Re:I will not hack on your codebase for free in an interview
by bane on Friday December 06, 2013 @02:27AM
(#6859918)
> 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.
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.