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Making Sure Interviews Don't Turn Into Free Consulting
We've talked in the past about what kind of questions should be asked of potential developer hires, and how being honest in exit interviews probably isn't worth the potential damage to your career. We're also familiar with the tricky questions some interviewers like to throw at people to test their thinking skills, and the questionable merits of gauging somebody's skillset through a pointlessly obtuse math problem. But there are also shady employers who conduct interviews to try to mine your knowledge and experience to find free solutions to their current problems. An actual job may or may not be on the table, but if they can get what they need from you before hiring, then at the very least your bargaining position will have gotten worse. Have you dealt with situations like this in the past? Since you can't know for sure the interviewer's intentions, it's tough to provide an answer demonstrating your abilities without solving their problem. "Before asking about the fixes they’ve tried, start by acknowledging the depth of the problem and find out whether the manager has the resources to solve it. Then, just like a consultant, use their answers to highlight your experience and explain the approach you’d take." You could also try explaining how you've solved similar problems, which won't necessarily help them, but will demonstrate your value. Of course, one of the biggest challenges is determining when somebody is getting a little too specific with their interview questions. What red flags should people keep an eye out for?
"Before asking about the fixes they’ve tried, start by acknowledging the depth of the problem and find out whether the manager has the resources to solve it. Then, just like a consultant, use their answers to highlight your experience and explain the approach you’d take." You could also try explaining how you've solved similar problems, which won't necessarily help them, but will demonstrate your value. Of course, one of the biggest challenges is determining when somebody is getting a little too specific with their interview questions.
Is this serious? Here's a big red warning sign for me: if my job can be jeopardized by twenty minutes of talking, I'm probably in the wrong industry. I can tell you how to implement a solution but it's the actual work and planning and care that should be paid for cash money.
What red flags should people keep an eye out for?
Here's a red flag: What company out there is so full of morons that they go to interviewees for direction? Man, if I ever got that feeling in an interview, I wouldn't want to work for them anyway and I'd walk away laughing when they try to turn small talk into a business plan! Is this why "consulting" is so stupid? They can have all the free advice they want, it's still going to shit out half way through when they go, "Okay we have hadoop and lucene, what was that 'blur' thing he was talking about?" or "Okay, we've built a rails app with the generator and scaffolds ... now what did he say about creating database migrations?" and on and on.
I mean, are there actually people out there that feel their job can be compromised by handing over thirty minutes of talking to a potential employer? The only thing I'd be worried about is if they started asking me to name names for other people they could hire.
My work here is dung.
only programmers and IT geeks would be so conceited as to even think this is a possibility.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Yeah, that's not going to happen in the real world, because it would require their pre-interview screening process to be so good as to effectively select, without an interview, the people whom it would be worth their while to get free consulting from under the guise of an interview.
I think the goal is to avoid wasting your time waiting to see if they're going to offer you a job, or to avoid accepting a job by a company like that if they do make an offer.
Um, yeah, no. Conversely you might have just sat through a potentially great job interview acting like you think you've got a royal flush and being careful not to show it. Yeah ... I'm not taking that risk. If you ask me in a job interview "How do you solve X" I am just going to turn on the firehose and let you have it to show you that I've got ideas for solving problems, I can openly confidently communicate said solutions well and I have dealt with problems like this in the past. If you can write all that down fast enough and follow through on something that normally takes a team six months to implement then good for you, you deserve that hail Mary pass that you somehow caught. Good luck on building a career off of hilarious asshattery like that. Your life must be "Weekend at Bernies" nine to five.
My work here is dung.
Does it really seem likely that a company would take the time to go through resumes and hold interviews just for the purpose of extracting "free" information from interviewees about their specific problems? Or does it seem more likely that a company would ask interviewees about their specific problems so that they can hire the one who has the best solution to it?
When I get asked specific questions in interviews, I'm happy to give the best answers that I can give.
Strictly speaking, this wasn't an interview; but I think it applies.
