Slashdot Mirror
One Company's Week-Long Interview Process
jfruh writes "What's the longest tech interview you've had to sit through — two hours? Eight? Ruby on Rails devs who want to work for Hashrocket need to travel to Florida and do pair-programming on real projects for a week before they can be hired. The upside is that you'll be put up in a beachfront condo for the week with your significant other; the downside is that you'll be doing real work for a week for little or no pay and no guarantee of a job slot."
Is that you're programming in Ruby on Rails...
Where do I send my significant other's resume? I can use a vacation.
The liability of hiring is being shifted onto the applicant. I hope they have a round of "normal" interviewing before they pack you up and make you live in shipping/receiving... erm... the companies "condo" for a week.
The longest for me is 5 hours but this is ridiculous. The only people that would be able to apply are people who are unemployed. As someone who has interviewed people for programming jobs, it really doesn't take more than 2 hours to figure out if someone is a good fit.
I've been through (and passed) a 2-day assessment centre before, when applying for my first "proper" job. That included exercises designed to simulate the work I'd be doing on appointment - but there's always going to be a degree of artificiality around exercises like that.
It's hugely important to get recruitment right, as a wrong call can have consequences that last months or years. We've all seen cases of the alleged saviour of the universe who gets recruited, only to turn out to be a mediocre employee who trundles along just above the point at which it's worth getting rid of him. Set against that, a week long scrutiny process like this has some merits.
The obvious downside is that by definition, it's pretty much limiting the pool of applicants to those not already in employment. People already working full time will likely struggle to vanish for a full week, particularly if they have family committments that place demands on their vacation time.
Violation of labor laws. This is illegal. They have people doing full time work for less than minimum wage. The fact that they call it an "interview" is hardly a reasonable distinction. I hope the idiots involved suck a nice 6 or 7 digit fine for this.
only to be told that I finished the project during the interview process and my services would no longer be needed. They then had the audacity to contact me months later to see if I wanted another go at working for them. Free labor is free labor, dont fall for it unless you REALLY need to.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's still just a language. It's not like the most common projects are in more enjoyable languages.
If you think about it. If you are currently at a job, you can get vacation pay, for that week, you get to see if the company is really a good fir for you. Also the company sees if you are a good fit for it.
Now if the company just doesn't hire people. Then there is a problem. Because they just found a way to get free labor. However I don't see that the case because it is really hard to do a lot of real work the first week.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I know somebody who did this, about 4 years ago.
The ironic thing -- or funny, I suppose, depending on your point of view -- is that Hashrocket did not hire him. He's one of the best programmers I know (I know a lot), and he was also quite familiar with their development process. He taught it in college.
I think it's a pretty good bet that Hashrocket made a mistake in his case. He went on to work for other prestigious companies.
This does seem to be one of he best ways to vet potential employees out there. The best way to see whether someone is a good fit for your company is to see what they can do; see how they can work, rather than ask them questions that don't really have anything to do with what the company is doing.
I'm guessing that most companies aren't going to want to spend the time and money to vet employees this thoroughly, though. But for a small company, it can be well worth it.
It wasn't enough that the position I was interviewing for was for someone who got promoted out of it. And I knew him (but not that I was interviewing for his job, until I got there) we of course hit it off, but his boss was the one that needed convincing. I get showed around, described the job, I take some tests, where I ace them, save for the questions that were either asked poorly or the answers wrong (2 out of 20) and we all agreed I was an exact match, and even slightly over-qualified. We got this feeling early on, but they continued to grill me through the full battery of people and tests. After 6 hours (We get a1/2hr for lunch)
We finish up, call the recruiter it looks good... They elect not to make an offer because I would be too good for the job. never mind the pay was better, the location was better, the industry was better and it was a topic I was very interested in.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This is absolute crap. They're getting free labor pretty much and most likely paying you absolutely nothing or next to nothing. I would contact the Better Business Bureau and the Department of Labor about this practice, this cannot be legal... unless you were stupid enough to sign something that says you waive all rights blah blah blah and consent to blah blah blah
We all have our preferences. If this were about PHP or Java or something, you would likely already have been modded as flamebait.
