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Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

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Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#451

Post by drawkbox »

ghaff wrote: post #405
drawkbox wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contract to hire is the way to go, even if a short time. Most jobs are like that anyways, the first weeks/months are still part of the hiring process. This tests the worker in the actual environment. The contract could even be remote and sectioned off from the larger enterprise, just like any contractors added currently. The important part of contract-to-hire is it shows how the person will communicate while working,…

>Most jobs are like that anyways The difference is in the presumed defaults. If you hire me, my assumption is that outside of company/organizational problems/changed of some sort, you'll keep me around so long as I'm reasonably competent. Contract to hire on the other hand , sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us. Which, if someone already has a job or has other good offers in hand, is not going to…

> sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us

Same with interviewing/take-home/whiteboard. It is just a better realistic view of the company. It not only makes it a "wow us" for the worker to the workplace, it is also the workplace to the worker. It is a two way street with a more realistic sample. It also reduces the friction of locked in employment.

Creative/programming/product/design are all creative fields, most projects/products like that have more flex/contractor style arrangements based on projects/products not necessarily the company such as movies, music, books, etc. Most of my career has been in games/interactive/agency style projects/products so it may make more sense there.

You can't judge creativity and product shipping capabilities with a take-home/whiteboard/interview very well. The sample is much smaller. The better way is the body of work and a real test that is longer or closer to the actual work and timeframes.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#452

Post by diek00 »

A few weeks back I was sent a home assignment by a company and it was a full blown production level program. If someone asked me to do it, I would charge them a minimum of $10,000. And it required I pay for an API, complete testing, caching, Dockerized, and a laundry list of other requirements. And it certainly would take a lot longer than a few hours.

The most reasonable company I have dealt with was Trip Ninja, an Amazon gift card for my time. Regrettably I tripped up, and messed up the test, timed tests are my Achilles heel.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#453

Post by zelphirkalt »

bambax wrote: post #152
jerf wrote: post #76

According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complain…

The problem with tech recruiting is that each company does its own, and so job seekers repeat the process many times with different employers. There should be some kind of test that would be recognized by the industry, that you could attempt once every six months for example, and that would positively assess your ability to code. You would get a score that you could show to recruiters (if you wished to). Some recruit…

But what would that test contain?

If I go by mainstream, then I guess it would contain some coding task, where you might have to solve algorithm stuff, that you will probably never encounter on the job, or some fake OOP "everything is a class" or "I must use [hot web framework of the month] for trivial things" kind of thing. None of that really tells much about a devs true skill.

I think the problem might be, that jobs are so divers as developer. For some jobs maybe the hot web framework of the month is really all you need to know, while other jobs might require you to think about how a system needs to be redesigned to run on some kind of multi server environment.

I guess there could be multiple such tests, for each area of expertise one. It would for sure be a lot of work to put them together. One would also need rotating problem sets or questions.

Also: Who is going to create these tests? I hope the idea is not big tech or some kind of government participation. Big tech would quickly make it a filter for only themselves, making their tech stacks assumed knowledge in the tests, and government would probably come up with something hopelessly backward like testing your Cobol skills or demanding you write an HTML 4 website, while you have gotten used to more semantic HTML 5 years ago.

I think it is a nice idea, but there are many questions about how it could be usefully implemented.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#454

Post by fsloth »

edanm wrote: post #450
fsloth wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally companies succeed in hiring by filtering resumes and interviewing candidates. That's it. It's weird if a company feels it needs to do more than that. Companies either have trial periods or can let go of non-performing personnel. Hiring is critical but I've not seen any study that would correlate "high scores" in any type of hiring test to actual work performance. This implies no matter how elaborate intervi…

> Hiring is critical but I've not seen any study that would correlate "high scores" in any type of hiring test to actual work performance. There definitely are such studies. I don't have citations here, but it's well known that IQ tests or work-sample tasks are both the most effective at predicting on job performance.

As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong) IQ tests work as a predictor for a population not for individuals.

I.e. if you prefer IQ in your job application process, you will get a more performative workforce.

