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Comment by cldellow | Hacker News Reader

That smells a bit fishy. I think you've dodged a bullet.

I have to be a bit cautious here, because our company does something similar.

We have a little programming challenge that we ask candidates to submit. We don't use those submissions in production. We find it gives people with non-traditional backgrounds a chance to show their chops, and gives us some meat to discuss during an interview.

The challenge probably takes 4-8 hours, though. Part of me does think it's a little asymmetric for us as employers to be demanding this of candidates. We've also done week-long work tests, where we pay the person market rate to work with us on real-life code.

Anecdotally, people view the paid week-long trial as demeaning, but the (unpaid) challenge as exciting and fun. We live in a bizarre world.

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> Anecdotally, people view the paid week-long trial as demeaning, but the (unpaid) challenge as exciting and fun. We live in a bizarre world.

That's because it is demeaning. It represents a large chunk of someone's life invested in proving that they're good enough for you. It's also inherently asymmetric in that the company you work for could not possibly be economically harmed by a week-long trial period, but a single person could be financially devastated by it. Additionally, if the person discovers an illness during that period, do you provide health insurance? What about employees coming from other employers? Do they have to quit their prior jobs or use up vacation time to complete your "interview" process?

A four or eight hour programming exercise skirts some really stupid aspects of interviews and the hiring process. Of course that's welcome. A week-long commitment to work is a sizable tenure as a second-class citizen undergoing prolonged scrutiny.

Your company should be deeply ashamed of this practice.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, the trial is an alternative path to employment if, for whatever reason, the challenge + interview isn't suitable.

If you're on the fence about us, give it a shot. If we're on the fence about you, your option is no offer or a week-long trial. As I identified elsewhere, a drawback of the trial is it's mostly only useful for people who are unemployed.

> Additionally, if the person discovers an illness during that period, do you provide health insurance?

We live in a country with reasonable health care coverage, so this isn't really a thing.

> A week-long commitment to work is a sizable tenure as a second-class citizen undergoing prolonged scrutiny.

This is my knee-jerk opinion, too. However, what is the alternative? We could hire you full-time right out of the gate...but we could still fire you after a week.

> Your company should be deeply ashamed of this practice.

Deeply ashamed might be overstating it. Contemplative and reflective, perhaps.

Perhaps you missed the part about paying normal rates for the person during that week?

If I'm looking for a job so desperately that I'd be financially devastated by a lost week, then I'd surely jump at a paid week of work, no?

You're not considering the situation where the candidate has a job already but is looking for a new one. Quitting your current job is a large commitment, and doing so for only a week trial period (where the odds are higher you'll be unemployed afterwords) is a pretty large risk.

That being said, for someone who is currently unemployed, putting job interviews on hold for a week is less of a risk

Ah, indeed, I did not think of that. There'd be vacation days to avoid having to quit your current job for that week. Still, there's other problems, like maybe the contract forbidding you to have other jobs unless cleared by your employer, and taxes because you suddenly have two jobs – not worth the hassle for a single week, I guess.

Spending half your annual vacation allotment on one job interview. Who would do that?

"The challenge probably takes 4-8 hours, though."

The problem with that is you aren't the only one doing this and when I am job searching I am applying to many companies. So now I have 10 different companies asking for an 8 hour code test to be completed within a couple business days. Meanwhile I still have a job to hold down. It's a massive time commitment to make to just one company without knowing if the work put in will result in an offer.

I much rather prefer companies that aren't lazy interviewing and will look over some of my github repos and discuss those with me to gauge my experience. There is no one size fits all answer to interviewing, but 4-8 hour code tests(plus interviews) just isn't one I can get on board with.

We don't have a time limit on our challenge - it's public, you can work on it whenever and submit it whenever.

But I do see how having a challenge means our funnel gets narrower at the top because we're competing for people's time. We think we're worth it. :)

At the same time, we're always wondering if our process is excluding too many people. If someone came to us and articulated: "I think your challenge is trying to assess me for X, Y and Z; here's a GitHub profile that shows I have those traits" we'd likely be open to being convinced.

Here's my problem with pre-interview coding tests:

1. The employer is just sending the coding test as a form letter to everyone who submits a resume. I can submit the test, ace it, THEN they read my resume and decide I'm a bad fit. So I wasted my time.

I've done several coding tests where I know I aced it, and still no interview. Why am I wasting my time on this?

2. I do the test, get an interview, and now they decide I'm a "bad cultural fit".

If you're going to reject me for a flaky reason like "bad cultural fit", then you should do it BEFORE you make me waste time on a pre-interview screening test.

But as you said, the test is a useful way to filter out bad employers. If they ask me for a coding test, I don't do it, knowing I'm not missing much.

Suppose there are 5 people willing to proceed directly to a phone interview and 20 people who want me to take a 1-8 hour coding test first. As a candidate, who am I going to spend my limited job search time on?

Obviously anyone really good won't actually do the tests because they'll be offered a job by somewhere that doesn't do them before they get around to yours though, sooo...

Personally I find the single best question is "what's your github username?". People who are on it and active are... well, actually I've only ever had one candidate who's actually been on github and she seemed OK. The majority of people I've seen haven't been much good (and have barely heard of github).

I agree about dodging a bullet. I think the OP did exactly the right thing.

We'll definitely consider a GitHub account as well, but we don't want to exclude the universe of programmers who are Just Busy Doing Their Dayjob And Having a Life and don't have time to maintain a ton of open source forks.

Yeah there are definitely degrees of "active", but even one or two forks, or even submitting an issue to an active project demonstrate engagement that says a lot about someone.

But is the opposite true? If someone hasn't contributed to an open source project, does that say a lot about them?

I have seen this first hand. Company A told me to complete a programming test, and only then they would talk to me further. Meanwhile, Company B gave me a solid job offer and I never got back to Company A.

I don't feel too bad about ditching Company A, because they have contacted me through recruiters a few times. It's always the same story. I complete their programming challenge (which is really easy, because it's always the same), submit it, then never hear anything back, not even an acknowledgement that they received my solution.

I'm curious, how does companies usually evaluate a github profile? and how important is that evaluation to the decision?

I ask this because I find many of the software engineers I follow on Twitter who work at major tech companies (github, twitter, google, etc) have a pretty sparse github profile.

I started asking it really so I could see examples of a candidate's code. Also seeing the projects they've contributed to would show that, for example, they genuinely were interested/engaged with whatever niche they were being interviewing for.

A problem with github could be that a lot of the code you write needs to be kept private for commercial reasons, and then I guess some kind of coding test would be better

What we've found is that the best folks want a (paid) trial - not because they want us to trial them, but because they want to trial us. Works out for everyone.

That's a good insight. We should make sure we frame the trial the right way so both sides see the benefit of it.

One big downside of trials is they exclude people who are already employed...ah well, can't win 'em all.

Eh, the job market is already grossly skewed in favor of the employers. Asking for 4-8 hours of unpaid work is probably fine though, given that an interview would take about that long... assuming the interview itself will be very short, that is.

We have 9 interview loops spaced out over 2 months.

Just kidding, the interview itself is very short.

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