Uncertain About Hiring, Some Companies Try ‘Test Drives’ | Hacker News Reader

Uncertain About Hiring, Some Companies Try ‘Test Drives’

nytimes.com

29 pointssoundsop47 comments

I don't quite get it. Normally, both the applicant and the employer take a risk when the latter decides to hire. You could argue that an employer takes the biggest risk.

In this system al the burden and risk is shifted solely on the applicant. So what does he or she gets in return? It's not clear from the article. I would expect that in order to attract applicants they must

- either be desperate,

- or have a salary offer in sight more than 2.5 times the market's average.

Provided that the "solid consulting rate" isn't pure bullshit, then I don't see the problem here.

In a traditional hiring process, you'd be hired, not work out in the first month, and then get fired. No unemployment or ongoing insurance for the employee, and a lot of paperwork and the possibility of a wrongful termination lawsuit for the employer.

By starting things off on a contract, both the employer and the employee have a chance to evaluate one another. It's really exactly the same as the traditional hire-fire process, but with less paperwork, and clear expectations on both sides.

>By starting things off on a contract, both the employer and the employee have a chance to evaluate one another. It's really exactly the same as the traditional hire-fire process, but with less paperwork, and clear expectations on both sides.

That's got to be compensation for New York not being a right-to-work state

Automattic, the creator of WordPress, the blog and website tool. Still, every hire, without exception, goes through a two- to six-week contract period, and is paid the standard rate of $25 an hour.

$25/hour: seriously?

That seems ridiculously low for any software job. I've known design interns making almost double that in SF.

I don't have a very sharp view of the practices in the US. In The Netherlands it is possible that the employer and the applicant agree to a proof period of maximally 2 months in which both sides are able to terminate the contract.

It is also possible here to offer the applicant a temporary contract which can be renewed two times (for the same contract period). Both parties needs to keep to this contract, they can only end it on pre-negotiated terms. After two renewals of the contract the employer needs to let you go or your contract changes in a normal, non-temporary one.

I think these measures are more appropriate to deal with uncertainties about possible misfits? It makes sure both parties make a commitment for trying to make it fit as I see it.

I read something completely opposite here:

«Candidates get about three weeks of work to complete in a week — and not much guidance. “It’s ‘Here’s your desk and some people you should know,’ ” Mr. Rusenko said.»

I wonder if they could not improve their interviewing skills.

> “We tell people to take a vacation, and we pay them,” he said. That way, if it does not work out, “you have one less week of vacation, but the next time you take a vacation it can be a nicer one.”

If I had 7 weeks vacation, maybe. Much less that you can basically only do a trial like this once a year, but spending half of your two weeks vacation a year might be worth a lot more than money.

Yeah this seems really anti-worker to me. Sadly, the direction things seem to be predominantly going lately.

They make you do 3 weeks of work in the span of 1 week. Getting the work done is a hard criteria, so even if you only end up getting 2.5 weeks of work done, the company is still WAY ahead, and you've just spent your vacation time and the company spent a tiny amount of money. It would be one thing if they were testing you with work they've already done (build a module from scratch similar to what we did), but I have a feeling they're taking mostly completed stuff from the failures and using it in production. This is pretty much zero risk to the employer because at worse, they're just spending cash as if they were hiring a (more expensive) contractor

I think they're interested in actually hiring people, but it's a nice side effect that they get some low-cost work done (the article doesn't mention the pay, but I doubt they are compensating you what you make at your current position + intangibles for taking your vacation to work there). Another metric to look at would be whether this company is actually investing in their employees (paid training, conferences, new productivity tools, etc.). The trial period, supposed workload, and the hard criteria that you MUST complete the work is a huge red flag.

I guess it's a bit of cash in pocket for the unemployed though.

Slightly offtopic: If you can abuse the working populace with this (due to economic conditions), its time for a basic income.

Those two ideas are not even closely related.

Perhaps I made a leap, as its a long discussion that could be had.

Would an employer be able to squeeze 3 weeks of work out of a potential candidate on their vacation unless the employee had no other choice? That to me is not how a labor market should function in a first-world country.

edit: /u/dismal2 said it much better

they are in the sense that with the way things are going, more and more risk, uncertainty, and costs are offloaded from employers to labor without ever giving anything in return

Slightly drunk offtopic: I'd rather just nuke my passport and head to some other less-insane country than try to fight for basic income in this country. Fans of basic income have some very optimistic hopes.

Social security is a essentially an age-tested basic income. With enough software, robotics, and clean energy, its easily done (from a technical perspective).

Keywords for more research: "post scarcity", "historical productivity to wages"

> Social security is a essentially an age-tested basic income.