Many many many moons ago, a friend asked me if I would be interested in setting up a Novell network for his employer. I put together a quote and sent it off. He called me up, and said that he needed a detailed walk-through of the work involved in order to explain the quote to his boss. I explained everything that was necessary. A couple of weeks go by, and I haven't heard anything so I call him. After learning what needed to be done, he decided he could do it himself; and that was the route they were taking. Lost a 'friend', but gained a cautionary tale; I think I came out ahead. (Yes, Jeff; this story is about you.)
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
I encounter this kind of attitude all the time: People who want to fight tooth and nail to hold on to whatever vital information they think they have, so they can't be replaced. They want to make sure nobody else learns how to do it, because otherwise they think they'd be laid off.
Thing is? They are often right, because they aren't very useful outside of that.
Personally I think it is silly. My boss always says we IT types should be trying to work ourselves out of a job. He doesn't mean he wants to get rid of us (he's a tech guy, not a PHB) just that we, including him, should always be working for better automation, working to solve problem, working to streamline and make service better.
The thing is that won't end up with us being out of a job because there's always more to do. There are things people would like us to do, but we don't have time for, and if we free up more time we can move on to that.
Not everyone operates that way though. They want to hold on to whatever little niche of knowledge they have, believing that is all that makes them valuable.
That's nothing. I was once asked to design & implement a space shuttle software in 30 minutes, which I did while undercover in communist Russia stealing their top secret documents. I also had time to prove that N=NP, create a simple script that passed the Turing test and create a machine learning method, that can predict exact date and time when you die with 100% accuracy. Anyway, this free consulting thing is a joke from Dilbert, so I would suggest reading less comics :D
I'm a pharmaceutical scientist and have personally experienced this last year. A biotechnology company flew me across the country and picked my brain to explain how to setup and analyze and characterize proteins by liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. Different people asked me the same questions over and over again inquiring about setting up the mass spectrometer acquisition parameters. I even tried to explain other relevant experience, they didn't want to hear it, all they wanted was to know how to acquire the data to identify as many proteins as possible in a series of samples.
"your bargaining position will have gotten worse"
If you just solved a real world problem for a company in a interview and made them lots of money, you bargaining position has just gotten a whole lot better.
If the only work they needed doing can be completed in a 30 minute interview than they simply do not and never had a job to offer you.
And no one would actually do this, it would be an incredibly huge waste of time. You actually think that some company is going to interview 20 people until they get the guy that is capable of solving their problem in 30 minutes? They have just spent a week of work getting a 30 minute answer.
If a problem is solvable in a interview setting then the company could of just spent 30 minutes posting a detailed description on some forum somewhere, where they would of gotten an even better and more detailed answer than they could ever of hoped for from an interviewee.
If you provide the answer to a current real world problem in an interview and do not get the job, then it is probably because someone else gave a better response.
And do you really think playing games with the interviewer is going to improve your chances of getting a job? If the person asked you a question they want an answer to that question, not to another question.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I had an unpleasant experience interviewing with Google that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I have a Ph.D. in Information Science, have worked professionally outside the university as an academic researcher, have published multiple books and peer-reviewed scholarly articles, and hold a technology-related patent. In research (contrary to the claims above that idea misappropriation isn't a problem), very often the idea itself is indeed the most valuable thing: out of the infinite attack vectors, which one you would choose to address the problem?
At my interview I was asked a number of generic questions, then suddenly was asked a very specific question about approaches to e-mail spam filtering. I gave what in my opinion were some pretty good ideas based on my recent academic work in the area. The mid-20s semi-anonymous interviewer (semi-anonymous because Google interviewers never give you their last name or a business card, the arrogant jerks) took diligent notes, and I never heard from them again.
In pure code-monkey programming-related jobs, responses to interview questions may not have much value to the employer, but in research-related fields I think companies can and do freely misappropriate the ideas there. After all, what have they got to lose? Nothing.
I'd be interested in hearing if my experience is commonplace.
One interview I had amused me. On paper it looked okay, a small art dealership was looking for a combined sysadmin/Perl programmer which was pretty much what I was doing then, and the pay was significantly more than I was on at my current place and as I was getting bored in the current job anyway I thought I'd go and have a chat.
