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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something here? The title says 1 hour hire but the problem listed says 7.5 (rails test: 0.5, backend: 3, frontend: 4). That seems anything but efficient and somewhat strange.

Why not provide the potential candidate with some actual work that you need done?

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7.5 hours of candidate time, one hour of the hiring engineer time.

So they expect me to put in 7.5 hours of my time but they only want to spend an hour of their time. Got it. Sounds like a great company to work for...

Agreed. Maybe their next step can be a 1-800 number style menu system for doing the initial phone screenings :)

One day for a several year investment seems pretty logical to us.

Why not 2 days, then? Maybe he should complete an entire project for free - why not, for a "several year investment?"

Personally, I think it's great when companies not only advertise these kind of practices with pride, but then send staff out onto the net to defend them against a veritable tide of criticism. It will certainly help you narrow your pool of applicants, and that is clearly what you are after - it says so in your "how to hire a human" flowchart! Haha.

Employment is a two-way street, especially for someone in-demand as a Rails engineer.

Something about this post tells me that there is not actually that high of a demand, and that there may actually be a glut.

Strictly-speaking, there are probably more people that know Rails then there are jobs requiring it. Even given that, the balance of power in the labor market is still supply-side. A Rails engineer can easily get jobs in just about any other platform fairly easily, and probably already has on occasion. But a company can't magically turn a need for a Rails coder into a need for a Java one.

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