In any job application situation, the company's concern is "can this applicant really do the job and do it well?" The applicant's concern is "will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?" In general, a work-sample test is a very good idea for answering both kinds of questions, and anyway research shows that a work-sample test is a far more valid hiring procedure than most other hiring procedures that have been tried. Check my FAQ link for research citations on that topic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227923

P.S. Yes, I intend to touch up my FAQ draft some more and then post it to my personal website. I just bookmarked the blog post kindly submitted here as another resource to refer to as I update my FAQ.

AFTER EDIT: I'd be happy to discuss with readers who disagree with this comment what the nature of your disagreement is. That helps me learn to make the FAQ better for its next posting on my website.

As others have said, there is no reason not to let the candidate work on related OSS projects or on already solved tasks. Adding new features to a code base for free is not on. This is like hiring labor for your bridge building company, getting 50 people and having them drag rocks around all day and then not paying them. Feels close to illegal.

If the application is so simple that you can get actual productivity in someone in the first couple hours then stop trying to hire candidates and outsource the entire thing to India for a fraction of the cost.

Otherwise it's a pair-programming test with massive hand-holding from another developer which is ridiculously more expensive for the company.

I'd choose to spend a few hours on the employer's actual application over any other form interview.

Obviously there are extreme cases (hey we'd like you to spend a few weeks working on this API, you know, for the interview), but I don't get that vibe from this article.

It that's all it is, then what is the benefit of doing it for more than maybe an hour or two? Are you really going to learn much more about the applicant's general level of skill and experience, or change your opinions on whether they'd be good to work with, if they are with you for 3 or 4 or 8 hours instead?

On a separate point, you are making an assumption that in a pair programming situation the hand-holding will all be one-way because the applicant doesn't know the code base. Hopefully anyone you're thinking of hiring would also be able to show the partner/interviewer a useful thing or two in a whole day of coding based only on general programming principles.

Also, if the applicant has a general knowledge of what the business does (which hopefully they bothered to research before applying!) and the interviewer and code base are any good at all, the applicant will understand enough about the problem domain to being to work "natively" within a day. Of course they won't suddenly understand everything, but interviews are two-way deals, and if someone the employer puts forward to represent them can't explain their own product well enough for native thinking to at least begin, or if the code base is so bad that a decent candidate can't start to find their way around after a whole day, then the employer failed the interview.

This isn't like a comic book company asking job candidates to submit a page of a script, where they can just use it as is. Software is a very living product and you need live people maintaining it.

I do think that companies should consider paying a candidate a few hundred bucks to spend his whole day with you. This doesn't change whether he's working on "open source stuff" or the company's product they are selling for money.

EDIT tldr: they should have paid him for his time not for his product

He fully accepts at the beginning that he knew they wanted a day of his time, and he was willing to give it - he just wanted to work on some open-source work instead of their product.

I've been asked to work on a company's live code as part of an interview process, and they paid me pro rata based on the salary for which I was applying.

Asking someone to do so unpaid for more than an hour or two just isn't reasonable.

If someone hires me for a day's work and he uses it to make a million dollars, I have not been cheated.

If someone hires me for a day's work and he can't extract any value from it, he has not been cheated.

He seems hung up on the fact that he thought the company was benefiting from his work. 1) They probably weren't, as you said, and 2) it doesn't matter if they do or not. He should be compensated for giving them a full day of his time regardless of whether he gives them useful work-product.

During the first interview would you consider paying for the time of the person interviewing you? My day rate to customers is £1000 and while I'm interviewing you I can't be doing that work so let's call it £125 an hour to read your CV, answer any questions you may have about the role and so on.

Yes they potentially want you to work there, but you presumably also are interested in working there. If that's the case why is your time valuable but theirs not?

And if you're not interested then why are you interviewing at all?

Quick edit: I think I've been slightly misunderstood. I'm not suggesting that the candidate should pay anyone anything, just drawing a (possibly bad) parallel.

A good interview is a chance for a candidate to see if it's a good job - that's worth investing time in. The organisation get to see if the candidate might be a good employee - that's worth investing time in. But both are making an investment and both are getting something out of it. To me it already looks like an equitable deal, I don't see why introducing money is helpful, particularly in a lopsided way.

As to why the actual code base and an actual problem - because it's the best test for both sides. What does a candidate learn more from, the actual code base and a real world change or a OSS project? I'd suggest that he's at least as likely to learn something material about the company and the product as they are to get usable code out of the candidate.

Assuming you've at least weeded out the many people that are a waste of time and money, then I think it's fair to pay anyone you bring in a reasonable rate for a couple hours of work.

Also, with most companies that contact me, I don't really know if I'm interested at all until I go in and talk to them. Don't presume that all candidates are interested in working there. It's hard to know until you know more about what they do, their processes, the culture, the type of people you will be working with and what the management is like.

But you're missing the bigger picture.

As a employer, interviews are massively disruptive and time consuming. For us over two interviews you'll speak to at least one manager, two or three developers and probably someone from the test team and or an analyst. All those people will read your CV, prepare questions, spend time interviewing you and then get together to discuss and make sure we've given you proper consideration and provide feedback. These are people who are generally relatively well paid and have other things they could be doing.

We'll read 3 (pre-screened) CVs for each first interview, 2 short first interviews for every second interview and probably 3 long (several hours) second interviews for each offer. So to get to one offer we'll have read 12 CVs, done 6 first interviews and 3 second interviews. I don't think we're abnormal - that's about typical for places I've worked (though I've heard of places who are far more demanding).

Much of that is done based on little evidence (usually a CV which may or may not be totally factual) and it's certainly not an indication that we want a candidate to work for us, merely that it might be something that could work out. Understanding whether it's more than that is why we're doing the interview.

My point is that we put a lot of time and effort (which has an associated cost) into seeing whether someone is a good candidate for us (and if we think this is a good job for them).

We don't ask for compensation for that time so why is it reasonable for a candidate to do so?

A candidate absolutely has the right to say that they aren't willing to submit to a particular interview process but I think asking for money to interview requires a very lopsided view of the process and, as a hiring manager, would have me pull the plug instantly.

From the employee perspective they may or may not actually be looking for a job, versus casually interested in all possibilities (like me). They also may or may not already have a job, in which case they'll have to take the day off to go through such an extensive interview, giving away work and potentially IP for free.

If I have a job and/or I'm not really desperate, then the cost of the interview may be greater to me than what I see as the potential gain. Especially when compared with the other possibilities out there. There are a lot of companies that will pay for any significant amount of time spent coding for an interview. Why would I waste my time with a company that doesn't value my time (esp. taking it off work), the work they're asking me to do, or potentially the IP I give them (e.g. if I come up with a new way of looking at a problem or a new solution they haven't thought of during the code interview).

A couple hours is a reasonable sacrifice, IMO, but may depend on each candidates situation. If I as asked to spend more than 2 hours coding, I would ask for compensation or turn down the interview.

If you're casually interested the aim shouldn't be to do a day long technical interview, it should be to establish what the real level of interest is and to either build that interest or establish that it's the wrong thing for you / us. Once we've done that we're either in a situation where you're keen on the role and we're looking at something where a day might be a good investment for you, or we've saved us both a day.

Making a significant time investment when one party isn't serious about the opportunity is the wrong thing to do for both company and candidate, and throwing money at the problem doesn't change that.

Ultimately I'd like to show you I value your time by not wasting it, rather than by paying for it if that makes sense?

Personally I don't think that a company will learn much more from 8 hours or more than they could learn in 3-4 hours tops though. I think it's overkill in most situations.

I would disagree with you. First of all, it is unclear of the role he was screened for.

1. It is clear that they needed the 'job' (features) done today, so a very likely of actual value to the company.

2. The candidate offered working on OSS project. Being a contributor to OSS project is a great value (not bukks though) itself, so I would not say it being 'free'. Saying that working for free on OSS is same as working for free on company's proprietary codebase is wrong...

