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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."
"programming"
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.
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.
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.
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
I've been involved in a fair few hires for my previous employer, and it struck me that we *sucked* at making a fair assessment of the applicants' abilities. My experience at other firms have been no different, even though most do manage to weed out the obvious knuckledraggers or spot the shining genius. In contrast, observing someone at actual work for a week should give a far better insight in their abilities and soft skills. This is obviously of benefit to the employer, but also to the prospective employee. The only thing I'd hope is that the company already did a short assessment of the candidate to spot any obvious reasons why he/she woulnd't be hired, before asking them to commit for a week.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Completely untrue. Countless people have enjoyed, and do enjoy programming in PHP. I myself am one.
Yes, I recognize the language's many obvious (and many not-so-obvious) failings, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun using it. There are plenty of ways to write good PHP code (Zend standards/framework, for instance).
PHP's biggest problem aren't its (numerous) issues as a language. PHP's biggest problem are the 90%+ of the "PHP Programmers" who are abhorrently bad at programming in general, and think they're programmers simply because they wrote a little bit of HTML with embedded PHP, or installed Wordpress *shudder*.
Granted, I prefer Python to PHP any day of the week for both fun and function.... Never written any Ruby.
I don't see how this unpaid week-long stint is of any benefit at all to the employee. Sure, it'll help the employer avoid hiring poor performers or people who don't fit into the organization, but what does the employee get out of it? The only benefit for the employee I see is if the candidate is going to have to make a long-distance move to take the job; moving (esp. from out-of-state) incurs significant costs, which can take a while to earn back in paychecks. However, this is really something the employee should consider themselves; it's frequently a good idea to just rent a room or efficiency short-term while you're in your "probationary period" with such a new job, so if it doesn't work out (which could be for all kinds of reasons, not just poor performance on your part; maybe the coworkers are assholes or you find the city to be a cesspool and didn't realize until you had to live there for a while), you can quit the job and go back home without losing much, but still retaining the pay you earned. This goes double if the employer isn't giving you any relocation bonus (which is probably usually the case these days; these used to be common 10+ years ago, but not any more unfortunately).
I think this week-long interview thing is a pile of crap really. They're getting a week of free work out of the candidate in exchange for nothing besides the cost of renting this condo (which they've probably rented long-term to save on costs, and they just stick a new candidate in it every week) and airfare, and the candidate walks away with nothing if he doesn't get the job, except for week in a beachfront condo which isn't all that great when you have to spend all day at the workplace, and not at the condo. The candidate's significant other might be getting a good deal here, but only if they had nothing better to do than spend a week on the beach while their SO was interviewing; if they have their own job or don't want to burn their vacation time this way, it's not such a great deal at all. I think this would be fine, however, if they paid the candidate for their time on an hourly basis like any normal contractor, but this company is probably too cheap to do that. I'm surprised this is even legal actually.
Quite possible. xaoslaad didn't say that your friend had a fucked-up personality, just that it might not be a fit. If the company is full of assholes, and he's not an asshole, then he wouldn't be a good fit. There's a lot of companies like that. As the old saying goes, "birds of a feather flock together", and you frequently see this dynamic in workplaces. You go to one company and everyone's really friendly and great, and you go to another company and everyone has serious personality problems or is an asshole. The assholes don't stick around company #1 because they get fired, not hired in the first place, or don't like that their behavior isn't well-tolerated when they get called out on it. The decent people don't stick around company #2 because they don't like being around assholes and look for a new job ASAP, or they don't get hired because "they're not a team player".
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.
There are many flavors of corporate culture and certain personalities I would rather not be around, regardless of how interesting/exciting/well paying the actual job is. So getting to experience the environment before fully committing is of value, especially if you are considering a long distance move. With that said, a week seems slightly long, a couple of days should give both parties enough insight into potential future.
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.
What have Africans ever given the world?
Homo sapiens? That's good enough for me.
Ezekiel 23:20