Hacker News Reader

Comment by ronilan | Hacker News Reader

Employers should be required, by law, to compensate interviewees for their time at a rate equivalent to the job for which they are interviewing.

(Macdonald’s, Goldman Sachs, line cook, VP legal, same law, everyone, everywhere)

View on HN

Well then I would be a professional job candidate. I could easily fill my time with $300k+ job interviews that I can pass a phone screen for but am not fully qualified for.

First, good for you. Second, if the transfer of wealth from employers with 300k+ jobs to the public does not lead them to change their practices, than even better for you. Go get the money. But, for the vast majority of people and employers, your special case is irrelevant.

There exists a very inefficient, unbalanced social practice. Needs a regulatory nudge. Simple law. California goes first. The world follows. Onwards.

The interview process would certainly change as a result, so who knows if one could interview full time sustainably.

But I don't think it's a special case. Good software developers are by nature great at hacking systems and plenty of them would find it more profitable to keep interviewing rather than work a regular job.

If it does need a regulatory nudge, paying people to interview is the most naive way to do this.

“They say we offer naive answers to complex problems.”

Just paraphrasing something from my sons leadership project ;)

Google tells me you're misquoting Hucci lyrics.

I think you are misreading the SERP.

I seriously doubt that.

Thank you for the vote of confidence, but I'm a decent developer, not a $300k salary developer.

I mean, if you were paid market rates for interviews, you'd have to do a lot of interviews to net $300K.

I don't see how that is possible, ignoring the fact that doing that would be about as fun as gold farming on WoW circa 2007.

Never did I say I'd be making $300k per year. $100k a year to do three 5 hour interviews a week for $300k jobs? I would do that in a heartbeat.

Still highly unlikely. There are only a few cities that offer $300K jobs and they talk to each other. Most of them probably use just a handful of recruiting firms. Your name would get around. You could maybe change it, but I still doubt you'd get more than a few hours every few days, then it would dry up.

You'd have to interview about 12 hours a week (including Christmas and Thanksgiving), every week at only SV type companies and only for $300K jobs and pull it off for a year without getting caught before you hit $100K.

Highly unlikely.

Did you even try to play this out in your mind?

It would certainly force companies to actually read the resume in person before throwing out calls.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com