Went to the interview and it was one of those where the interviewer wasn't actually technical himself. He had a friend write a page of simple technical questions which I answered without any trouble, also corrected one of the answers he had. The interviewer seemed happy and we started talking about what the job actually involved, and here it started to go wrong. He wanted a basic browse-only shopfront, no actual payment, with basic message board capability, and some everyday web/email/DNS handling. He did vaguely ask how I'd do this but not in any detail at all. Listening to him I knew that I'd be bored by day two, but I did actually like the guy and knew that what he wanted really didn't need a full-time employee. I explained to him that these were basically things which could be done by using pre-existing software with a month of effort to get it up and running in the first place, and a day or so a month afterwards to maintain it. I jotted down the names of some software and companies that could help him, and told him what to ask them for.
He was genuinely amazed. He thought that all of this web-stuff was so complex that it'd be a full-time task to keep his website running, thinking that every new art piece he added to the catalogue would need an entire new page to be written for it. Finding out about CMS was a revelation, and one he was grateful for, and all this took less time than the interview was scheduled for.
In the end he went with one of the companies I'd recommended to him, they did ecommerce stuff and this was bread and butter for them, he was up and running in two weeks with everything he needed, as he let me know in an email. As for me I didn't have a new job but I felt good about myself, and the fact the chap had basically ended the 'interview' by giving me a few weeks worth of wages for saving him a lot in the long run was quite nice too.
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... and you can solve our problems, why would I want to boot you, potentially sending you to one of our competitors, instead of keeping you and making you solve more problems for us?
It was just to find out about a project and give them a quote. It turns out that I solved their issue in about 30 minutes, including chit chat, and told them everything they needed to know to fix their problem. I even made notes on their materials for them.
You know what I charged them? Nothing. I told them if they had to come back and have me do everything, it would be about $X, but that I thought that they had enough information to do it with the people they already had on board. They're a client I'm unlikely to ever see again because this is an unusual problem for them. They're not going to be repeat freeloaders, and doing this work full-up won't get me a bigger job with them later.
I figure that if I can solve your entire problem in 30 minutes, it's not something that requires my skill or justifies my fees. I'd rather have a happy non-client telling their friends that I was extremely helpful (yes, I made them promise not let people know I just gave them the info for free), than clients who just spent a healthy dime because they felt they had no other option. I do have "regulars" who have stupid issues like this on a recurring basis. I charge them full rack rate every time.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
As a consultant, there was a brief period where I would have an existing client start asking for some very specific information about "how" to do things, like instructions on how to add users to Active Directory. Eventually, I got over the instinctive insecurity of giving away job secrets, especially when it's stuff that they could just google up answers for anyway, and found that promptly providing it only serves to strengthen the business relationship.
I haven't gone to an interview in ages, but I can't imagine getting too ruffled over one where they would basically be asking me how I'd fix a particular problem. Even if they came right out and said "we have a problem with this application and are looking to hire someone who can hit the ground running with ideas. What would you do to fix it?" The fact is, they aren't going to retain very much of anything that gets said anymore than I would retain asking a mechanic what he'd do to fix my hypendupulator pump. He get as detailed as he wants, and it wouldn't get me very far.
If a gig entails solving a problem that can be solved in the time-frame of an interview it wasn't much of a gig anyway.
In early 1989, I was called for an interview at CERN. The guy who interviewed me was called Tim. He asked me to call him Timbo. The interview went normally and then Timbo took me to the CERN cafeteria for lunch. I told him about my idea about taking hypertext and connecting it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas andâ"ta-da!â"you all know what happened next.
http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.htm
The Test For Unpaid Interns
There are some circumstances under which individuals who participate in “for-profit” private sector internships or training programs may do so without compensation. The Supreme Court has held that the term "suffer or permit to work" cannot be interpreted so as to make a person whose work serves only his or her own interest an employee of another who provides aid or instruction. This may apply to interns who receive training for their own educational benefit if the training meets certain criteria. The determination of whether an internship or training program meets this exclusion depends upon all of the facts and circumstances of each such program.
