> This works, but make sure they spend the 2 hours in your office and not 12 hours at home solving a 2 hour problem..
This goes against the core message of the article. The candidate is supposed to think about a problem on their own, and propose a well-reflected solution on Monday. That's pretty much the opposite of "sit down in this noisy corner in an unknown environment and give us something in two hours".
> The other problem is that when you pay them you generate all sorts of nightmaris legal liabilities.
If hiring a freelancer to do a little thing tends to generate all sorts of nightmarish legal liabilities, your company is either a government contractor or it has even bigger structural problems than hiring.
> If hiring a freelancer to do a little thing tends to generate all sorts of nightmarish legal liabilities, your company is either a government contractor or it has even bigger structural problems than hiring.
It might not be an issue for your company, but your candidate might have a non-compete (or other clause) preventing them from accepting compensation or even performing work for another company at all.
Any company trying to enforce such a non-compete against someone who just earned $200 would spend a lot more than that in legal fees. This feels like legal paranoia to me.
Furthermore, in German we have a saying: "Where there is no judge, there's no executioner". Maybe this attitude is more popular in Switzerland than in Germany, but the basic meaning is: don't sweat the legality of small exchanges that (a) don't affect anyone negatively and (b) aren't in some government agency's crosshair. That being said, your mileage in different legal systems may vary - in our civil law system it's probably more common for a judge to simply throw out such trifling matters and people are generally also way less inclined to start a lawsuit.
USA is kind of special regarding legality handling. An unhappy candidate my find legal arguments to complain. In Europe, states may be unhappy that work has been done without tax payment.
This payment looks like easy money for cheaters who would copy ready made solutions or ask friends for help. I'm not convinced, but this is indeed how things should be done in an ideal world.
I guess we could also ask candidates to pay. That is what is done in engineer schools in France. Not sure this is a good filtering method because of the Donner Kruger effect.
> In Europe, states may be unhappy that work has been done without tax payment.
Well, it's a good thing we have (now domestic only) banking secrecy in Switzerland, for exactly these reasons. You only get into trouble when your livelihood doesn't make sense from what you earn and own - as long as you pay what's generally considered a 'fair' amount of tax, no-one will blink an eye and come after your documentation. And even if for some reason the government finds out, all that will happen is a penalty tax ranging from 20 to 300% of the missed revenue, usually 100%. There is an explicit difference between tax fraud (document forgery, which could mean jail) and tax evasion (when you 'forgot' to declare something, which leads to above penalty.
Overall, the system is set up so that the government can't abuse its asymmetric power over individuals, instead keeping it as close as possible to an 'employee' of the people.
To me it feels like classic "A-ha! I discovered an edge case so the entire solution is invalid!". Just handle the edge case differently to how you handle everything else.
Then the candidate says something like "Well, you know, I can't take any payment before I'm out of this job. Can't I just do it for "free", and payment come as a bonus on hiring?"
It's a risk you take, or don't, it'll certainly depend on how compelling is the job.
But you are the one that placed yourself in a bad situation. They have a sane procedure that fully respects you, but isn't fine-tuned to your current problems. You can try negotiating their procedure too, but in their place (what I'm not, I'm in the "can't bill you" place right now), I'd refuse to.
There can be legal issues from the candidate's side too -- people on an H-1B visa in the US may not be able to accept payment for work outside of the company they've been hired by.
And also not very enforceable in some areas. I got legal advice on this from my own attorney some 20 years ago. I had created a piece of software on the side while working under a contract that said something similar. The software took off and I was worried about it. He advised me that worst case would be paying the company the money I earned while under that contract, but even that was a stretch.
This works, but make sure they spend the 2 hours in your office and not 12 hours at home solving a 2 hour problem..
Yes. And to make sure they don't cheat on it, maybe don't let them use a computer or the internet. A whiteboard ought to be enough. And just to be really sure, make them explain what they're doing in real time as they do it.
That will do quite well, and offer a wonderful alternative to the standard, awful, whiteboard coding interview.
>This works, but make sure they spend the 2 hours in your office and not 12 hours at home solving a 2 hour problem..
Did you read the article?
That's what the article author is saying not to do, they prefer to see a well worked solution after you define a particular technology, showing they are adaptable and have thought it through properly.
Limiting them to your office, timeboxed, advantages people who spit out lines of code quickly, which is definitely not the right fit for a huge amount of coding positions, especially when you are emphasising logical choices and design decisions.
It does add to the comment. It hopefully encourages people to actually read the article. People can not contribute to a discussion constructively if they do not read the subject of the discussion.
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I know it is in the guidelines. I am saying that I disagree with that guideline as it does not accomplish the goal the guidelines are intended to accomplish.
2 hour deadline and forcing the task to be done at the office turns it to a different kind test. This becomes more like how do you perform under stress and how well can you propose things out of your head. These are valuable skills as well, but I think having the weekend to spend with the problem more accurately models the actual development work.
Pressure comes in many forms. Certainly, being able to handle pressure is a good thing. But how often is it needed and what kind of pressure is it? What kind of relief have you got?
As I understand it, the more common form of pressure would come from having to deliver things in a tight schedule, and perhaps in certain kinds of meetings and presentations. Not from being forced to work in a foreign environment with foreign computers & tools and unknown people hanging around, watching and JUDGING you. If a company puts an engineer in the latter position very often, it might be doing something rather wrong. Whereas in the former situation, employers can find relief in at least having colleagues they are familiar with and an environment they're used to & comfortable with.
Your point is valid, although technically it would be under pressure as opposed to stress. The difference might seem minor but it's rather significant, and it's a characteristic many employers would intentionally want to measure. I highly recommend the book Performing Under Pressure, by Weisinger & Pawliw-Fry.
I was pretty happy to find this out recently. It was a non-tech person who brought it to my attention actually. It's definitely motivation to monetize some small projects I've had in mind for a while now.
What's the legal liability ? It's not illegal to do a small project for someone and get paid for it. If the interviewee is on a H1B or some visa like that then I can see some issues.
It varies a lot depending on where you are. In Australia, it's dead easy if the employee has a registered business number (ABN) to be able to contract as a 'sole trader', because they can just give you a tax invoice and declare the income separately when they do their tax return (it's just a separate section on the web form).
But probably only 10-20% of people will have set that up, and for people who don't have an ABN, you have to basically fill out all the forms you would to make them an employee (you need their tax file number, have to submit a form to the tax office, have to get their superannuation details so you can pay them the mandatory 9% additional retirement savings on top of what you pay them, etc.)...
Absolutely agree with the sentiment here. I have used this technique for a couple of years now, except that I kept the task to 20 minutes (and didn't pay people, since it's a short amount of time).
To save dragging people into an office for that time period, I set up a custom git server that marks the timestamps of their pulls and pushes. The instructions for the task are contained in the README of the repo, so as soon as they pull it they've started.
20 minutes is way too little for a meaningful programming task that's worth presenting to the other devs (and that's the really vital part of this method in my opinion).
I prefer to see what people write in their normal way of working when they're not under extreme time pressure.
The other problem is that when you pay them you generate all sorts of nightmaris legal liabilities.