As a proud African, I am absolutely disgusted by this comment.
Seriously.
Not only are you stupid, you are working for a stupid company.
You are already bending over and taking it, before you are even employed. You are working hours you won't get paid for, and they already have the upper hand in this "relationship"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
House MD season 4 was mostly an extended "interview" with a crowd of medical folks.
I would have thought that this was FICTIONAL. (and at least DR House was decent enough to PAY them (until they got hit with ROW D YOUR FIRED!)).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
a 20-60 min interview over the phone isn't enough. People can talk a good game and sound intelligent when answering my open ended "How do you solve/approach this asynchronous timing window?" questions. You may have spent 10 years in the industry, but you may not have the right mix of skills to get tasks completed. Then I go and waste months training them up and they just don't work out.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Yeah, um, ya...
I'm stunned by the utter brilliance of your argument. Clearly, Ruby is a terrible programming language - can I subscribe to your newsletter?
this sounds like spec work. which is a big no-no for anyone with nothing to prove.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
but we pay them inflated contractor wages. For the most part, we don't hire anyone direct, but convert contractors to full-time.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Especially if its 1080 comped (food cable ect) so you don't have any expenses during that week. Still its slimy for them to do it this way.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Why are you feeding the troll?
Of COURSE this process is good for the company. They get an entire week of work for the cost of a beachfront condo they probably usually let executives use for free.
For the applicant, it's a really lousy deal, especially if they are not currently unemployed.
With one-week sprints.
...and people are still falling for it. This IS a scam, and it's been around for a long time (I ran into it in the late 80's). This is absolutely NOT on the up and up. They generally target unemployed programmers.
I had an interview for an out of city employer. It resulted in me being given a PAID two week contract to see if I'm worth hiring. I forget what it was I made, but I was paid $2000.
that $2000 was part of my moving expenses if I was hired, and if I was not, I still got $2000, because I signed a contract stating if I finished the work on time, I get $2000.
This seemed like a good way to do things and benefits both the company and myself. I get money, company gets proof I can not only code, but be professional (meetings on time, meeting deadlines, etc).
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Indeed. Ruby (the language) doesn't look too bad. (Although, personally, I'm not a big fan of chucking static typing out the window, but languages like Groovy and Python seem to make it work ok.)
Ruby on Rails is a giant stinking non-scalable piece of shit, though.
If it takes someone a week to figure out if their candidate is "the right fit" they're either doing it wrong or they're angling for free development work. Personally, I believe that anyone but a true PHB could figure out how inefficient is the latter case. So that leaves us with the former, in which case they're probably a bad bet as a prospective employer. Now, careful evaluation does need to be done, but if it can't be done in a day or two, tops, I'm suspicious.
...perpetual "working" interviews.
Never hire anyone, of course, so you never pay for salaries, FICA, health care, vacation, paycheck distribution...
Next step: require that the interviewee simply telecommute in with their own computer. Now you don't even have to worry about covering transportation costs, desk space, office supplies...
Genius, I tell ya. Evil genius, of course. But still.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
My current employer already has a problem getting otherwise bright & capable candidates to submit code samples against a simple problem that take experienced devs all of a couple of hours to do. They decide the hurdles to hire elsewhere are lower, and don't bother to finish our problem. Yeah, you might say maybe we don't want them, but the truth is that sometimes we do, and it takes a very long time to fill some of our positions since top talent has their pick of jobs. The core issue is that they don't generally know us as a company before the hire process begins, and therefore have no personal incentive to prefer us ahead of time. We aren't Google, we don't have Google's reputation, and we aren't going to become Google anytime soon.
A week sounds long... but honestly, every time I have started coding at a new company, it has taken me at least 2 (more often 4) weeks to learn my way around their code-base. I suspect the first few days would be lost learning their tools, coding style, and architecture (is the client data in Postgress or LDAP?, what persistence library are you using, and what's your pattern for using it? Same with you MVC structure.) Etc Etc.
