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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is not a very spicy take. A spicier take is that you can hire people without administering any interviews at all. Hire like an orchestra: through an audition process, which, in a work setting, is also known as "work-sample testing". It works a treat.

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I had a great experience with work-sample testing once until I had to work with the founder's wife who was an absolute nightmare to work with and was forced to sit in on zoom calls with the investors just because they wanted to be face to face with who they were paying for. It was only then that I realized that my performance didn't mean shit and I was playing an optics game.

The problem isn't the process. It's just like dating. Everyone is lying and pretending to be their best self. Hiring process can't fix that -- you fix it by making employing people and taking employment low risk. Give a generous evaluation period and the option to take walk-away money/severance.

You can never see how terrible a company's culture truly is until you've been there 3-6 months.

Rule #1: Never work for the person who cuts your checks.

This works early in your career but for a long while now in my jobs I've only had a couple of people above me on the org chart..

I agree. If your organization has the resources for it, go contract-to-hire. 3 to 6 month contractor and then make your decision bringing them on as a full employee.

In practice this almost never happens. Most contract to hire roles don't appropriately pay you like you're a contractor (really should be at least 3x salary) and get worse/desperate candidates who will take an unsecure job with no benefits for 3-6 months.

Real human beings with real responsibilities are usually looking for fulltime work or they're running their own business and charging you for services.

I would like to be running my own business.. have a few times in the past.. but usually run out of money before the next SaaS attempt or whatever is ready and have to find a contract on short notice.

I guess I'm not a real human being.

No, you just have a higher risk tolerance than most and also probably a spouse that really believes in you.

You are blessed.

Many contractor orgs provide benefits during the contracting period and pay at least 1.5x salary before the employee comes aboard as a full employee.

Also, as so many others have stated on this site, many people just as talented or better than in silicon valley aren't looking for 500k+ a year because they don't live in a hyperinflated shithole, but that's another topic altogether.

All I can say is salary is relative and nobody should let that go to their head. The economy in the USA, but especially on the west coast has never experienced inflation like we currently have and are in for a rude awakening soon.

My whole point is it's a worse deal at anything less than 3x pay. Three to six months of 1.5x pay just to have to look for a job again and you probably haven't done any meaningful work in the last three to six months?

My brother used to contract-to-hire in the 90s-00s for banks and not even getting issued a laptop for the first few months of a contract happened nearly 100% of the time. Literally months of sitting around writing emails going "I can't do the work you're paying me for because you haven't issued me equipment yet" and that was routine. Or if it wasn't working equipment, it was company accounts/logins. I even did a year of this once with a hedge fund in the early 00s. Once and never again.

Contractors don't get meaningful responsibilities and meaningful responsibilities are how I justify myself (and my price) to my next job. No thanks.

> Three to six months of 1.5x pay just to have to look for a job again and you probably haven't done any meaningful work in the last three to six months?

Hard disagree. They're not really looking to extend full employment to people like you, but may from time to time. If you're really that good you have nothing to worry about. I'm speaking from experience working on both ends of the contract-to-hire process.

If I'm really that good I have another contract lined up already and I'm out the door. The only way you're getting me back is with a fulltime offer after my next contract ends. Or you're buying me out.

Might as well skip the games.

I've been on both sides of it too and I would never hire that way looking for good, experienced people. My experience with people successful at work is that they're successful in other endeavors too such as their private life. Experience also tells me that most peoples' life partners are extremely intolerant of career uncertainty, unless as a couple they are both very young.

> Experience also tells me that most peoples' life partners are extremely intolerant of career uncertainty, unless as a couple they are both very young.

I can only laugh at this statement.

You can but it's pretty naive. The effects of layoffs and non-fulltime employment on families have been well studied with all of the conclusions that one should expect.

I know multiple guys with wildly successful side-hustles, years-long backlogs of clients and more than enough income to exceed their day jobs and their wives absolutely will not allow them to leave their fulltime jobs because they're fearful of the risks of self-employment. These are the kind of men that put their family as their first priority.

If you're only in the business of hiring kids, maybe you're entitled to your perspective but that's not somewhere I'm looking to work.

I'm not hiring kids. This is the world we've come to. I understand your perspective, but have you considered that times have changed? Your most recent reference to this idea is over 20 years ago. The nuclear family, and especially wives aren't relevant anymore.

This isn't even an about inflation. There's an entire cohort you're not looking at and they're about to eat your lunch and so is your wife :D

Once we reach this rude awakening, would you rather you had more money in the bank and prior salary to give hiring managers, or less?

Similar to what is discussed in the article, this basically optimizes for the most desperate candidates who can't get a job straight out of the gate. For starters, very few people would leave a good, full time job for a contract-to-hire position.

