbir.gov/
Those hours can be used to work on your passion without damaging your life/work balance. Ofcourse if this works for you depends on a lot of factors.
My free time is now when I can think and play with hobbies. Those can be code, music, sewing, fishing, etc etc.
After work, I’m usually zonked. “Too tired for having fun” (Devo cover playing in my head).
I now just focus on kids after school, dinner, zone out, and sleep by 10pm. I listen to history podcasts and don’t watch much TV, except college football and Star Wars series.
But I don’t pressure myself to “finish” hobbies anymore. Work is work, hobbies are for pleasure. If hobbies are generating anxiety, I pivot. That took me a while to come to terms with, given my ADHD.
I have no dreams of making a passion project my job. I enjoy my work and “finish” there, but like having a separate life.
My dad owned a business, and I don’t want to live that “never off” lifestyle. I’m a very boring family man and love that.
I loved staying up late and playing games, reading, coding, watching films, whatever.
When I had kids, I had to start waking up earlier. So I decided to go all in and switch to early-down/early-up, and it changed a lot of things in my life.
The biggest change was not working on or doing things I love while super tired and pushing through it anyway just because I love it.
I would reduce working hours, work on your project and figure out how to monetize (e.g. self-hosted vs managed, consulting, ...). What can or cannot work depends a little on the industry you are in and also in what you want.
Maybe the project can have an OSS target, and a $$ target on the enterprise solution.
How much do you think to do with support with your project? those kind of questiona are the starting point whenever you want to create a business from your OSS passion
Though, I'm unsure as to the legal ramifications of such work, TBH.
Please read the latest copy of your employment agreement before doing this. In the US, it is not uncommon for employers to claim everything you do, on or off the clock. Some places restrict this to "related" work, others do not.[1]
Some employers will say they would never claim your work, but it's what's written down that matters. If they won't, ask them to sign an agreement. I've had broad swathes of my personal projects excluded from my employment agreement just by asking.
[1] I had an employer who claimed everything. Their view was they paid for your existence, so they got everything you did, regardless of whether it related to the firm's business. I was tempted to ask if they claimed people's children, but quit instead.