3. Not everyone is "omg I will work here even for free, because it is awesome and I am changing the world". The candidate might have no difficulties finding job offers, and he values the money over excitment of a project. That is his choice, some professionals know what they are worth.

4. Employer - employee relationship is straight forward: pay for value, get paid for value.

If I have been interviewing him, I would instead give him a plus for not being "yah I will work for free, just give me a job" - a signal of desperation and troublesome candidate.

2) That's been discussed elsewhere in the thread. My personal view would be that unless the candidate had existing domain knowledge as well as technical skills, the lead developer would likely have been able to do the job faster themselves.

If they are being used as a freelancer for a day then I'd agree that that's exploitation but it's such a dumb thing to do (is any company really getting an unknown interviewee in to write production code to a deadline in a way their lead dev can't without the help) I very much doubt it's the case. If the developer had reason to believe that that was the case then they shouldn't ask for money, they should run away fast as the company is being run by idiots.

3) I agree but from the company's perspective to invest a day of a developers time (even without the money) I'd want to address as much of that doubt as possible up front.

4) As per point 2, I don't believe there is likely to be significant value in the code, just in learning about the candidate and that's reciprocal - the candidate is getting valuable information about the company which will form a .

Turn it around, would you want to work for a company so desperate for talent that they have to pay you to come to an interview?

To me it just sounds like you don't want this job much and the best outcome for both parties is that you go your separate ways.

1) I was talking from the personal experience in UK. Though, this might be conditional and post-student specific period.

2) Lead developer is getting a double value: interview a candidate, develop the product.

> Turn it around, would you want to work for a company so desperate for talent that they have to pay you to come to an interview?

I would like to work for a company valuing my professional time. The interview process itself is usually exciting, I learn a lot for myself by talking with inspiring people. But a day of coding is carrying by a degree less benefit to my professional and personal growth.

> To me it just sounds like you don't want this job much and the best outcome for both parties is that you go your separate ways.

I would rather not live in a employer's pony world where everyone dreams of working in their company.

As a company, you can hire someone highly loyal, thankful, putting his soul onto company's idea and unskilled, or less loyal and more skilled. You choose the balance. It was never possible to get both of the two worlds.

E: My awful grammar.

I don't see this as an employers pony show (and I'm both someone who looks for jobs as well as hires), I see it as looking for an equitable arrangement where someone interested in a job gets together with someone interested in hiring them. Both have a need and the aim is to mutually satisfy that in a way both parties find acceptable.

Paying someone who isn't sold on a job and a company to come in for a day seems to me to be the wrong solution to the problem. The persons questions and doubts can almost certainly be addressed (or not) in a far more time efficient way at which point they're in a situation where they can work out whether a day is a good use of their time. The real question seems to me to be how can we get it so that day, if they choose to attend the interview, is a good use of their time, rather than paying them because there's a high chance it's being wasted.

We can value someone's time by paying for it, or by doing what we can to make it time well spent. I think we should try to do the second one rather than the first.

Sorry hiring people is a burden, BTW, my 1-day contract labor rate is $25,000/day. Why should I waste my time doing your labor for free?

If after research and any questions they want to ask ahead of an extended interview they still aren't sold on the reasonable possibility that it's an interesting opportunity it doesn't seem a good use of my time, let alone hard cash.

How many sales have you made at that price? My figure isn't hypothetical, it's our standard day rate which we sell at and is the opportunity cost for those people's time. I'm not seriously saying that we'd ever consider charging candidates, just saying that the company is already making a significant investment in the person.

Maybe this is a local thing and supply and demand are more out of whack where you are than here (the UK) but what's being proposed doesn't feel equitable to me even in a candidate driven market.

(See also the edit above in response to your earlier deleted post).

If you can't answer that question yourself without assuming that every candidate is a desperate unemployed mook on their last dollar you can bend over a barrel to squeeze some free labor out of then you probably shouldn't be in a hiring position.

Flip the question around, if you didn't need somebody to do work for you, then why are you bothering to open a position?

> How many sales have you made at that price?

You're the one with a problem so big and urgent that you're willing to take a random person off the street and put them onto your production code for a day. As the person solving that problem for you, I get to dictate the price, not you.

If you think you can sustain your daily charge rate and grow your business without adding more people, why aren't you doing that instead?

I think we're agreed that by the time you got to doing any extended technical interview you'd have gone through a fair bit - the company would have seen CVs, the candidate would have done research. There would have been a shorter first interview where both sides could ask questions.

At that point I'd hope that the candidate would know whether they were interested enough. I'm not saying they should be certain but it should be more than just an idle "what's this?" situation.

If that wasn't the case then the right thing to do would probably be to talk a little more about what the candidate was looking for, what concerns they had and whether we could address them and what (other than money) might convince them that an extended interview was a good use of their time. If they couldn't be convinced then we could either talk about a shorter interview (either instead of or ahead of a longer one) or we'd have to accept that we'd not sold the opportunity to them and ask why we felt that was likely to change during a day together but couldn't be addressed in any other way.

To be willing to hand over cash to someone to attend an interview I'd pretty much have to be convinced enough that I'd be willing to offer them a job without the interview.

As for desperation - I don't think I've ever been or would ever be as desperate as you make out and this isn't a "random person off the street". If I was I'd hire a freelancer and still take my time over the long term hire.

As for the price, no you get to make an offer, and I get to politely decline and look elsewhere. Both my experience of recruitment (both recent and long term) and standard practice in the industry says that that's working out just fine. It may be that there are specific local conditions where you are that mean otherwise but I can only comment on what I see in the UK.

Out of interest, your bio says that these days you're largely management. Would you ever pay someone to come for an interview? Do you think you'd be able to sell it within your organisation?

No, and I'd never try to do the practice that started the entire thread of getting somebody to work on my production code for free for a day either.

It's probably illegal in both of our jurisdictions number one, opens you up to unbelievable liabilities number two if you don't hire the person (at least in the U.S.), and is just outright unethical. It keeps popping up here from time to time though and it makes me wonder about two things

1) What kind of people does HN attract that are in hiring positions?

2) What kind of abuse do engineers take for granted that they'd be willing to entertain the idea?

> I think we're agreed that by the time you got to doing any extended technical interview you'd have gone through a fair bit - the company would have seen CVs, the candidate would have done research. There would have been a shorter first interview where both sides could ask questions.

Personally, I've been very far along in interview processes before one side or the other decided to pull the plug. I've even been as far as starting to fill out initial employment paperwork before pulling out after finding out something about my future employer that hadn't been made clear to me during the earlier interview processes (in that case, I found out the people who I interviewed with were not going to be my supervisors. And after meeting him, I found him to be unsavory and that was that).

I think we're probably talking about different subjects, I was referring to the rotten idea of grinding a day of slave labor out of candidates the OP brought up while it looks like you're focused on appropriate compensation for people's time during long interview processes. If I'm the one who got off track then I apologize.

The employee/employer relationship is a business relationship. As such, think of yourself like a business. Sometimes you have to spend money (time/effort) to make money (paycheck).

To view it any other way seems entitled to me.

Lets put this way, you are interviewing for a Car Sales position, you get to the my store and I ask you: Hey, today you gonna spend the day selling cars, it will be our test, and then you sell as many cars as you can for free.

Do you still consider this, part of the interview? Keep in mind that you are bringing profit to my store.

As others have pointed out, a pair programming interview costs them money. If you want the job you should be comfortable with an extended interview... lot's of companies do a series of interviews, should candidates be paid for that? As long as you're not naive this stuff isn't too big a deal. If I didn't like it I'd leave -- and I have during a pair programming session once, but it's because it helped me to quickly get a really clear view of the situation. It's as valuable for the candidate as it is for the company, since you get to make a life decision based on actual information. This is a rare gift in a way.

