Comment by nswanberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nswanberg | Hacker News Reader

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At this point in Jeff's company he is looking for someone who wants to get paid to work on Discourse, not simply have a job. Someone who wants that would not think much of following the easy instructions to get Discourse, install it, and be able to make a small contribution to the project (not sure about contributing but the download and install process is extremely easy and is sort of a fizz-buzz test in itself).

I don't know if this good advice for everyone looking to hire but it seems like filtering for both ability and motivation is a good idea for young, growing companies.

The problem with any discussion here on HN is that, judging by replies, many commenters feel insecure whenever an idea is proposed that they feel could exclude them from a job, even though typically these ideas do not spread, and most people need only one full-time job at a time (writing about interviewing has the same problem. See the first few paragraphs of http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...).

I agree that if every company started this practice in the same way, applying for five jobs at the same time while currently working at one would be difficult. But it seems very unlikely that would happen in practice.

True, but just because I want to get paid to work on Discourse doesn't mean I want it "simply to have a job." I already have one, remember? I would also love to get paid to work on any number of other projects, but that doesn't mean that I magically have a week worth of evenings available to work on your contract project.

I'm not upset at being excluded from a job at Discourse -- in fact, I'd probably exclude them from my search! Quite the opposite, my time is valuable to me.

Just because I can't take a week to work for you on a contract basis doesn't mean I lack motivation or ability. It just means I have priorities that don't include sitting in front of a computer screen 24/7. I may have a wife and kids, or I may be an Olympic runner, or I may be struggling to make ends meet with other contract work, or I may be taking care of a sick relative. Who knows?

All I'm really saying is that there's a happy medium here. Some way for you to give me a programming assignment, and for me to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. Offering to pay me just means that you want a LOT of my time -- time that I likely don't have to spare.

If I were a junior dev and desperate for work, then yeah, I'd make this a priority. But Jeff isn't talking about junior devs -- he's talking about the best. And the best already have jobs and don't need to prove anything to anyone.*

* (I'm not saying I'm one of the best*)

Are you concerned that every employer would begin do follow these practices and require auditions? How likely do you think that is?

Nah, not concerned at all. I'm just pointing out that auditions like this necessarily rule out a large subset of the population right off the bat. Maybe that's okay for your business objectives, maybe it's not. Maybe you're looking for "the best" and not qualifying "the best what." Maybe you're ruling out the best senior developers (who may not have time for this or have little to prove) and picking up the best junior developers (who may have spare time and everything to prove). Maybe that's acceptable to you. Or maybe that's exactly what you want.

I'm not saying "don't do it." I'm saying that from my perspective, I think it's a flawed interviewing technique and it's not something I would be interested in when applying for a job.

If it works for you, then by all means go for it. I'm just saying it doesn't work for me.

He's partners with Joel Spolsky, whose old article on hiring [1] set the stage for a lot of the modern hiring era. Even though almost all of the questions are considered unfashionable today, I think the gist of "find any excuse not to hire" still holds in a lot of people's minds. The more people you reject, the better your candidates are, right?

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html grep for "no hire" just to get a feel

Joel and Jeff are not partners in this venture; Discourse is Jeff alone.

The weirdest about Joel's method becoming the gold standard was that FogBugz around that time (I last used it around 2004) just wasn't that great. It was clunky, weird, and required a Windows server. It was served through a browser at a time when presenting GUIs through the browser was a slow and tedious string of refreshes.

Trello and StackOverflow are so much nicer now than FogBugz was then so I guess he hired better people. But I think a lot of his advice became vogue more because he was an entertaining writer than a great software entrepreneur.

The process of applying for a new job while you still have a current job will take time, no matter what the process looks like. The hiring company will want a series of interviews, and either a whiteboard, pair program, or code audition. A small project would perhaps take a little more time than these other methods, but should not take take that much longer, provided the hiring company has put some thought into what small projects they are giving to you to audition. If they pay you for your time, that is also respectful.

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