No, its not. Benefit eligibility is driven primarily by previous contributions (either yours or, if you are relying on survivors benefits, someone else's), with various qualifying events. Its not (even leaving out the "age test") anything like BI, except in the extremely distant way any way that the government gives you money is "like" BI.

Can you exhaust your social security? Is it an account? Or is it an entitlement that you have to qualify for (credits over a number of years) and then can continue to draw until death?

> Can you exhaust your social security?

No, no more than you can exhaust a purchased annuity. Which is also not like an age-tested BI.

> Or is it an entitlement that you have to qualify for (credits over a number of years) and then can continue to draw until death?

Right, so, exactly not like BI, which is equal and unconditional (even excluding consideration of the influence of age, since its specifically based on the amount of contributions, adjusted by the the wage index from the time they were earned, and then adjusted by the CPI from the time benefits started being drawn.

In a sense, its more of a retrospective reverse-means-tested benefit program, which makes it about as far from BI as you can be and still be a government benefit program at all.

"Social security is a essentially an age-tested basic income."

Kind of irrelevant to the point regardless of whether the statement is correct because social security, if it did not already exist (but all other things were somehow still the same) would (incredibly unfortunately, IMO) have absolutely no hope of being instituted in this country either.

The US of 2014 is not the US of 1935.

Agreed.

The US of 2014 doesn't have 25% unemployment. When we get back to that point, I think we'll develop more tolerance for socialist policies. And just in case anyone doesn't think our unemployment will get that high, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

I also don't get it. Don't most companies already apply a 3-month period where if you don't cut it you're fired? Every company I've worked for has, and only one failed to fire people (because no one wanted to work there and they'd rather have bad workers than no workers)

Is a probationary period really meaningful in the context of at-will employment?

Yeah, oftentimes you don't start getting benefits until it's over.

You'd be surprised at the amount of drama that occurs, regardless.

A bad fit between company and employee is a risk for both of them. If you institute a system that reduces the risk of such an outcome, it helps both of them, in proportion to how much they were risking in the first place. If it helps the employer more than the employee, it's because the employer was risking more in the first place. (Something I'm not sure of - I've turned down cofounder positions with startups because after working with them for a week I realized I didn't really like the other founders, and then ended up doing far better than the startup did.)

The main problems I see with it are:

1.) How to recruit from companies with restrictive IP covenants or moonlighting clauses. There's no way Google would've let me do something like this when I was working for them, for example, and most companies would like the option of hiring ex-Googlers if they're interested.

2.) It eliminates the ability to check out many options in parallel, which is essential for negotiating a fair wage as an employee. A company can "test drive" many possible employees at once; a person can generally only work for one effectively.

I would be extremely skeptical if someone asked me to do 3 weeks of work in one week with no guidance during my vacation. Add to that, I cannot imagine they'd pay my weekly rate, because that would of course raise the question of why I'd take such a huge pay cut to do the same thing full time.

> noting that candidates are generally eager to test the waters before committing to a job and that they are treated legally as employees even during the trial period

I'm not seeing any upside for candidates here ? What does it even mean to "commit" to a job in this context ?

remain funemployed, I imagine...

I imagine that without realizing it, they are getting some bottom of the barrel talent using this process. Not sure which qualified person would look at this hiring practice and go through with it.

The upside of this for the employee is that they know they are going to be working with "rockstars" (the word is from the article). If I applied to a company which had a hiring process that could let through idiots, I wouldn't take the job.

I don't really think I'd accept this unless I had no other job prospects or I really wanted to work at the place I was interviewing/'testing' at.

>Meanwhile, she said, much of the emotion and uncertainty has been taken out of the interview process.

At least it has for the company. Seems like it puts more of the risk on the employee.

Hopefully an interview is a two-way process, though. To me, the fact that the employer is unwilling to take that risk is a red flag. How likely are they to invest in me down the road if they're not willing to from the start?

Yup, this seems very directly like a transfer of risk from the employer to potential employees.

But remember -- there's an engineering shortage! We can't hire good people! We need ten times as many h1b visas! (Pay more? Take a slight risk? Hire someone without five years of experience (in a four year old tech) doing exactly what we think we want them to do? Now why would we do something like that?)

Edit: and nonsense like this is going around. I recently talked to a very early stage startup that just raised either a very large angel round or a smallish round A. The phone screen went well, and my experience and skills were a great match. But then the ceo wanted to do a reference check to proceed not to an offer but to an in-office meeting with the other founders! I said that, well, my references are ceos and chief scientists and they're very busy; I can't impose on them just to see if maybe there's a fit. But again, I'll bet good money he's complaining to his peers about how hard it is to hire.

edit2: I'm gonna channel michaelochurch: this is beyond fucking amazing.