IMHO full-time pair programming is a waste of a good developer or a shield for a bad developer. The only time I have seen it really work is for debugging or code review.
A week is nothing. When I went for the Marines, it turned out that the interview process was 3 months!!
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
I did a *three* week interview process at Menlo Innovations, in Ann Arbor Michigan, back in 2006. They paid about half of what I normally make. This was the third phase, after a 3-hour interview, and a 1-day interview.
I actually thought it was an *excellent* process. I learned a LOT, they learned a lot about me. It was a terrible fit, and I disagree vehemently with the overall way they work. (*Extreme* XP.) But based on what I learned, I feel like I should have paid them.
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
Unfortunately, as an African, you apparently haven't spent enough time on Slashdot to realize that almost no good ever comes from reading comments by Anonymous Cowards, and this place is full of filth when you browse at that level. (Of course, it's still full of assholes even if you exclude all the AC comments, but it's not quite as horrible.)
I interviewed with a consulting company. After 3 interviews, tech exam, etc. the final thing they wanted me to do was go to one of their client's sites and do something. (Don't remember exactly what now.) I respectfully declined to go to one of their customers. That was the last I heard from that company.
Bravo! You have made the beginning of my day!
The title of my next newsletter:
Ruby: A language designed by programmers for non-programmers
Then followed by these illustrious titles:
Ruby: Non-programming for Programmers
Ruby: Unprogramming what you've learned about Programming
Ruby: Lobotomy required
Ruby: Brainfuck for the masses
...to check out your s. other in a bathing suit.
Interesting how the bulk of employers looking for "web 2.0" programmers are legion. What a horrible, insane, crappy, language.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
should be part of a apprenticeship type learning as that can be a real 2 way street where people can find of if there a fit and people can pick up real skills on the job.
Now this is not an internship where they can make you do work that does not help you learn skills on the job and is tied to college.
Now tie some thing like this to a IT trade / tech school and you may have a good plan.
Guess I can't interview there. My contract has one of those wonderful 'all IP created during your time here belongs to the company' clauses. If I create it during my interview my current company still owns it. I've never worried about interview code before since it's all toy problems and junk code anyway, but if I was doing something commercial as part of an interview process there could be some nasty legal implications if they try to release it.
That company just does a lot of "Interviews" which translates into unpaid slave labor?
For the guys here, they'd need the company to provide a SO...
There's some strange discrepancies lately in Slashdot, both the stories and the comments. No Are we saying that no one can do the Six Degrees thing and come up with a Hashrocket Employee who tells us they're either full of it or else it's Shangri La? What we're clearly missing here is the other hald of the story. X person submits to this outrageous hire process, they get hired, ... and then what?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Why make them work on YOUR problem, unpaid? Just get them to submit some code they wrote to you.
--PM
ass, gas or grass no one gets my code for free.
Yeah, maybe, but it's all still Employer's Market strategy. They get even more brutal on the under-qualified side because sky help you if your last job was something like "creating AI models out of the movement patterns of muskrats" you'll never see that exact job again.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I wonder if that is some kind of reference to the obscure stoner flick "J-men Forever"...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080940/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-Men_Forever
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Because he read some place that African trolls are starving?
I do a lot of work in Ruby, too. I notice that lots of Ruby gems contain C code. Someone competent is writing that.
Language fascists aren't generally as good at programming as they think. They'd understand where interpretive languages make sense, if they were.
Bruce Perens.
Hashrocket was accused of doing some shady stuff in the past. I'm not sure what ever came of it though. But I do know there are a few professional groups in town that won't invite them back as guest presenters.
http://jacksonville.com/opinion/blog/401574/abel-harding/2010-07-02/jacksonville-executives-charged-425-million-mail-fraud
$2,000 for a 2 week "contract"?
A reasonable rate would have been more like $4,000 or more.
