Ask HN: What if a candidate gave a company an “employer challenge”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What if a candidate gave a company an “employer challenge”?

10 pointsshaggyfrog14 comments

Not long after reading a TechCrunch article posted recently -- http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/08/on-secretly-terrible-engineers/ -- I went through my latest "developer challenge" experience. ~4 hours of work rejected because of a single bug. Argh.

Is it time for candidates to give companies "employer challenges"?

What would those look like?

Would any employers be brave enough to take them? Is it reasonable to expect employers to?

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> I went through my latest "developer challenge" experience. ~4 hours of work rejected because of a single bug.

Consider yourself lucky. Do you really want to work with such people who don't value your time and are so nit-picks?

Whenever, an employer asks me to do a challenge, I ask them how long do they think the challenge will take. I double the given estimate and if it is more than an hour or two, I ask to be paid. Most employer decline and I decline to further pursue. Simply, if they don't value my time now, they are not going to value my time after they hire me definitely. I maintain a list of such companies so that I can avoid them in the future. I also don't use or recommend their products and as a place to work to anyone.

I regularly read about people having complaints about bad experiences at companies. I know there is glassdoor, but I would love a more focused place where we could name these companies so more people don't waste their time with them.

Glassdoor is as good as it gets. The challenge is that such reviews need to be anonymous. But majority of reviews are going to be from unhappy people.

IME, the test requests primarily come from startup tech firms and technical people who think they are better than 'most' even if they are not.

There already is the Joel Test. Many companies on StackOverflow Careers advertise their score in job listings.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

This probably wouldn't work unless you are an extremely exceptional candidate (ex: a leader in the field, major contributor to an open source project they use internally, etc). Most of the time employers have the upper hand since there are a number of people applying to a single position. So if a number of qualified candidates apply, and one hands them an "employer challenge", their resume will be thrown in the trash.

In an interview once, I asked if I could look at their bug tracking log. (They wouldn't let me.)

So I asked how many bugs where in their bug backlog. (They wouldn't tell me.)

So I asked something along the lines of "in the last year, have the number of open bugs gone up or down?" (They wouldn't tell me.)

I stopped the interview a while later (for other reasons) and told them I didn't think I would be a good fit.

should have asked - do you keep a bug tracking log.

>should have asked - do you keep a bug tracking log. That was the first thing I asked but it's a good question.

It could be answering a question: "how does this job help me in my development?"

Or it could be showing some portion of source code, significant enough to assess quality of code itself and its architecture.

Or giving an hour of chat with the future teammates.

Don't candidates give employers "employer challenges" all the time? It's their product. I won't work for a company with a sucky product unless the founders acknowledge the suckiness and their attitude is "That's what you can help us with", not "Who the hell are you to tell me my product sucks!"

having gone into jobs where i've learned to hate the top secret product i was about to work on, within the first day of actually seeing it and am just left wondering why they chose to go down that path... i've wondered where i go wrong.

i've asked dumb questions before to test the employer, things like if they have coding standards, where will i sit, who will i work with etc. but its obviously not foolproof.

some employers are just not a good fit, although i'm fortunate that they will often make it known to me due to my epic history of bridge burning, having discovered it through google and deciding to ask questions that reveal their shoddy workplace practices... it still doesn't stop me from winding up working on the arse end of nothing.

To an extent, candidates are actually giving companies an employer-challenge every time they read the firm's job description. This is the mirror of asking a candidate, "So why should we hire you over other candidates?".

Call future colleagues and ask about the work environment, will definitely tell you more than all the bullshit you hear at interviews and job postings.

I think the employer-challenge comes in the form of the comp negotiation. That's an ideal time to push back and challenge them on whatever you want.

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