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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

> They have so many offers that writing code for 4-8 hours is just not going to work for them.

Yeah, I don't typically work for free either. Are you paying candidates for this time?

"Hey, I need you to come in and stock shelves for four hours, you know, just to see if you're a hidden gem for shelf stocking"

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I've told this story before here, but I actually did have a job interview for a company, where they had me work on site for four hours, doing "real" work, and they actually paid me. Granted, it was only like $35/hour, which is pretty low for an engineer in NYC, but it was still a welcome change of pace.

Usually companies that advertise paid interviews ghost the candidate in case of either unsuccessful interview or candidate opting for somebody else. OTOH if you want to work in some bleeding edge team that would catapult you to elite status, like AI autopilot at Tesla/SpaceX, you would be fine with an unpaid crazy project to pick you out/weed you out in the first phase.

Well, in this particular case they actually made me an offer, which I accepted but then they rescinded because I stupidly lied about having a degree.

I can't speak to any other companies, but at least this one did pay me, like they said they would.

On the other hand, I’ll spend 4-8 hours on a coding challenge for free. Give me an interesting problem and why not?

I was asked to write an AWS integration tool once, and I declined to proceed with the interview process, because I didn’t feel like spending hours learning the Amazon API and re-learning a language with a useful library (I’ve since come to appreciate Python and Boto3, even if I’d rather be Erlanging).

It also wasn’t a sufficiently interesting problem to make the time worthwhile.

Which, for the right job, can be a perfect example of the system working: the firm wants to hire someone super comfortable with AWS, for that person, the tool might just take 30 minutes to bang out, and so it works as a filter.

I think I'd only be willing to do that if I were unemployed. Otherwise I'm already collecting a paycheck for doing tens of hours of software development a week—the last thing I'm interested in doing is more of that, for free, on a project not of my choosing, so someone else will maybe start giving me a paycheck instead of whoever is now.

There are so many mid-tier companies in my mediocre city paying (for the area) absolutely stupid money and so desperate for developers that they wouldn't dare ask that much time of a promising candidate for fear of losing them to somewhere else. It is, to an incredible degree, a seller's market for software development. There are two whole different worlds of software interviewing, as far as I can tell, and outside of FAANG and friends the pay difference is just about non-existent so it's not worth putting up with humiliating or time-wasting games.

Yup. If a developer wants to have a FAANG company on their resume they're obviously going to have to jump through some hoops and do what's necessary. Non-FAANG companies are going to have to take what they can get and hope it works out because they aren't worth a long drawn-out hiring process.

Yeah, I can get a bunch of phone screens for opportunities with nearly no effort. If comp's high across the board and I have, say, three or four promising calls within 36hrs of flying my "I'm looking" flag, and one says "we'd like you to come in for a whole day for a half-dozen one-hour interviews" or "we'll give you a 4-hour coding challenge" and the others don't, guess which one's not getting a second conversation? And they know that, so most places aren't pulling that crap. Economy turns around, who knows, probably swing back the other way, but right now? No.

There might be people here interested in what area that is to scoop up some of that stupid money or get contracts. ;)

I certainly wouldn't say no to stupid money

I don't know where you live, maybe it is different there but the majority of jobs that I have worked - from stacking shelves to financial services - usually required a morning or afternoon in the office to see how everything works. If you are a developer or a mechanic, maybe this isn't necessary...but in a lot of service jobs it is very useful. I have chosen not to work places based on spending time there...nothing was wrong with that place, just a bad culture fit and it wouldn't have worked. It is definitely a very cheap way to derisk the decision if you are an employee.

I use the shelf stocking example because that's actually illegal in the US.

That argument falls apart utterly, since software writing requires you to demonstrate a vastly more technical and nuanced suite of skills than manual labor requiring a minor amount of mental overhead.

Hi, I need you to come in and work on proving Fermat's last theorem for four hours, just to see if you're a hidden gem.

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