Or let's put it this way, you worked for less than $41,000/yr for those two weeks - $1,000/week = $50,000 /yr (2 wks vaca) less 20% for overhead-taxes-etc ... and that's running lean.
Unless, you're making less than $41,000 per year; which is possible since the bottom of programmer pay has fallen out.
Sorry, I can't take a week off my current position to "interview" for another. Can't do it.
The longest interview process that I've been through was planned to be about 6 hours. I left after 3. The company had failed **my** interview of them.
I was interviewing for a director level position, but when they sat me behind a Windows-PC in their testing lab, to see if I could code C, it quickly became clear that I wasn't a good fit. C was listed on my skills, but I hadn't coded pure C in years. I hadn't programmed on a Windows PC in years either. UNIX and C++ using very specific commercial toolsets was my most recent position. After about 15 minutes of reading the problems and looking at their testing setup, I knew it was a waste of their time and mine.
I'm sure the tester thought I was clueless. As I left, I told them they were looking for someone else to head of their UNIX development team.
Interviews are 2-way streets. Companies should never forget that. The actions that a company takes says much about you.
Remember that most of your stuff was cobbled together in a week by code monkeys of unknown skills and quality then passed on to the next code monkeys who never saw any of that stuff before.
I interviewed with Rackspace in San Antonio, meeting with 8 different people over the course of 3 hours. I then had to interview in Austin for over an hour with three other people, just to be told they were 'pursuing other applicants'.
It was not a pleasant experience.
Sounds like the company just wants a free week of work. Instead pay the job candidate like a normal employee. Then both parties would benefit. However I still don't see how anyone other than an unemployed person could participate in this "interview" format. So the company has (by accident) already ruled out the likely best group of candidates - those who are currently employed.
... this has some benefits.
1.) a trip to Florida, with expenses paid for you and Significant other.
2.) keeps up good programming skills
3.) it's not really free work if you're getting hotel and expenses.
4.) shows if your a good fit in a specific team environment
5.) may help encourage someone who's out of work to step up their skills for the current environment
6.) whenever an applicant is doing something productive, it helps keep the depression of being unemployed away from positive motivation for finding work.
There are some negative benefits
1.) being used for your programming skill for a measly week in Florida.
2.) not getting the job after a full week of hard work can send an applicant into a tailspin of depression thinking that they aren't good at what they do.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Over a decade ago, I did something like this for a company outside of Akron, OH. It was a two-day evaluation to implement a solution to a typical problem. It was an already solved problem, so I wasn't doing free work for them.
The first day started out Ok - hand-shaking, overview, etc - but I wasn't exactly blown away by the working conditions; kind-of dingy. Later in the afternoon - still first day - I needed a printout. My "mentor" tried this and that to get his printer working and eventually resorted to literally banging on the thing.
Never got to day 2. Shortly after the printer incident, I said I didn't think I'd want to work there, after all. I mean, if something easy like a printout is that difficult, what would it be like for the harder things?
What have Africans ever given the world?
Homo sapiens? That's good enough for me.
Ezekiel 23:20
I work in broadcasting. A company essentially wanted to 'try me out'. They flew my entire family (4) from Boston to Oregon, put us up in a Holiday Inn resort (upscale from the usual HI), rented me a car and gave me 50 dollars a day for food. I had to work 8:30 - 4:30 for ten days for free. On the last day they offered me a job. I almost took it, but decided to go to Los Angeles at the last minute. Unfortunately, I burned a bridge with them.
Just 500 job applicants more, and the product will be finished.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
This is about egos. The Rails ecosystem is rife with developers who think they are gods. They surround themselves with people who have similar inflated egos, further reinforcing their group behaviors. It probably has something to do with DHH being the leader, in stark contrast to the humble Matz who really made it all possible with the elegant, powerful language.
I've been a Rails dev for 5 years, and I've encountered way too much of this during the times I've been looking for work. The irony is, many of these guys (and they're almost all guys) are so rabid that they cannot consider anything other than pair, TDD, Rails, mostly Mac, and Github. "Show us your Github!"