   Not all positions lend themselves to candidate auditions. At Entelo, Joor 
   and Weebly, candidates for senior executive positions rarely go through a 
   trial process.

So yeah, all that shit about how execs are treated better? That's it right fucking there. At Entelo, Joor, and Weebly, if you're a regular asshole and dumb enough to want to work there, you gotta suck it up and audition. But an executive? Come on -- we're all equal, but some of us are more equal than others. All that writing Michael does about high-status and low-status jobs, this is how execs want to treat the low status employees. You should all read this [1]

[1] https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-othe...

Maybe we are somehow insanely good at interviewing engineers, but after a standardized 1 day interview I can't think of a single bad engineering hire we've made in the last year.

But, it may be much harder if you're only looking in the pool of people who are willing to work temporary contracts for $25/hour or "who are in jobs where they are unhappy".

Our lead investor suggested we do this and it's been working very very well. The one time we didn't do it, it was a major screw-up.

Lots of negative comments about this from people looking at it from the employees side. Have you considered the impact on the employee if you just hire them full-time and it doesn't work out? They've quit their other full-time job (yes, we hire part timers who are at other companies while they're working there), potentially moved house, made other irrevocable decisions related to their new job with you. It's a disaster if you have to let them go in 3 to 6 months and it's very hard to get re-hired once you've gone through that - not only does it look bad on your resume but your self confidence is shot.

So a 30 day try-out IMO works extremely well for both employer and employee. Remember, you're trying out the company too during those 30 days.

> we hire part timers who are at other companies while they're working there

That seems problematic, even in states like California that don't enforce non-compete clauses...

I've never had a job that would be ok with me working part time for someone else. So I'd have to quit my job to do a trial run with you. At that point, I'm not sure it's better to be let go after 30 days instead of 90 or 180. I still have to look for a new job after having failed at one, and I still end up with a short stint on my resume (though I suppose it's short enough that I could reasonably leave it off). Also I don't understand how this addresses the relocation issue. If your company is in a different place than I currently live, aren't I going to be required to relocate regardless of how long my tenure is? Are people supposed to shell out for a hotel (potentially away from their families) for a month?

Do you pay extremely high salaries, hire the long term unemployed or new graduates? I just don't see how many people would be able to take the risk involved with passing your "interview".

Does this work for people over 30, with kids or a mortgage?

My last job began with an out-of-the-blue phone call, a couple of phone interviews, and then a ~8-hour (paid) contract project (adding a couple of features to the codebase I would be working on). I didn't actually meet any of my coworkers in person until about six months in.

It was basically a paid audition. I'm not sure how I would've felt had it not worked out, but it seemed like a fair process for all involved.

One big possible failure mode would be a totally incompetent auditioner, but paying a few hundred bucks for some unusable work is probably cheaper than bringing someone in for an interview with a few engineers, let alone hiring them.

I have no problem "showing what I've got", so to speak. But I fear this practice is really just a tactic to strip software employees of leverage at the negotiating table. After going through weeks or months of trial by fire, making some friends in the trenches, and stopping the machinery of their larger job search, who is still willing to walk away from a lowish offer and begin that whole process again? It's the rational thing because there is plenty of opportunity out there, but emotionally it is a tough pill to swallow.

I'm in the middle of a three month contract to hire right now at a smallish startup. I go back and forth on whether I think it's a good idea (weeds out would be coworkers who don't perform) or bad for reasons laid out above. I was seeing a ton of interest when actively interviewing at companies and probably would not have agreed to this except that my current employer has long been on my dream job list. Emotionally it's tough to deal with being a temp, even as other (cheaper, non developer) employees are hired full time without a trial period. So far I'm sticking it out and doing well, but when I have doubts I feel like maybe starting down this path was a sucker's move.

> People fail either because they do not get the work done or because they have abrasive personalities, he said: “We have a zero-tolerance policy on that.”

We've sure gone soft. Here's to the sane, socially normalized ones.

While I don't think it's a great solution (give up my vacation time to do more work?!?) I'm surprised so many people think this only plays to the employer's advantage. I've been in a number of interviews where the potential employer has lied through their teeth about what they do and how they do it and even stupidly accepted an offer as a result of one. Going through this process there would've saved me the miserable few months before I had to resign.

What's the difference? You spend a miserable few months as a contract employee vs a miserable few months as a salaried employee?

Just had a realization, I wonder if you get health insurance during your trial?

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