How many talented folks in the field will accept that kind of job insecurity? If my offer is between 500k+ TC or “do work for us until we feel like commitment and maybe you’ll be on your ass in the street doing all this interview bullshit in 12 weeks; maybe you’ll get an offer better than the competition — but probably not because we’ll be in a position of negotiating strength knowing you probably don’t want to interview again”, I know damn well which one I’m taking.

Especially because I was given just that choice a few month back.

Plenty of talented folks will do it as actual contractors taking on projects for a few months at $250-300/hr. I did that for five years and was always open to my clients bringing me on full time for the right price. But the opportunity cost/price of exclusivity is very high.

"Contract to hire" is the worst of both worlds; I've only seen that work for bottom-of-the-barrel employers/employees.

What senior person wants to do this?

That's the problem with so many attempts to "correct" hiring. Especially for more senior roles, the best people you want to hire usually already have jobs, or they have a pick among different companies. Make the hiring process too onerous and you end up selecting for the most desperate people.

I don't know how you'd get a good signal from a "work-sample test" in under a week or so, in which case you've basically weeded out most of the people you want to hire.

I’ve never tried it, but it doesn’t sound terrible. As I approach 25 years in industry, what does sound terrible is more rote studying for interviews, and I don’t mean just leetcode. The idea of just giving the work a go in situ, and we either like each other or not, sounds sort of refreshing should I find myself job shopping.

I don't know your life circumstances, but as I am slightly beyond 25 YOE, it has been over two decades since I found myself job shopping, just job choosing. There's no way I'd be working my current job and also doing whatever weird contract-to-hire gig some company that can't vet employees would ask.

For most senior people, a new job is leaving an existing cushy job. We're not going to do that for some nonsense like this.

You have to take at least 1 day off for a standard tech interview, often more. I don't see how this is much different from a demand on your time.

Plenty

In lieu of a regular interview? And if I get paid? In a heartbeat.

I don't care. We hire resume-blind.

I did it when I had over 40 years experience. It was a blast.

I've since used that method when I was a hiring manager, both for technical roles, and even a Manager of Compliance. Was extremely successful, both for us on the hiring side, as well as two very good hires.

I suppose you've heard this argument a lot, so the short version: Can't compensate people in many countries, and probably some other legal problems when they are still employed, so what are they supposed to do? Take a vacation day? Does it even still count as an interview if you're doing real work?

I'd love this, because I have a feeling I'm better at working with people than whiteboarding, but realistically unless I'm on furlow or out of a job it seems really hard to pull off, especially if it's longer than one day, even if I ignore the compensation, which would not be a pet peeve of mine, but I've heard it as a valid argument from others.

A common hack around this is to donate the “compensation” to a charity of the persons choosing.

Do you do this on-site? If not how are you sure they did the work?

The one place I interviewed that did this had me email my program for them to run, then come in and answer questions about it and describe which parts I was proud of, which could use improvement, etc.

Just have people pair with people doing actual work. It's better signal for the candidate, for the existing team, and for the organization.

This is the only correct answer. I interviewed dozens of people this way over more than a decade. Hiring was never difficult to get right.

Bonus: we self-selected for people who don’t like to pair. We paired 100% of the time.

You’re not but it already reduces the sample size by a lot. There is no 100% effective way to detect liars. I’ve been a hiring manager in multiple companies (including currently) and fortunately for me they were so far rare (maybe because Germany isn’t attractive enough as a job market for programmers to get the bulk of people putting a lot of effort into fraudulently getting a job).

Either way it is customary to start new hires with a 6 month probation, and their long term contract only kicks in after that. That’s long enough to detect if someone is incompetent (I’ve had to fire people during their probation when finding out they weren’t actually capable altho I don’t think they outright lied).

maybe a balance can be struck? audition/take-home to select potential candidates, a follow up interview with each to confirm they wrote the code and are a good team fit.

Are we doing more spicy takes? I'll give you one: this is just not a thing. Unless you're operating at a very large scale, I think you can simply ignore this problem.

If your team is at all well run, and your work-sample testing mirrors the team's work, it's not a very good scam to run: it'll be immediately obvious on the job.

We thought we'd put some energy into this back in 2021, and we have yet to reach a point where thinking about this makes any sense (except for tech writers, where spotting GPT is maybe somewhat useful).

Maybe I am unlucky, but I've been working fulltime for almost 30 years and I can count the number of well-run teams that I've worked on or known people working on with exactly zero hands. And the management of 100% of them acted like they were the best company on Earth to work for.

I have _heard of_ great teams, but even the one person I knew who worked at Pivotal ended up there long after things went downhill culturally.

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