That said, I think half a day max makes more sense.

Pretty much this. For some large, complex codebases I've worked on the metric has been that if the engineer can meaningfully contribute within a week then they're likely damn good at the job. Two weeks and they're still fine.

And some are needlessly complex but you inherited them from another, long-gone team and somebody has to maintain, improve and update them, unfortunately!

But the work isn't free. Sure, the company isn't paying you, but the company is paying me, and you can bet that we're not getting as much done as we would get done on an interview-free day. I don't think anyone's ever been under the delusion that we're just trying to get cheap labor to build our codebase for us.

> LD: "Well, I thought we could work on our application, we've got some features I want to implement and push live by the end of the day"

Key difference being that the interviewee is going to be adding new features that will be pushed live without any further work by other employees.

A company solicited "art tests" as part of a hiring process that basically amounted to having the candidates create free content for them.

maybe I wouldn't say anything too valuable unless it really seems like it will tip the scales but this is part of common sense and good judgment at any job -- if you publicly spill too many good ideas, others will repeat & steal credit. plenty of corporations will hire with a couple hours of interview but i don't really expect startups & small companies to work like this realistically. They probably need to be more careful with hiring. if you're obsessed with your "day rate" and think you can get people to keep paying it, then just keep freelancing...

the point of a job is to get a steady check every week in a more relaxed environment than freelancers typically face. if you want that opportunity, you have to prove yourself. the idea that they are trying to trick your fantastically brilliant mind into solving their problems sounds like a Ruby-ists fantasy or something, lol.

Just get real now and then, the author made fun of them for hiring [Hipster programming language] but he sounds just like [Hipster programmer]. If you walk into a place and you are not feelin the vibe then you are free to leave. Their request seems far from egregious though, I've done a pair interview before and it's strange but you're pretty much just shadowing someone and hangin out. They're not going to set up a dev environment for you and give you the keys to the codebase, come on.

Full disclosure: I have a job

When my employer wanted "work sample" for my interview, they set up a consulting contract, gave me time to familiarize with the codebase, discussed realistic sample assignment requirements, placed no limits on my work time, sensibly integrated my submission(s), and paid me for it. I'm very happy working here.

I am warming up to the concept of a very short paid contract to do the code interview, btw.

If you want to argue that he should be paid for the value of his work product, realize that in almost all cases that value is likely negative. Slowing down a developer for a day to work with a candidate is in no way beneficial to a company.

There is always a cost to hiring. When a company decides that the value of having that dev is greater than the cost of hiring them, then it makes sense to hire someone. It may not be an immediate monetary value, but the company decided they needed the dev. So they decided that slowing down a developer for a day to work with a candidate _is_ beneficial to the company.

Plus, like others have said, it really sounds like he was being asked to work on something that was adding value. If a company has decided a particular bug or feature is worth prioritizing then it obviously has value. That means that if a potential candidate comes in and does it, they are adding value (though whether the net value is positive or negative varies case by case).

I think you're generally being rather kind on the not-yet-employer here, but I have one specific point: giving up a whole day of your labour for free for every interview is not a sustainable strategy.

I don't know what the average number of interviews is prior to taking a new position, but if they all last a day, that is a lot of work for each applicant to do without getting paid, and it's a lot of work from a lot of applicants that the prospective employer gets for free.

Everyone is taking a risk going through a recruitment process, but typically it's already stacked heavily in the prospective employer's favour as they set the terms of the interview and generally it's held at their choice of venue, using their preferred facilities, and with minimal overhead for their existing staff.

Throwing in working for free on the prospective employer's real project, and IMHO this tips from unbalanced to downright insulting. If you want to hire a professional, give them some professional courtesy and treat them as such.

(I would almost certainly have ended the interview in that situation as well, though perhaps not with quite the same choice of words. But then this sort of one-sided relationship is why I choose not to work for anyone as an employee any more and instead run my own businesses, so I do have a well-established bias here.)

Hmm, obviously had something to get off my chest there. But interviews can go 2-3 rounds on the phone alone, 1 day or more on technical, and then more to actually talk to the team. It works for some companies because they have a steady stream of people that want to work for "Google" or whoever. Then everyone w/o the reputation of Google decide they should be like Google, follow suit, and you have the current madness.

There is the fact that a bad hire is extremely expensive, and it makes sense to be careful. But what working, skilled person has the time for such impersonal, multi-day efforts? When I put my resume on the street I had multiple inquiries from Yahoo, Amazon, Google, not to mention a bunch of smaller players. Just dealing with the proposed phone interviews would be a full time job, and I'd have to take a month off to go interview with them just to make an informed decision (why take the first job that comes along).

Something is seriously broken. So long as it is possible for me I'm not going to play the game, and do it the old school way - connections, people that know my work, and so on. But the trouble is, your connection ends up at a big company, and they are powerless to stop the HR/"best practices" juggernaut.

I've been lately thinking that perhaps we'd be better off with a more fluid style of hiring, say something involving real probation periods after which both parties assess how things are going and decide whether to continue. That approach is complicated, though, by the fact that on-boarding an employee is costly. Perhaps THAT's what we need to optimize.

Candidates are told up front about the probationary period and can back out if they want, but everybody who works there accepted it. It's amazing how many people make it through the hiring gauntlet (no matter how extensive, rigorous or complex she made it) and the completely bombed out during actual work.

Interestingly for the ones that don't work out, most of the time, the employees (I'm calling them that because that's what they are) opt to leave before the end of the probationary period. Nobody's upset about this because it's all handled professionally and sometimes people just don't work out.

However, the ones that make it past the probationary period are really really good employees. I think the average employment period with her company is around 5 years and while she's run the show they've had 99.999% up time in an industry that would probably get by just fine with an 80% up time.

You're right I'm talking more like 4-6 hours... but at that point you need to schedule the entire day for it so you can be on time, leave room for extra time to talk if the employer wants, etc.

So again, it's not that it is exactly 8 hours, but that it pretty much takes up a day.

"The applicant's concern is "will I really find a good fit in this company and advance my career here?""

Is a big deal too.

Wondering what the company is really like? You're going to get to work for a day with one of their devs, see what they're like, see their code base, their tools and processes, their standards.

Given that most companies oversell themselves (the old saying interview is like a seduction, a job is like a marriage), this would seem to me to be an amazing opportunity to find out if this is the right move.

Sure you want to be pretty certain before you commit this time, but so will the company - unless you're off the charts great it's likely they'll lose as much of their lead dev's time as he gets you up to speed as they'll gain from you - so as a final stage in a recruitment process that could lead to a long term commitment, it seems win win.

Or if you want to work on something that is yours, let's reimplement stuff you've done, but let's not take a whole day where I work and I don't get paid. Or ask me to build you features that go live, and I won't get paid and might not get the job...

There are better ways to achieve what the prospective employer is after, without getting me to spend 8 hours building features for your application with a risk that I will get nothing out of it, but you might.

If that makes sense?

It seems at least as likely you'll learn something material as I'd get working code out of you that the lead dev couldn't have written on his own given his better understanding of the problem domain.

I would say that if getting the opportunity to evaluate the company as a fit more substantially than a traditional interview isn't adequate compensation for the company getting to do the same for you, that's quite possibly a good sign to you and the company that you aren't really a good fit.

That isn't any logical grounds to assume I wouldn't be a good fit. That just means the ROI tells me it's not worth my time. Without seeing significant potential reward and a reasonable possibility of getting the job, and actually wanting it, there is no way I'd go in for more than a couple hours of coding without compensation.

You say that the ROI doesn't work for you, but the chances are those odds mean it doesn't work for the company either (we could invest the time and money in the interview and still not land you - that's always a possibility but here it sounds pretty likely).

