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Comment by RangerScience | Hacker News Reader

I've been doing initial phone screens (small companies) this week (two just today, actually), and with all of them when the recruiter (internal or external) gets to the "we'd like to send you a coding challenge" I interject with: "Let's do a code exchange. I'll point you at some of my GH projects, and you send me some of your code".

So far they've accepted ("I'll forward it to the hiring manager"), and it's far too soon to see if this works... but I'm hoping.

The next step I'll be trying is "I'd like you to pay me for my time. If you're not comfortable with that yet, let's talk about what's involved in getting there."

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One approach I really like is a company that will vet you and decide you have promise, then decide to hire you on the spot for some small amount of contract work. "Ok, you seem great, let's commit to 40 hours of work from you on whatever schedule you want, and we'll see how that goes." This lets you squeeze that in on evenings and weekends if you want and not quit your current job. Costs them very little and is way more productive than a standard interview loop.

Oh, nice! I'll keep that mind and see when I can play it that way. Good suggestion!

Airtable requests a coding challenge and pays for your time. I was very impressed.

So does Weebly

I interviewed with a start-up mid-acquisition by Indeed and they paid me for my take-home project. Quality move but the rest of their behaviour was utterly reprehensible. I was mad/upset at the time but I'm now grateful.

Also, I had the time available to spend ~8-10 hours on a take-home project (paid or otherwise); most of the time the best candidates already have jobs and will rightfully tell you to pound sand.

I did a tedious take home assignment while employed for a different famous company - it was clear they hadn't updated the instructions (broken links, outdated documentation, changed behavior).

They gave this to me with a 72hr turn around requirement on a Monday morning (which I found a little thoughtless) I got a basic implementation working with reasonable code quality (not just hacked together) which took a few hours and then got turned down with no details.

In general this is worse than a regular phone screen when the instructions are bad and it's not really clear what they're looking for.

The worst is when the spec seems purposely vague (which is a reasonable part of the challenge), but there’s no channel provided to ask clarifying questions. CockroachDB was like this.

In my opinion this should be the only way things are done. And it does work it just depends on if the company gets OSS

Curious how they respond, but I like this angle.

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