Hi HN, this is Zaf and Ioannis from Algora (<a href="https://algora.io" rel="nofollow">https://algora.io</a>).<p>Earlier this year we decided to hire SWE summer interns. We wanted to know how well someone would perform on the job, so we gave our top candidates a real paid task from our backlog. Introducing a payment allowed us to ask for something challenging and lengthy, while also respecting the candidates’ time. We also found that the strongest candidates self-selected into this paid screening challenge, unlike the traditional and mundane take-home coding assignments. You can find our challenge and the rewarded pull requests here: <a href="https://algora.io/algora/challenge/bounties/1" rel="nofollow">https://algora.io/algora/challenge/bounties/1</a><p>From our experience, hiring by building product predicts on-the-job performance really well.<p>Similarly, one of our founding customers Lithobyte used Algora to complete $15k of contract work with a developer over four months before hiring him full-time, calling it “trial employment”. Is this something any of you have tried?<p>Furthermore, as a bootstrapped startup we didn’t feel ready to pay fixed salaries to our interns. Instead, we wanted a more outcome-based way to collaborate, making sure any money we spent was consequential. That’s why we used bounties for all of our work during the internship — you can see a sample here: <a href="https://algora.io/demo/bounties" rel="nofollow">https://algora.io/demo/bounties</a><p>If you’d like to try Algora, today we are launching our first public release! In addition, we are really curious about your thoughts and relevant experience; how do you all go about hiring developers? We’d love to hear from you, also feel free to reach out to us at zafer@algora.io and ioannis@algora.io