In all honesty it sounds like the right thing in these situations isn't to pay money, it's to either find a more efficient way to work out whether it's a good match (so that a long interview was either unnecessary or something the candidate was willing to do) or for both parties to walk away and look for a better way to spend their time.

Just to be clear, it's not that I don't value the developers time, I absolutely do, it's just that I think handing over money in this situation (a) may work for the developer but doesn't for the company and (b) rather muddies the water.

If you need a painter, you may want to see a painter's work before you hire him to paint your house. Maybe his portfolio was fake? Maybe that client reference is actually his uncle? Maybe he's never done this type of project!

So hire him to paint the shed first. You can't ask someone to do that for free...

ETA: I'm referring to product integrity. Do you want a highly complex and specialized product developed, at least in part, by people whose total exposure & involvement lasted less than a day and had basically no incentive to do it right?

All I'm saying is I wouldn't care if my work ended up in their code base vs an open source code base, and I'd prefer it to just being wiped from the hard drive after I was done. In return I'd get something very valuable - insight into the working conditions, what it is like to work with the senior dev, what the code base looks like, what the build and QA system is like, and so on.

A whole day is unreasonable, but I'd jump at the chance to do what TFA describes as "free work" for an hour or so.

Jump at the chance to look at the codebase. A whole day coding, I get the concern there, but yes, otherwise, I urge you a thousand times, look at the codebase.

We would hog the candidate's time for half a day, but it was not half a day of production for us, it was also a lengthy team lunch at a restaurant, and a lot of talk.

If after the allotted time I still don't have a working dev environment, well, that job's not for me.

1) A great way to assess your technical chops is to watch you code.

2) A great way to see if you can do the actual work that you'll be expected to do on a day-to-day basis is to work on a real-world task on the team's actual codebase.

3) If you have what it takes, then it's crappy to have you "work for free" for a day. But if, after the day's over, it's clear that you don't have what it takes ... then have you really "worked for free"? (Remember, freelancers don't get paid unless they deliver.)

Here are some ways to address this problem:

1) Do paired programming on the actual codebase -- but on an old problem, the solution to which has already been implemented in production. This makes it clearer that the exercise is merely to assess your skills and not to get free labor out of you.

2) Pay all in-person interviews for their time. Once they've passed the phone screen and whatever other preliminary hurdles you've set up, you should feel pretty good that they're not just wasting your time. So compensate them.

3) If you don't have the budget to do #2, which -- let's face it -- is uncommon, then perhaps you could offer a signing bonus to anyone you end up hiring that essentially repays them for their time.

1. I totally agree with that. Yeah, watch someone code. Do a short hackathon. But not a day's worth. Seriously. 2. Using the actual codebase is fine but the interview starts to stink when the interviewer says "I gotta get this pushed live by the end of the day so let's get 'working'". It's not about "is he genuine?", it's about "that's a little weird, does he even want to interview?" 3. Here's an issue. What if you have 10 great people. I've been in a hiring process where it was DIFFICULT to find a person. So you get 10 days worth of free work and have to hire someone based on OTHER metrics. Be it budget, their demeanor, or whatever else.

Also, freelancers (same as contractors) get by the HOUR unless contractually provided otherwise. Meaning that it's not just about the deliverables. If I was doing freelance work on a big project, had a scope, I'd get paid by the hour. If the company cut me off (didn't let me finish), they would pay for that hourly work, not for what I delivered. Same with scope revisions and other stuff like that. Sometimes you even work for a company HOURLY, doing random work that they need done. Again, it's HOURLY.

Not if the freelancing contract has a kill-fee or partial payments upfront. Both of which are really good ideas, because they prevent clients from taking advantage of freelancers.

Also whatever the plan if the interview is going to be for more than a couple of hours let the interviewee know the rough plan in advance.

Comp time. You wasted a vacation day at your previous employer by "working" here so your official start date is Friday but don't bother coming in until Monday morning. Seems simple enough.

Or you come into work on your start date but I'm not giving you any work assignments of any sort for n+1 days where n is whatever is normal (zero?)

Or start on Monday but don't bother coming in the following Friday.

"freelancers don't get paid unless they deliver"

Well, depends. If you're having a clear deliverable I agree, if you're getting them for staying there and following the team, pay the person.

The assumption isn't that your code will be deployed at the end of the day, but that both side will get to see how the other works and you don't waste too much of anyone's time if it's not a good fit.

This problem exists in every field and for every kind of job. Nobody takes seriously the notion that a book-keeper candidate should do your accounting for a day to see if they should be hired, or have a contract manager negotiate a contract for a day for free, or a designer design for you for a day. So why are developers freed from this?

Because it's feasible for a developer to sit down in front of a terminal for a few hours and start hacking away?

Here's part of the problem from the candidate PoV

1) It's slave labor (obvious) and opens you up for a never ending series of small, but annoying lawsuits if you don't hire the candidates.

2) Candidate doesn't know if you're serious about hiring, or just doing a cattle call. There's a lot of reasons companies do this, but it's a practice used by some very well funded startups that wastes unbelievable amounts of people's time and is like a cancer in the industry.

3) Candidate likely has plenty of other irons in the fire, and your company isn't a special snowflake. If they're currently employed it's even worse as they have to figure out how to take time off of work to waste doing free work for somebody else. Now let's say they have to do this for the 20 companies they applied to, that's a month off of work!

4) Development on complex codebases is hard, most engineering companies don't really expect a new hire to be very productive on their codebase for a few months at best. It doesn't actually test them on their day-to-day as much as anybody might think, because their day-to-day job function will rapidly change over their first six months as they start to wrap their brains around the work.

What is appropriate?

1) Ask for a portfolio, open source projects, other work they've done, etc. Hopefully they have some kind of work history they can show off.

2) Irritating, but ask them to complete basic development tasks -- fizzbuzz is a good example. Surprisingly, most bad engineers will be stumped by surprisingly simple questions like "write a for loop" or "write a basic SQL query". If they pass that, ask more and more complex questions until they're at the level you need. You can usually figure out a candidate's skillset within 10 questions. But please, don't waste anybody's time with brain teasers and puzzles and other nonsense. Keep it focused and keep it real.

3) Actually have a conversation with the candidate. Plumb their knowledge. Ask them about various frameworks they've used, or languages they've experimented with or whatever. People who know their stuff can usually talk endlessly about their past experiences, people who don't can't and you end up with "well....C++ is nice, but Lisp is a great language!". Too many hiring processes forget this part of interviewing because it takes practice to get good at "interrogating". But it gets you so much soft information about a person as well.

4) With questionable candidates that you're 50-50 on, be open to offering probationary employment. 30-days, or 90-days or something. It must be well structured (weekly check-points, options to leave after the first 30 days, etc.), and you have to take it seriously. It's up-to the candidate if they want to take this or move on to other opportunities. If they move on, nobody's time was wasted. If they really need something right now and they take it, you have some exit valves if they stink, and if they're promising you can adjust final employment one-way or the other.

5) Something I hated at first, but have come around to a bit is the idea of a take-home problem they can work on at their leisure. Perhaps a problem that wouldn't take more than 2-4 hours to work on. Why is this different then having them hack on your code? Because you can make it not-your actual code, and can use it to concisely test exactly what you're looking for. Plus they're not taking time off of work to do this. They can spit-shine and polish their response as much as possible and really show off if they want.

I think that #3 is spot on. Most companies AREN'T that special snowflake. Just like I would not tolerate a company with ridiculous demands, I imagine a company would not tolerate me. I'm not a snowflake, neither are they. This is a business negotiation between two parties.

As far as "what is appropriate", you're spot on, too. I'd just like to add on some details per point from what I've seen:

1. you can easily tell when a project is just NOT theirs. I've heard of people (from hiring managers that interviewed them) that copy (not fork!) someone else's projects and slap their name on it. If you're a programmer, you should see these stick out. If you're still concerned, go talk to them about the project. You'll learn a lot about their knowledge.

