Hacker News Reader

Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Next level: You take interview vacations, where you work 3 days for every final company in your interview round. It’s an exchange: You check the cushions on the sofas of the HR ad, they check that you can actually take a bugfix to production.

Then they give you your real chair.

View on HN

Terrible next level, that's unpaid work and it's already a thing in interviewing at some unethical companies.

Nobody said unpaid.

Even so, it's probably not going to be super-effective, unless each workplace is willing to have enough useful small things that do not require knowing substantial chunks of the existing code base.

It is probably realistic to expect someone to write something useful (although possibly small) in three days. It is less realistic to expect someone to write a useful component integrated in a large system that they have to learn, in three days.

This doesn't have to be unpaid.

They need to be contrived bugs. Unpaid work is illegal in the US, and most other 'civilized' counries. Plus you don't want your competitors to send someone to interview just to look at your code.

He said "work", not "unpaid work". Pay that work.

>Unpaid work is illegal in the US

Is that actually true? It's probably uncommon in tech but I understand it's fairly common in creative fields and--while it was a long time ago--I worked a couple unpaid internships when I was in high school in chemistry labs.

The trick is it can't be work, only work like things of no value. You can have unpaid internships so long as you are getting training and not doing valuable work.

A railroad engineer intern can move cars around the yard all day, assembly trains, and other such things. However if they move the car to a loading dock where it is loaded/unloaded that is valuable work and must be paid. If the train they assembly leaves the yard for the next that is valuable work (unless they all make it back to this yard unused).

Most companies choose to pay interns rather than figure out how to not break the rules. A few have a separate intern program where they carefully figure out tasks to assign interns for training. If your intern program did valuable work you should talk to a lawyer.

Surely there is some economy of scale here, where a standardized first round interview'taking a bug fix to production' fits multiple companies. Noone should have to do more than one technical interview

Reply on news.ycombinator.com