However, with point samples it's not a very good benchmark. I.e. if you are comparing fairly strong candidates A and B, just preferring the one with the higher IQ is not necessarily the best option. So, getting the best hire for a specific position, and getting the most statistically best workforce are not necessarily the same thing.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#455

Post by ghaff »

drawkbox wrote: post #451
ghaff wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most jobs are like that anyways The difference is in the presumed defaults. If you hire me, my assumption is that outside of company/organizational problems/changed of some sort, you'll keep me around so long as I'm reasonably competent. Contract to hire on the other hand , sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us. Which, if someone already has a job or has other good offers in hand, is not going to…

> sends off a vibe of we'll probably hire you if you wow us Same with interviewing/take-home/whiteboard. It is just a better realistic view of the company. It not only makes it a "wow us" for the worker to the workplace, it is also the workplace to the worker. It is a two way street with a more realistic sample. It also reduces the friction of locked in employment. Creative/programming/product/design are all creative…

Programming is no more a creative field than other branches of engineering or the sciences--and in fact many white collar professional jobs. The sort of exceptionalism that gets attached to software is pretty ridiculous.

And yes there are agencies and consultants for all sorts of specialized work on a project basis. But that's not the majority of software and I'd guess the majority of programmers/software engineers don't want to be constantly looking for work especially if demand lets up.

Obviously, some things like games lend themselves to more of a project-based approach to staffing than other things do. (And certain other engineering projects do as well.)

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#456

Post by em-bee »

dragonwriter wrote: post #345
sarchertech wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pass the bar 1 time. Not every couple years.

> You pass the bar 1 time. Not every couple years. You maintain a current law license, which requires having passed the bar once, continuing education requirements, and the absence of professional mal-, mis-, or non-feasance sufficient to lose that license. Taken together, the requirements are ongoing, though some individual elements are one-time.

you do that while you are on the job, and generally i expect that the time and cost for that is covered by the current employer.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#457

Post by warrenm »

kasey_junk wrote: post #146
warrenm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if it's done out of hours and on !work equipment

This is wrong in the jurisdiction I live in (Illinois) where an employment contract is allowed to state that outside work is not allowed. Most contracts I’ve had will actually state “without manager approval” but that’s just as bad in many instances. [later] Actually this became illegal in Illinois at the beginning of this year, though the protections don’t extend to clients or competitors.

The contract may state it

It's unenforceable, according to everyone I've interacted with in the state :)

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#458

Post by smugma »

sarchertech wrote: post #111
jerf wrote: post #76

According to the HN gestalt, you shouldn't do a whiteboard interview because that's too unrealistic because nobody programs on a whiteboard, you shouldn't expect programmers to code with their laptop in an interview because that's too much pressure and also unrealistic, you shouldn't expect programmers to be willing to do a take home exam because that's too much work without money (and if people did pay, the complain…

You’re setting up a gigantic straw man. There are camps on HN who dislike all of those things individually—you can’t just take the union of everything someone here dislikes and call it the HN gestalt. >do something unfun to get hired I don’t know of any other industry who hires senior people the way we do outside of performing arts. I personally don’t mind putting together a portfolio the way most other creative indu…

Having hired (and been hired) for both technical and non-technical roles, I personally prefer whiteboard coding interviews (or phone screens asking how they’d design X) to the more abstract business questions, both as an interviewer and interviewee.

Within a few minutes I can figure out if a candidate knows SQL better than I do (not that hard to do, basic joins maybe a HAVING clause) or if they took a class and forgot most of it and don’t know what it means to de-normalize data. I can do the same with Excel.

But I still don’t know how to effectively judge whether a candidate is effective at closing deals, what their work ethic is, how they actually support team members, are self-starters, etc. It’s much harder to do.

Technical fields have a huge advantage in being able to assess skills with objective criteria. It’s not perfect and interview anxiety is real, but it seems a lesser challenge than how business fields hire.

Re: Tell HN: Unpaid home assignments are not ok

#460

Post by CodeyWhizzBang »

criddell wrote: post #393
CodeyWhizzBang wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assignment is an assessment though, it isn't actual business work. I've seen before this suggestion that companies are trying to get free work out of candidates, but I find that really hard to believe. I don't know if you're suggesting that interviews should assign actual tickets in an interview, but that seems nearly impossible to do in practice. I've never got back work from an interview or assessment that was…

It's not actual business work but you are asking for actual time from the person's life. When it's an non-trivial amount of time, you should compensate them fairly.

This feels mad to me. Companies don't pay people to go through the application process to work for them.
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