2. Exactly. Just like you would not ask a mathematician to calculate if a train with thirty tons of coal is going at the speed of 70mph from NY to LA, and another train with sixty tons of radioactive material is going the opposite direction at 230 mph but accelerating at 3 mph...you know what I mean.

3. This is the best point. You'll quickly find if someone IS or IS NOT knowledgeable about a subject. Not just by talking about the "top article on HN!" or some brand new framework, but having a conversation about work, problems they've encountered and how they've solved them, how they like to work etc. You learn not just about the person but a lot about their experience.

4. i've never really seen probationary employment in practice but companies seem willing to do contract work or contract-to-full-time type deals. Sounds very similar

5. Spot on. I find these annoying however, because I've been in a situation where I had 3 projects like these to finish. All of them small 2-4 hour projects but all to do over the weekend. I guess it wasn't that much of a big deal in the end and I do prefer this to any other type of "test".

But to each his own.

Contract developers on a day rate very much do get paid time (and materials). If they can't afford a day of his time to figure out if they want him they shouldn't be interviewing him.

That's what I was thinking. Which is why I thought "uh oh" when the interviewer said they needed the features live later that day. So, not only does the coder get to do free work for the interviewer, there's time pressure as well. Sweet!

That depends on the freelancer. I charge a day rate.

And I've been asked this before, "We serve a million visitors a day, what kind of caching and optimizations would you implement to handle that type of traffic?" Completely fair question.

It's another to do that work.

1. There is a class of people who will not do algorithmic interviews, who think they are puzzles and not exactly what a programmer does on a day to day basis.

2. There is a class of people who think doing homework assignments makes no sense, especially if you have a full time job and this eats into your evenings.

3. There is another class of programmers who won't work on coding projects because you may potentially be exploited.

For a group of people with highly specialized skills (who get underpaid when compared to lawyers and doctors), we do tend to complain a lot.

I think people ought to stop artificially limiting themselves and trying to pick overly-precise categories for themselves. You think algorithmic interviews are puzzles? What exactly is wrong with sitting down and doing some puzzles? Puzzles are fun! Homework assignments are fun! Coding projects are fun! If an interviewer sat me down with a truck and some tools and handed me the maintenance manual and said to me, install a new fuel injector using these materials and we'll see how you do, I'd say, hell yes! Sounds like fun! Tests my ability to think and try something new, too.

So we can skip all the above and the developer in question can show you several medium to large web applications running in production, all written entirely by him, some combining to pay his rent, one having won its category (technical achievement) at SXSW.

"There. That's what I can do", he says. "And here's my hourly rate."

No complaining necessary. Get yourself provably good, and all this interview silliness goes away forever.

Pair programming on the other hand is an excellent way to evaluate how an employee deals with other developers and to get a feel for their quality of code.

Of course as many have suggested in other places in this thread you don't need to do new work. When interviewing candidates myself I like to find a feature/problem from the last 6 months that uses the core job skills I'm looking for and have them work through that. Using current development can feel like free work for them and often doesn't demonstrate the full range of skills you are looking for.

In tech, it feels that one's education and work experience is what gets you the interview. Then, it doesn't matter. I'm tired of hearing the old "developer with 10 years of work experience who can't do fizbuzz". Rather than a lack of competence, the issues are:

1) Most humans can only hold so much information in their head at a given time

2) Tech/dev tool updates move ridiculously fast. It seems they are moving faster as time goes on.

Here's an idea: hire smart people. Even if they don't know your particular stack. Here's another idea that will never happen: lets all agree to be tested for interviews in one tech platform (that'll happen when pigs fly). We dismiss these issues now because we are young and hip. Eventually, many of us will have kids who we want to spend with. That's when we'll be on the other side of the table and have our oh-shit moment. I guess I shouldn't complain about the inevitable.

This is also true for PhD students and research labs. Like if you are a C.S. PhD student interviewing at Microsoft Research or in an academic position, no one is going to ask you code up insertion sort. They look at your papers and evaluate you. I sometimes regret not doing a PhD for this very reason.

> Here's an idea: hire smart people. Even if they don't know your particular stack.

What the fuck does smart even mean anyway? How do you find out in the space of 5 one hour interviews if a person is smart or not?

1. If smart means problem solving ability, the way we test it now is a huge crock of shit because it is hard to abstract out domain specific elements from pure problem solving. I mean if you take any Math olympiad book, there are no pure problems beyond the puzzle level, most of them have a few tools of the trade that you can use. I remember someone posting here that IQ tests are illegal and probably not very good.

2. If smart means suave, sophisticated or looks like me (the accepted buzzword is "cultural fit"), it is going to not scale very well.

this has not been my experience, lab / academic jobs are a day of interviews which probably will not have any programming questions because you're hiring a scientist, not a staff programmer, but you will talk about research, ideas, and be expected to think and produce insights on the spot, and you as a candidate will give an hourlong talk. the decision is not made before you show up and the desires of the hiring body are very fickle.

Then we need to solve that problem, not bury our heads in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. When you post a job ad for a software development position, you should receive absolutely no applications from people incapable of fizzbuzz. Yet we the majority of applications we receive are from such people. That problem won't go away if we just say "well, you had a job before, so that's good enough for me!" and hire them.

However, it would take a developer 5 minutes to realize they can't code shit. They are good at other stuff ... sure ... and they shouldn't be applying for programmer jobs.

I think startups are trying to emulate the Google way of hiring and that is to their detriment. There used to be a time where Microsoft hired an MD/PhD to become a coder ... because he had raw intellectual horse power and a desire to learn. I know quite a few PhDs who would love to work for a startup. Most of them have gotten dejected after the interview process. The common complaint I hear is "interview made me think I'm going to be a code monkey. F that. I'll keep my cushy research job with a door on my office".

I've gathered there is a population of "developers" who refuse to demonstrate the ability to code at any stage of the interview process.

(The OP is definitely not part of that crowd, given his willingness to submit a pull req to some open source project.)

My current job, and every previous development job has clauses about outside development, and what internal hoops have to be jumped through. I'm compensated for that restriction, so I don't mind.

Even lacking those restrictions, contributing to open source projects just isn't really my thing, and my personal projects are just that -- personal, and are usually ugly, hacked together in a hurry and never revisited solutions to specific problems, not resume filler.

If you can't find some way to determine if I'm a good fit without looking at github, having me do unpaid work, or playing trivia games, you need to revise your hiring policies.

Why have we, as a group, allowed the creation of this requirement, official or otherwise, that we have a public portfolio of work we've done on our own time?

In the real world, some of us work on highly proprietary code bases, where putting any code up online could expose the risk of future lawsuits or prosecutions, certainly this has already happened to individuals in the industry.

Thankfully in the real world there are some sensible and mature interviewers who are able to look beyond the heinous crime of not having a Github presence.

For every one person who is great but can't publicize any of the good code they write, there are a lot of people who simply suck. Differentiating between them is expensive (read: hours interviewing the good candidate, many more hours interviewing bad candidates) which is why the people with a good github/bitbucket/ftp server full of code are at the top of my list. If they all bomb the interview, maybe I'll move down the list to the people who's skills are unknown.

This simple reality is why one should demand more money from employers who impose restrictions on what one does outside of work.

My point is that if having a github account becomes a silly barrier like having an education from top school, it kind of defeats the point of being fair whilst also acquiring good people.

As someone who is now interviewing for a new job. I've had three interviews this week ask pointed questions on github contributions including requests for me to change things on the spot ( or talk through a change that might occur).

Too broad a brush stroke there. The vast majority of software development does not require highly specialized skills and is more comparable to nurses and paralegals than doctors or lawyers. (Not trying to be disparaging here, either to nurses/paralegals or developers, just running with your analogy.)

