Back in 2000, I had an in-person interview at a very small b2b website. They'd been using overseas contractors (zero local technical people) and the founder/interviewer barely knew a thing about computers. He didn't know how to run a technical interview, so he sat me down at a computer, logged in as root on prod (lol the only server), and pointed me at a couple of bugs. I knocked them out lickety-split and was hired on the spot. The world sure has changed

I'm making it like that again. I'm back down with the blue collar proles in Mountain View, landscaping and moving and waiting tables and the like. That's how things work outside of speculation... employer has a business where they get paid, and they outsource their own functions. I'll never run an engineering org like Silicon Valley again, it's so broken in delivering results as a result of the speculative nature. I have a project website up serving two cities. We use Clojure and static generation, and operate and maintain IT like an old tractor. I train my replacements to keep myself available and customers getting a good price (minimum wage). It lets people start their career with hands-on work. It's in BigTech's interest to make us think tech is hard, but I'm using most of the same stuff as I did when I was 14 and self-taught 20 years ago, and it's gotten far far simpler and better.

I'm in high tech and dying. This is making me feel nostalgic and thinking... maybe taking 3 steps back would be 10 steps forward in terms of my mental health.

Nothing has really changed since then. That scenario still exists. We acquire tons of companies that have the equivalent of what you're describing.

Every company I see "really would like" to fully automate their build/test/deploy pipeline, to actually have automated tests for most new features, infra as code is a work in progress, et c. Basically most of the Joel-test or modern HN-bubble best practices are still on the wishlist or on a perpetual "we're trying to make that happen" an awful lot of places.

And they are all, all, "fixing their Jira workflows". Constantly. What a time-sink of a tool, as commonly used. I'm convinced at this point they'd be better off letting their dev teams use whatever, and just have human-driven processes for collecting all the (mostly meaningless) metrics they always seem to need to report upward, rather than trying to make one tool do everything automatically. Pretty sure Jira and other heavy PM tools are typically the sort of software/process that Graeber calls out in Bullshit Jobs: adding a ton of work out of proportion with any real benefit, to make everything fit in a computer and on a spreadsheet, rather than reducing work.

I had that type of "interview" 10 years ago. I got the job. It was the worst job I've ever had outside of being a grad student.

It's great if you do it as long as you pay for it. I was doing a 1 week payed interview at Coinbase. I was not hired, but my memories of the interview process are great.

This sort of thing mostly works fine for students and similar. (And internships are often great for everyone concerned.) But this doesn't really work for someone who already is working full-time. Some pay is fine but there's no way I'm taking a week of vacation to interview with you.

At our place we reserve coding tests for applicants on the more junior end of the spectrum. I've always found conversational interviews sufficient for vetting mid to senior level developers.

We do pay a good rate for the time we instruct people to spend on the coding test. We value our people and prefer starting the relationship generously and in good faith.

Also keep in mind that many tech companies have anti-moonlighting clauses or otherwise forbid side projects. You’re losing current employees from these companies from the interview funnel.

I'm sure a lot of folks take the attitude that it only matters if you get caught. However, unless perhaps I already had one foot out the door, I'd be very hesitant to flagrantly violate an employment agreement forbidding such things to accept a relatively modest payment for some outside work.

I understand it, I wasn't a student, but I didn't have a job at that point (I quit 2 years before to travel the world and had some contracting jobs).

The good part is that it was the last step, and 50% of the people from the last step were given an offer, so it wasn't that bad (though I'm afraid that the offer itself was maybe too low compared to my previous works).

I've just completed an interview process (waiting for the decision) that was explicitly "this is a real problem we have", but also stating that I'll be paid for 8 hours work. I have no problem with that. It took about that long as well.

So I suppose if you're honest about it, and you give a fair estimate of the time required, then what's the problem?

I still disagree with that. are you being paid 8 hours at a pro-rated salaried rate? Well you're going to have to report that as income and take a 30% haircut off it. There's a reason contractors get 30% or more above the hourly-equivalent of a salaried employee.

A bit more than just 30% - for a short contract id want 3x my FTE rate.

Our interviews have consisted of something similar, but never in a way that produces actual usable work. We've had candidates "add features" to code, except the code in question was in a language they don't know. So they didn't write anything. We have them tackle past PRs for bugs that have already been fixed. And we've had them do design work for systems/processes we've already built.

We're not evaluating them on whether they got the same answer as us. We care about hearing aloud their thought processes.

What's the copyright situation in America anyway? I can't see company lawyers over here be comfortable with using code written outside formal employment.

Code is copy-written by default. So unless the company has you specifically license the code in a way they can use, there's defiantly some room to go after them.

A game studio I worked at had a blanket policy of destroying all fan fiction. And story plots we were sent just because someone had previously sued for stealing their idea.

Means a lot of letters from kids get read only by the secretary till the identify it and destroyed.