We need a term for these guys, something on par with "brogrammer" but specific to their unique, incestuous behaviors.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Here's a couple. One the company's fault, one a headhunter's.
1. While laid off, I had signed up with a headhunter. I had told them flat out... "I don't know DB, I can't do DB, don't bother with DB jobs." So they send me out for an interview. Guess what. Within 3 minutes, I'm apologizing to the hiring manager, explaining that the headhunter messed up.
2. Went for an interview with a major defense contractor (who shall remain nameless). Showed up at 8:30 on Wednesday (note the day). I interviewed with about 4 or 5 people, and left at about 12:30 (note the time). I had thought it went rather well, and nobody had given me any indication otherwise. THE VERY NEXT DAY (Thursday), I got the rejection letter via USPS Snail Mail. The letter was postmarked at 3:30 on Wednesday, which meant one of two things. Either I sucked so horribly that someone had to RUN to the mail room to get that letter out in that day's mail, or they already had hired someone and were just jerking me around.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
They probably just call it an "internship."
Captcha: Pretend.
There are federal labor laws for internships too. http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
This would not meet the qualifications for being an unpaid internship ... and both DOL and IRS can separately nail a company for that. Likely their lawyers set it up so the beachfront property rental is denoted to be the agreed compensation.
In which case these interviewees will get a 1099 at the end of the year and pay taxes for having gone to the interview.
I'd work free for three weeks to avoid having to live in Florida.
My interview for the mobile Safari browser team was an all-day interview. My advice to anyone about to go for that kind of interview is to eat well beforehand and bring your own food, too. Even though I'd already eaten as "insurance" (I was told that the interview would start with breakfast) I was failing really simple problems by 2:00 PM, even one's that I'd answered in front of classrooms. Maybe they wanted the candidate who would demand food but I was unemployed at the time and didn't feel comfortable demanding anything. I wound up working on a similar team at a different company.
Um, obviously they have not gotten the memo about the fierce hiring frenzy going on. If you have half decent skills, and are willing to move to a high-tech hub like SF or Boston, companies are fighting in the streets over you. Who in their right mind would program for free for a week as part of an interview? This company seems to think it's 2008 again, and that job applicants are banging down their doors.
Institutional overthinking. Sounds like they are afraid to make decisions. How about they have a one day interview and then hire the best candidate with a 30 day probationary period policy. Seems cheaper (than paying for a buddy programmer and lodging) and just as risk mitigating.
Where does Ebola rank on your list?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because Florida has very poor labor laws.. In most good states, there's no such thing as "working for free".
I don't mess around with shops that like to waste my time with crazy interview processes. At the end of the day most shops are near close to equal when it comes to environment, job and pay. By the time someone asks me for a second interview it is too late, I am hired.
Got Code?
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't even consider interviewing with them unless they paid significantly more then I make now. Why would I want to go through all that hell, for a whole week ... when there are TONS of developer jobs out there.
Don't believe me ? Look at the bay area, so many damn developer jobs is scary.
I bet these guys are always interviewing.
Don't you guys have trial periods in US? Like for the first month each party can terminate contract without any notice.
Absolutely ridiculous!
Here's a quote from the article: A small number of candidates decline to audition and, naturally, getting a week off of one’s current job to travel and audition can also be an issue. But those who decline to audition probably wouldn’t have been a good fit anyways. “If someone is going to go through this, they want to work for Hashrocket,” said Elliott.
If this was NASA or CERN or something similar then ok. Some people really, really, really do want to work for them. But Hashrocket? One of hundreds, if not thousands, of whogivesashit noname web consultancy shops?
I just spend a month and a half interviewing -- 9 interviews. 5 on the phone, and 4 in person.
This is just a scam to get a week's worth of unpaid labor. I'm sure it violates a lot of laws.
Might as well have a month long interview.
There's always Node.js, which scales better for distributed systems.