I personally would never join a place still using CVS for source code management, even SVN is something I'd like to have a night of good sleep before accepting. Same for not having proper bug tracker systems.

Edit: Also, as the introduction to How Stuff Works will likely be done by a dev team member, this presents you with the ability to ask the dev guys how the job really is, and not what a clueless HR idiot tries to sell you.

If you're already employed, you're probably taking a day of vacation or sick time. So you're being paid. On the other hand, you're losing a day of vacation or sick time. This has been true for years and years (but that doesn't make it right).

Frankly I would seriously worry about trade secret exposure, and any restraint against "moonlighting" or competition by your current employer (some employers forbid working on open source as well). Working on live code puts both parties at risk here.

There are indeed companies where, if I had worked on their live code, I would never have worked there (one company was where I learned the phrase "train wreck").

Worse case, the HR guy is actually a decent IT guy (so that the IT-related questions in the interview are actually fair), but he has multiple different IT departments which each use different operations policies so he can't answer your detail question. Happens especially in bigger companies or, as I experienced, in government.

Why's that? SVN may not be fashionable, but it's centralised, has ACLs and a hook system.

edit: And if the SVN server goes down / messed up by someone, you're essentially forced to sit around and staring into the sky. With git, all you may have to do is fiddle a bit with merging if someone did a git push --force. And if the server is down, you still are able to work on your own.

It might be a warning sign as well. An organisation on svn might be an organisation that doesn't upgrade and is resistant to change.

A CCIE test has varied thru the ages but seems to have stabilized at an hour. I have no idea what an entry level dotcom would need with someone operating at that level, but it probably happens. The problem is at a CCIE lab test you're being evaluated by people more or less as good as you, but your average dotcom will be hiring you because you know more than them in a specific area not because they're smarter than you and they need to staff a team of underlings. probably. Maybe A / B teams or rotating pager duty with another CCIE. Maybe.

Look into the length of an oral PHD thesis defense. That's usually not a full day.

I would agree that in comparison to existing standards a full day is way too long.

If I'm looking at three places and each of them want me to sacrifice a day for the interview, that's a lot of my time, especially if I am currently employed.

Perhaps it would have gone better to politely explain why he could not / would not want to work an entire day for free. Also, an entire day? Since when are tests that long?

working during an interview isn't "for free" - both the interviewers and the interviewee are both taking a considerable cost in time which is a contract entered into by both parties for the best interest of both. The company spends a day also.

I see this from the other side far more often. Candidates that come in that claim to be able to code and yet when put on the spot can't do much of anything, wasting huge amounts of time and money. When I fly someone cross-country for an interview I don't go ranting online that I wasted that money.

I'm not sorry he can't find a job, he needs to grow up and stop whining and grok how this stuff actually works.

His tone is aggressive and completely self centred - imagine trying to have a meeting with him where he sticks stubbornly to his opinion, refusing to listen to other opinions and potentially throws tantrums whenever he doesn't get his own way.

Secondly, the fact he refuses to pair program with a developer on the existing code base ' to see how he works within a team / on code - suggests that he probably would equally be unlikely to do anything outside of what he is technically being paid for.

I'm not saying anyone should work for free, but sometimes you have to help out, whether it's working a bit later or helping during a crunch time. He comes across like he only would want to work on things that interest him, during the hours he's paid and then be out the door.

I think the company that was hiring did a good job of filtering him out.

All programmers expect (or should expect) to have some demonstration somehow/somewhere. OP offered to demonstrate his skills but the hiring person was locked into their way of doing things (our code, our way, your time). The problem with this particular company is that they expected a whole day (or that's how he paints it at least).

I know the start up way is to push for more, but if you are hiring a person to make sure they stay late and work unpaid time, you have a manpower problem, it isn't a problem with the individual.

The real problem is that companies far past the start up stage continue with this belief that it is the employees responsibility to work late for the companies mistakes, and yet when it comes to raise time try to fit you into a rigid and small benefits/pay increase. If there is supposed to be a give and take, where's the give?

"Technically" being paid for? There is absolutely no reason for anyone to do any commercial work unless being paid for. People are not slaves, they have their own lives and their own free time to do the stuff they want to do. To expect from anyone to work for free and complain when they refuse to is outrageous.

> I'm not saying anyone should work for free, but sometimes you have to help out, whether it's working a bit later or helping during a crunch time.

Yes, in fact that's exactly what you're saying--people should work for free. You're just calling it "helping out". The employee is not there to "help" you (do what? get rich?), they are there to do the job they're contractually being paid to do. If you need more work to be done, then arrange so. If you need free "helping out" feel free to call in your friends and family.

Part of being a developer is there's going to be some crap I can't shield you from as your manager, despite my best intentions. If I think you are going to suddenly turn barrack-room lawyer on me, or tell me it's not part of your job, or anything other than deal with it professionally and helpfully, you're a poor team fit.

And if you understand so little about how programming teams work, and think that you are going to - with no context of the codebase or problem space - significantly improve my Senior Developer's work such that you're worth your contracting day-rate for the interview (and are paranoid to think that the interview is a big scam to get you to work for free) ... you're probably delusional.

It didn't sound like the company was looking for the interviewee to improve on the Senior Developer's work, it sounded like they wanted the interviewee to develop new features for deployment in a pair with the lead developer. Not the same thing IMO.

Maybe the company wasn't trying to concoct a grand scam, but there are certainly companies out there that would think nothing of doing so. And even if the whole 'write some deployable features' for us exercise was not devised as a scam, it doesn't change the fact that it is a bit unreasonable to ask a job candidate to spend a day writing code for you.

The guy even offered to write code for an open source project but the interviewer refused. What does that say about the company?

Anyway, I think attitude plays a really important role here. A candidate might be able to recite Linux Kernel code by heart, but if he doesn't show commitment or a bit of flexibility, I would never get him on my team. I'm not talking here about an 8 hour long test run. I bet the guy could have negotiated it to 4 hours or something. I gave away 8 hours of trial work once (+ 3 hours spent talking to managers during the other stages) and I never felt bad about it. I really don't get what the problem is here, I was always really eager to show what I can and to impress. It's all about being competitive. We're not pealing potatoes, we're writing code. Show some passion for Christ's sake. Or find a job that makes you happy even when you're not getting paid. That's the kind of job you'd like to keep for the rest of your life.

> Secondly, the fact he refuses to pair program with a developer on the existing code base ' to see how he works within a team / on code - suggests that he probably would equally be unlikely to do anything outside of what he is technically being paid for.

I don't think that is the case at all, the guy offered to do some work on some open source code and the interviewer refused. It's not that he wasn't willing to pair program, he was unwilling to produce a day's worth of deployable code for free.

Programming is skilled labor, and doing skilled labor for free for a commercial interest devalues the profession. It's one thing for there to be occassional spikes in working hours, it's another thing to start out a relationship with the attitude of, 'You will do work that is valuable to me, but you will only get the chance of working for me in return'. That's what clueless people looking for programmers on Craigslist do.

Flip the situation around. Let's say the interviewee asked the company to provide a developer to spend a day developing an open source feature so he[the interviewee] could see the company's coding practices in action. What company would agree to that? Especially for multiple interviewees?

After the initial shock of excitement I realized the cost to fly me out there was much cheaper than they could hire a dev for. I actually thought it was a pretty ingenious way for for a startup to get cheap work while raising money.

As some people have already suggested I think there are some good ways to avoid having to do this while still getting an idea for the candidate. You can offer to pay for their time, you can have them reimplement a feature you already have, or as the article suggests work on an open source project that one of the parties are familiar with.

After a pretty standard interview one afternoon, I got asked if I'd be willing to come back in for a couple of days to see if I got on OK with their current team. They made it extremely clear that as they'd be taking up a couple of my days, they'd pay me pro-rata for them whether I got the job (and chose to take it) or not.

