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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I have been approached with the project-interview and it left a bad taste in my mouth leading to me ultimately turning down the interview. Getting a candidate to do work for you in their free time for no compensation is perhaps not the best way to attract and find good talent.

If you want to hire me but want to see some real-world work first, give me an 8 hour contract and a fair wage.

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So you have invested 2+ hours writing a cv and a cover letter, and another 4 to 5 getting ready for, going to and finally attending one or more interviews, and you balk at investing another 4 hours on a project, where your abilities can really shine over the competition?

I don't think the argument was about the misc. time it takes to do things. It takes time to commute, it takes time to shower, it even takes time to eat.

The issue is that you're working for a prospective company while not being compensated for it.

I read this post as being the same project for everyone, that was extracted from real work, not 'we're going to put this in production once you're done with it.'

That's correct. We already have an excellent implementation of what we're testing so there's no need to use what the interviewee made (this is simply an interviewing tool).

If you want to hire me but want to see some real-world work first, give me an 8 hour contract and a fair wage.

If only there was a website where one could upload and source code one had written for fun. Perhaps even with repo history. Like a hub of git activity or something.

Then employers could simply browse this website rather than demanding these annoying project interviews.

If you are working at a place that does OSS that puts you miles ahead of anyone working on closed source systems.

Additionally the legality of OSS commits is technically still kind of grey for a lot of people with generic "your code belongs to the company" in their contract with their employer.

Yes, if an employer can easily determine you know what you are doing, you are miles ahead of people who are unknown quantities.

See also filters like college degrees and past experience, both of which also provide evidence you know what you are doing and put you miles ahead of people without them. Should we also not look at past experience and education?

I am speaking from a requirement standpoint. By requiring OSS commits, I am heavily favoring people who worked for OSS companies. This may be a good thing or a bad thing.

I do not disagree on the value of looking at OSS, I just feel that requiring it is going to cause you to pre-emptively filter your candidate list.

Now if that is what you want there is nothing wrong with that, it just may not be obvious that is what you are doing.

Note that I am assuming you are looking for complex work, github is great for seeing if they can at least program, but I would trust a quick whiteboard problem more for that level of technical aptitude.

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