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morelisp

He calls it a "Ride Along": top candidates spend a day of coding with his team and receive $500.

How do you figure out if they're top candidates?

First we did screening & technical interviews to arrive at our 5-10 most promising candidates

Right, so we're back at square one doing "technical interviews" again.

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That's just how Thomas at Cloudthread.io run his process, he used real paid work for his final hiring decision. It's not the only way. We personally (Algora.io founders) jumped straight into paid work without prior interviews.

We shared a hiring bounty with a dozen applicants purely based on their resumes, never spoke with anyone on the phone, received 5 PRs, awarded & hired 3 of them.

You awarded 5 of them, or 3 of them?

If you're only paying the people you hire, that's not paying people for their time.

I mean sorry, but if you did a good job, we're going to make you an offer such that you won't need to quibble about $500. The entire difficult part is what you're asking from people you don't hire!

Received 5 PRs, awarded the top 3. You can actually see them https://app.algora.io/algora/challenge/pulls/5

We clarified it in our bounty issue that only the best-winning submissions would get the bounty. Other folks have chosen to award all PR submissions regardless of hiring outcome. The format is up to the company hiring.

You're making a great point! It's exactly about what we ask from people who don't get hired.

I think real-world coding, getting reviewed by the CTO / hiring manager and getting compensated beats standardized coding tests & imaginary take-home assignments any time of the day.

I mean you do you, but it's a total farce to call this paying people for their time. You're paying people who win your little contest, which is what hiring already is before your startup tries to insert itself as a middleman.

I'd call it an early experiment and what we could afford at the time to evaluate candidates for a SWE summer internship. Maybe other companies will like this approach and offer challenges that pay much better, with different setups & time horizons. Ex a user turnt his challenge into a 3-month contract-to-hire arrangement that paid $15k to the person who did the work & got the job.

Ultimately it's about getting the right signals. Real work produces the best signals. The rest of the mechanics are a WIP :)

Really appreciate your input, thanks a lot!!

> what we could afford at the time to evaluate candidates for a SWE summer internship

You didn't even hire them as FT? Christ, what a submarine charade this entire thread has been.

submarine charade, that's pretty funny lol.

The principle of engineers evaluating engineers based on real work remains the same, whether it's for an internship, flexwork, junior or senior roles, no?

I don't see how it isn't fraud to claim that.

did you read the blog post though? :)

Kevin Hale at Wufoo (YC W06) did contract work for a month instead of interviews. Is that not "give candidates real work & pay them for their time"?

Thomas paid every engineer who did a 'Ride Along' (a day on the job with the Cloudthread team) regardless of his final hiring decision, and he did it with a bunch of folks.

Elliot paid every PR he received for his screening bounties on Algora regardless of his final hiring decision.

I think the title for the blog post checks out.

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