If you're interviewing with a company that actually cares about the happiness of their employees, then they tend to make this pretty obvious pretty quickly. I would suggest that the ones who make it obvious are the ones you want to be working for.

"This is meant to be to assess my competence. They're gambling your deadline on either being extremely sure that I am going to be good at this job, in which case they're trying to get a free day's work out of me. Or they're taking a worse gamble on someone they're not really sure of, in which case they have no respect for you and by extension their workers.

Either way, you shouldn't be using work that actually matters to test new entrants; in the former case it exploits me, in the latter case it abuses you. So, given it's clear I'm not a good cultural fit to this company, I'm going to have to decline."

Don't waste your time on an interview when you've got a tight deadline. Make some time for the interviewee.

The interviewer may also have had no other way that they felt they could evaluate a candidate effectively.

However in defence of the OP, if somebody asked me to work with them for a full day I would also want paying for my time.

The thing is - they PAY for each cover they commission whether they use it or not.

----

My career began in graphic design. Many people try to get you to submit work and only the winner gets paid (or paid in full). I've had other 'take home assignments' or interview tests that they tell me to block off half a day so they can 'see my work' to 'tell if I'm a good fit'.

Don't be fooled by any of it - good work != good workers, and it's much more valuable that they see how you work on their team than how well you perform in skills that can be taught.

I quickly made a simple rule: I do the work; I get paid.

@Hiring managers: If you want to see a sample of my work, and my past portfolio isn't good enough for you - pay me for a small freelance project before offering me a contract. It's low-risk, everybody gets paid and is happy, and if you don't like what you see, don't give me more work. It's very simple. Anything less is criminal (where I live).

@Devs: Only have two prices: Pro, and Pro Bono. Nothing in-between.

Pro means there's no such thing as family discount, or friend discount, or a 'deal' on things. If the person knows you and wants you to be successful in life the last thing they'll ask you to do is work for less profit. See those selfish people for what they are. You should be happy to pay full price for anything, and it just makes it better if you're able to support somebody you know while paying full price.

Pro bono means it's $0.00. You should always have at least one project on your table that you are donating your time back to the community. Ever use Firefox or Chrome? Linux? OS X? Android? You already understand the benefits of pro bono work in the open-source software community, but as a worker maybe there are ways you can give back to the community you live in as well. Find people who need your skill set and make a habit of learning new things while helping others.

If you don't do any pro bono work, it's easy to get caught in the 'discount delusion' and you end up trying to give up all your profit instead. Do pro bono, and then insist on the full (fair) price for everything else.

He could have easily made the same point with far more calm and eloquence - why the anger and the tone that at least to me comes across as extremely arrogant?

For the author, this is an unusually genuine opportunity to see what the work is actually going to be like.

If the author feels that compensation for this time is necessary, they ought to confirm the salary would be at a level to cover the time-cost and risk of interviewing.

Asking for money up-front is (unfortunately) sending a signal that you need to be compensated early because you expect not to be employed as a result of your work.

So I came away thinking this guy was a dick and probably difficult to work with, I wouldnt hire this guy even if he was the best developer Ive ever met.

That said, yes- the interview process is broken, there needs to be a better way to assess developers in the real world and not resort to trivia and "working for free". I think its been proposed here pretty often that a small short term contract is probably about the best way to be fair to both parties. The developer gets to show off what he/she is capable of, and doesn't have to give away IP for free. The company is protected by not having to make a judgement call based on how he/she answers programming trivia. The team gets to see how this person works and thinks about problems, especially if it is an in person interview.

FWIW, I did a free "starter project" for my current position and it was completely awesome. Worked with many teams, learned a few codebases, learned the metrics/logging systems, and learned the true size and formation of the production environment. A+++, would interview again.

That said: shipping code written by a person being interviewed is nonsense. Either the person was assigned completely menial tasks which doesn't evaluate their skill at all, or the manager is a complete nutjob that wants to ship features written by someone who has never seen the code before.

If the employer can't provide a person to pair with, and says you should spend an entire day coding features to go live immediately, it would actually seem like the employer believes interviews can be used as free labour. That idea is so stupid it is hopefully rare enough that it doesn't even deserve blogging/discussing. There are tons of useless interview procedures that actually deserve discussing.

But no, I wouldn't do it for a whole day.

Like many have said. One way to find out whether you like to work or not is whether the code looks interesting, how your co-workers work with you and what type of problems they are solving.

I'd grill the heck out of my pair partner. Interviews go both ways and I hope I'd be paired with a real live employee not future supvr. I would probably learn more about company culture from that guy in 5 minutes than I could from management in multiple hours of regular interview. Its worth it to me.

I'd also look at it like an intrusion, uh, experiment. How much can I learn about this place in a day. Not being sneaky about it at all. You're going to be exploring the dark corners of the environment once/if you're on the job as a regular employee, so start shining a flashlight in there today. Yeah yeah they said we'd implement feature XYZ and we are doing that but it doesn't mean I don't read the surrounding code and verbally grill mr pair partner about his firewall or DB or caching system or whatever semi-related stuff I can talk about. Thats interesting. I'll trade labor for "interesting" anytime.

Its a pair event. Maybe I'm just old but I'm assuming I'd pull off a partnership where I talk about architecture and the pair, if he approves, does the grunt work (and maybe he intentionally sticks errors in to see if I can grunt as well as he can). Yes I know thats not exactly traditional pair programming but then again this isn't pair programming, its an interview of both sides. On the other hand, if their idea of pair programming is some dude micromanages me while I do all the work, I agree with the original author, F that. We just don't have enough detail.

It kind of sounds like if I ran into this dude at a bar or a con and we started talking shop about life in the biz, we'd have a fun old time talking and then he'd surprise me by sending me a bill later.

If I show up for a short interview at 9am and they demand me sit around till 5pm they better be feeding and hydrating me, and not cheap mcdonalds either. This actually happened to me once, and everyone left happy and well fed and that's exactly how it should be. Maybe I'm a cheap date but I'll "work" for a day for a $200 steakhouse lunch. Not every day, duh, but...

Finally "if we decide to hire you, your salary starts today" sounds like a fair deal to me.

For example, when I write code, I write it in iterative drafts. I find that my train of thought breaks when someone points out a trivial piece of syntactically wrong code that I put in there as a filler for stuff that I am going to work on once I have finished iteration 1. I think of it more like solving a math problem where I sketch a picture and then gradually turn it into a sigma/lambda type proof. It is incredibly distracting if someone stops you in the middle of the picture and asks you how this has any connection to the final product.

The first company's test was similar to that which the OP describes. A manager gave me a list of company contacts and asked me to build an interface for sifting through it. It was a boring, tedious task that benefited the company, but wasn't particularly representative of my skills or knowledge.

Contrast that with the second firm, which gave me a coding challenge. They gave me a list of prompts, including interesting ones such as "Build your own A.I. algorithm that can interpret poker hands."

Not only was the second test more interesting and indicative of my skills, it made me respect the company a lot more. I ended up accepting a job with the second company because their creative interviewing approach made me more excited about their offer.

I thought this was completely fair, as I wasn't doing work for them but they were able to receive a fair assessment of my skills through more than, "Write a recursive function to calculate the factorial of a number"

Having an interviewee code on a live code base, whether or not they are being paid, is just a bad idea. They don't know anything about the code or architecture of the project, and aren't as invested in the product as the people actually working for the company are. What happens if the person writes some bad code that works? Do you throw it out? Will it slip through the cracks? What if they change something that was already coded that they don't know breaks something else? Do you not allow them access to the rest of the code base? The questions go on and on, just save yourself the trouble and don't do it. The fake application idea works great

Completely agree with the author, being asked to create potentially production-izable work is ethically wrong.

