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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

The best "interview" I've ever had consisted of me spending an entire day hanging out with the team. We essentially pretended that that it was my first day working there. They asked me to keep coming back.

Even if they hadn't hired me I would have been happy to do it. It was enjoyable and I learned a lot of interesting stuff. I know some people would say it's unfair to ask this, but I really wish it would become the industry standard method.

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What I don't understand about this kind of time-intensive stuff is that everyone seems to think good programmers don't need another job, they already have one. As such, they tend to leave on their own terms and don't have periods of extended unemployment proportional to mediocre programmers.

Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but at least personally speaking, I always do my interviews with PTO and only quit after I get a job offer I like. I'd never burn PTO for something like that unless it was a truly extraordinary opportunity, and don't better programmers have enough options that they wouldn't have to do so?

Did they have you sign an NDA?

It seems like it'd be hard, using this tactic, to protect trade secrets in companies where that's important.

Secrecy always harms something else. Most obvious example is closed source being less convenient for users to work with when they have to peek inside (e.g. bugs in closed source drivers).

Also, I doubt any secret that can e leaned in a day is worth a lot.

I did not sign an NDA. Good point though. This company truly did have very sensitive IP to protect (unlike most companies IMHO). The CTO chaperoned me the entire day and made sure I didn't see/touch/hear anything too sensitive.

Facebook makes everyone who walks in the door sign an NDA, including visitors and people coming in for interviews. It literally takes 15 seconds to do.

Really? How can you read a legal document that quickly?

If I was signing something that could get me sued in the future, I'd make darn sure that I read it thoroughly before signing!

That's just common sense:)

You must spend a lot of time reading legal documents then. Damn near everything involves me signing something saying that I can either get sued or can't sue over something.

I don't think it's that many. This year I signed a new credit card contract, contract extension with my landlord, mobile phone contract, some online service direct debit signup and a car rental paperwork. That's it - and I read all of that. I'm not sure a typical person ever goes over 10 things to sign a year... It's not that many and it really pays off to read them before you sign.

Few people read contracts they sign any more. In most of our (U.S., at least) culture, people no longer view a contract as an agreement between party A and party B, but as a paperwork step that has to be signed as a formality. I think most people don't even read their own employment contracts; they just sign however many places it calls for and move on.

With EULAs and click-through "contracts" devaluing the term, the average person probably signs hundreds of contracts a year, and reads none of them.

I mostly agree with you, but I think it also depends on the types of contracts we're talking about. I definitely read all 20+ pages of my apartment lease before I signed it, but not a word of the iTunes EULA when upgrading it.

It's a half-page NDA. You can read it in about 2 minutes.

So it literally takes 15 seconds to do?

This works well as a second interview, in my experience (and yes, use an NDA). It's still helpful to have a first interview, specifically as a reality check to weed out people for whom the day would be a waste of everybody's time.

Did they phone-screen you before they asked you to come over? I can't imagine a company asking each of its candidates to come spend an entire day with them without a prior filtering of sorts..

I came recommended by someone inside the company, as almost everyone else there did.

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