The following six criteria must be applied when making this determination:
The internship, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to training which would be given in an educational environment;
The internship experience is for the benefit of the intern;
The intern does not displace regular employees, but works under close supervision of existing staff;
The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded;
The intern is not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the internship; and
The employer and the intern understand that the intern is not entitled to wages for the time spent in the internship.
If all of the factors listed above are met, an employment relationship does not exist under the FLSA, and the Act’s minimum wage and overtime provisions do not apply to the intern. This exclusion from the definition of employment is necessarily quite narrow because the FLSA’s definition of “employ” is very broad. Some of the most commonly discussed factors for “for-profit” private sector internship programs are considered below.
In the late 1990s I had a job where I was a Unix system admin and our group needed to hire a replacement for the guy who left. The job required some marginal Unix/Linux user knowledge but most of the work would be repairing and building out PCs for our test group. Our PCs weren't the best and needed constant maintenance. The previous 2 guys who held the job were nuts. Guy number 1 was bipolar and told us on his first day of work that he was bipolar and that he saw no need to take medicine for it. It ended up being 6 months of hell where we basically had a guy who alternated between being a crybaby and Captain Angry All The Time. He left us to become some other company's problem, but we foolishly brought in his replacement before he left and had him train the new guy. Much to our surprise, he became BFFs with guy number 2 and he poisoned guy number 2 against our group. Guy number 2 basically had a permanent hostile attitude towards our group until he left us for another company. So we let guy number 2 leave before we ever started to look for his replacement because we were not going to repeat the previous mistake of letting a departing employee have a negative influence on his replacement.
We interviewed several people and we actually flew a guy in from another state who seemed promising for an interview. I don't remember exactly what it was, but we had some ongoing problem related to our PCs that neither of the 2 previous crazy guys could ever solve. So after we interviewed the guy, my manager brought him into his office and asked him about the problem. He got it fixed on the spot for us within 5 minutes. He was hired that day. His ability to fix that ongoing problem on the spot clinched it for him. He was a fantastic employee for us. So while I'm sure that maybe some sleazebag companies are just trying to get free help, trust me, you don't want to work for them anyway. Some companies may just be using it to test your abilities and if you can solve their problem, you'll get the job. I've seen it firsthand.
I was doing DBA work for Vertica database systems through a consulting company. We had a phone interview with one potential client and it turned pretty quickly to them wanting to solve some very specific issues over the phone for them for free.
I fell back to something like "these problems are very complicated. We've done this type of work in the past. I'd have to look at the specifics of your case." I gave them a good outline of the approach I would take.
They became irritated, in my opinion, and kept pushing.
I am convinced they ran into a problem and wanted me to work for free. Best case scenario, they ran into a problem and wanted absolutely no doubt we could help them. Regardless, I wasn't comfortable actually doing the work I was interviewing for in the interview. Proof I know what I'm doing is different.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
My reaction to a situation like this is to explain my relevant experience. Nothing more. If they insist on focusing on the problem at hand, then my decision has been made and I would no longer want to work for that company. I recognize free consulting when I see it, it is highly inappropriate during an interview, and I did not spend a fortune on college education and work years in a distinguished career to give away solutions.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
While many commenters have blown off the original article as a scam, this kind of "intellectual theft" is pretty common in one-off, temporary, contract job situations.
For example, a few years back I had an "interview" for some subcontracting work with a former consulting firm I'd done some work for in the past. I needed any cash, so to ensure I got the work I ended up talking to them for an hour or more about about what I would do. The end client was there asking questions, listening and taking a few notes, etc., and I grew a little suspicious. By the end of the meeting, I had a feeling that I was being used for free consulting, but not having set a clear payment plan for my time up front, what could I do? In the end the client was so excited that they decided to do the work themselves after the meeting, based on the direction I had pushed them, and he decided I wasn't needed. The former colleague semi-apologized later, but I would've appreciated getting at least a one hour consulting fee (which they stiffed me on).
The moral of the story: Have a clear understanding UP FRONT that you will be billing for ANY time you give for ANY temp/contract work... Even for friends/former colleagues... If they're really pros/friends, they'll understand and pay up.