On the flip side, you learn a ton about how the engineering culture by looking at their codebase.

You're right you'd own full rights to your work. That doesn't make a difference though - you'd realistically never sue them.

Having someone, who is not an employee mess around in your codebase before they are hired is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Not worth it, and if you could convince me to come into your office for an interview and this is what awaits me I am leaving in no time.

What happens if you don't hire the guy and sell a 100,000 copies with his work product in there? Do you own the copyrights or have a license to it? Probably not, and if it was me coding then my lawyer would have a field day with you and your company.

So besides the insanity of not hiring a developer like you hire anyone else by references, reputation and limited work sample tests. Do you think you can tell some lawyer, please work on this case for 8 hours and then I will tell you if you get hired is going to go along with this? He will bill you 4000 chf for the pleasure and so would I.

In Europe you have probation periods, i.e. you hire someone and find out that they can't do the work you terminate them on the spot. Is that expensive, relatively yes. But if that happens you already screwed up weeks earlier and it is time to pay the piper.

This entire consult to hire, or whole day interviews just seems unacceptably unproductive and ethically as well as legally questionable.

I've come in as the new guy on a project and been greeted with a zip file of the code base (already out of date). It was complete with hard links to the main developers personal test database running on his machine.

If the same story had happened to a graphic designer then most would agree,as usual in that case, that you have to set limits and not work for free "just to see what you can do".

On the flip side, literally every interesting answer that you give folks in an interview process could potentially be considered to be free work. I used to work on recommendation systems. Say, I go interview at another company in the same space, literally any potential what-if machine learning problem can eventually get into the situation where it goes off text book fairly quickly. At that point, any information that I talk about has two values: 1) it helps the people understand that I can do this shit. 2) it also helps them maybe solve the problem based on my experiences from my previous job. In the case of 2), they are essentially getting free work. How do you resolve such a situation? Should we have an industry wide standard where people pay you a market rate for every hour you interview?

But I agree with the post. Very well written.

2. Otherwise, fuck you, hire me. I am available on a day rate for heavens sake. You can throw me a project that will tart up your site, improve your jenkins flow, add 100 test cases. Whatever.

This is a massively scalable approach, an the way you should be parcelling out work most of the time.

A day is a pretty unreasonable request. Maybe an hour would be more reasonable?

FWIW, I really like it when I can hack or even see their codebase upfront.

In fact I once passed on a job offer because they wouldn't let me see the code until I accepted.

(Of course, the idea of a day-long technical interview exercise is truly insane.)

So from that standpoint, validating the skill set using opensource tools would be the way to go. Having an outsider view and modify internal company code demonstrates poor judgement on the part of the interview, as that code is not her/his to just expose to anybody. I would be wary of even considering that role if interviewer is willing to expose their code without considering the legal and ethical consequences of that action.

Also, if you're going to require full-day interviews from your job candidates, it's not likely that someone who already has a job that they like will be interested in interviewing with your company. And if you're looking for highly qualified, experienced developers, they do already have jobs that your company is trying to lure them away from. You don't want to artificially limit your candidate pool to students and the unemployed.

http://hownottohireadeveloper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/no-im-g...

For high-pay, high-impact jobs, 8 hours of time to get through the hiring process is not unreasonable. My current job had a few hours of interviews even after they had narrowed the candidate pool down to just myself, to be sure I was a fit for the company culture. VP/C-level positions in large companies will put you through the ringer with multiple days worth of discussions.

I would gladly pair program for a day vs. 20 hours of interviews, tests, and other evaluations. One day, get it all done, and get a decision. Sounds great, especially if I had already set my day aside for the interview.

So my guess is that aside from the obvious attitude problems, this guy has never held a truly senior level position, because he clearly does not understand the time that goes into hiring. I highly doubt this company had 50 people pair program with them. This guy was probably their final candidate, and probably would have had a job offer by the end of the day if he had chosen to be cooperative.

This is not an interview.

The interviewer is focused on his "regular" job, not the candidate. Plus, the candidate can't possibly become fluent enough in the company's app/API/codebase to actually accomplish the task in a day.

Interfail.

On the other hand, it is reasonable to have a backup plan for situations where someone is adament about not working on your proprietary code for free. Any legal issues aside, as someone familiar with the existing code base, a lead should be able to conceive of a contrived scenario that closely maps to work that will be done on a day to day basis.

While I am personally an advocate for contributing to open source projects as part of a company's cultural, that is not something that all companies are okay with, or that all leads see as valuable. Without judging one way or another, this is another factor that should be considered for cultural fit.

And that said, it should be shorter than a day, but still, if they're hiring he's there because he wants the position, and this is an excellent test.

I recently did a full day of this and by the end I understood their whole stack, where the system failed, and managed to find a, "oh shit look at that... that's awful" part of the code.

I would take 4 hours in a potential employer's codebase in a heartbeat.

Most employment contracts have a "work for hire" clause with respect to copyright assignment. In contrast, most interviewees at most sign an NDA.

Why is it always a ping-pong table?

I don't get it. Pool tables are way more fun.

I do give a break if I'm charging in bulk (i.e. I have a really long term ongoing project with you and we negotiate a different rate).

I'm sorry, but I must respectfully disagree on a number of points. I think you make a number of flawed assumptions and miss some great opportunities when you pass up an interview that allows you to work in their code base.

1) Maybe this company was different, but as for me if I bring in an interviewee and say "Let's pair on some code for a day, and try to release a feature" I know up front this will be an up hill battle. Can you really say that you, an interviewee who has never seen the code base, will suddenly make amazing production grade code? I am absolutely sure that if I were to grab one of my other engineers, seasoned in my code base, I would get this task done in half the time. The point is, I am assessing you to see how you work with me, what your attitude is while we pair, what your contribution to the process is, and to a lesser extent how your code looks. Can I get this out of an open source project enhancement, maybe. But I can certainly get this out of my code base and it will cost me more than it will cost you in income.

2) You've missed the opportunity to look at my code base for a day. I can't name the number of times where I have walked into a company after a lovely interview experience and said to myself "I wish I had seen their code base, this is horrible". Your other blog post states you want to "test the company" before you take a job. Test them.

3) I won't discuss how low your day rate is, and how it establishes that you are an inexpensive engineer (that may have been what you were trying to get across) but I will discuss investment in future earnings. In my last few jobs I have received at least a 5 figure signing bonus, and generally a healthy pay raise (this is generally why I move companies). When I sit down to pair for an interview "for free" I don't think of it that way. I think of this as an investment into my future earnings. I am going to get a signing bonus from this "trendy startup, complete with ping pong table". I am going to get a healthy pay raise. It will equal far more than my day rate. You might say "But what if you have to do 5 or 10 of these interviews with companies before you get a job?" I often do! Getting a job is a numbers game. But I am still highly compensated for my time, just not right that moment. It is ok to defer payment. Investments can be quite rewarding. (Not to mention, money isn't everything. There are other reasons you may want to leave to another company. Account for that in your equation). If I interview with 10 companies and they all have me working on their code base, I hope they enjoy the one day of free work. I won't get paid by all of them. But I will not lose a dime of my own income in the end. I will make it back when one of those 10 companies hires me.

I understand from this blog that you would rather not be tested and that you would rather not work on a companies code base. But a company that wants to hire you, wants to hand you a pile of cash and a hefty salary and benefits, needs to assess you somehow. You also need to assess them. I think a day of pairing on their code base can easily tell you if you are a fit for them and they are a fit for you. In the case of this interview, maybe they very quickly figured out you are not for them.

Now, I agree with the blog post: if you want me to code at interview it has to be open source, pseudocode or a toy library. Not your production app. I don't want to see you proprietary code till I am hired in case some moron on your staff later goes on a spree suing people on an open source project where the code looks 'similar' to what they may have seen in your code-for-free cheapskate interview process.