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Comment by nswanberg | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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