One counterargument is that many employees in finance are required to disclose <i>outside business activity</i>. From FINRA's perspective, getting paid to do an interview would be covered since it is remuneration that could be a conflict of interest with the current employer.<p>I.e., the employee would have to let his employer know that he got paid to interview somewhere else! Failure to disclose would result in disciplinary action from regulators, possibly leading to a suspension from the industry.
I think this is a stronger argument that we should have more entry-level contractor gigs available with a route toward full-time employment. Because they're easier to fire, contractor positions allow more risk-taking in the hiring process and this increases candidate diversity - true background diversity, not what you see with category-based quota systems. A company will be more likely to hire a person without a pedigree into a contractor role, and once hired they have an opportunity to showcase their aptitude.<p>Interviews are expensive in terms of employee time. Paying a candidate for their time as well wouldn't be the most expensive part of the process, but in general increasing the cost of an interview will serve to decrease the breadth of the process. Companies will probably start to become sensitive to people they perceive as profiting from the interview process and restrict access accordingly. I think this would be ultimately detrimental to the goal of scouting new talent.
I’m ambivalent. Sure, guess I’d like it as an industry practice. It would make my taxes very lengthy to do by having to deal with 40+ 1099 forms every year but for sufficient payment not a big deal.<p>I do worry this would raise the bar even further though on expectations because now they’re paying for time. They’d take even less chances on who they interview because it’s 2x as expensive as it used to be. And I don’t think it’d become a world of doing “practical” assessments - I think leetcode would still be very common.
Make the entire interview process take less than 5 hours. If you’re anxious about hiring a fake or someone who isn’t cutting it, get better at firing faster.<p>Only once have I seen an employer show a new employee the door within that “six month probation period” they talked about.<p>This is basically the ultimate form of paying people for an interview: the interview happens on the job for a while.<p>It also would help with an issue I’ve struggled with a lot: learning that the person is a jerk who doesn’t work well with others and has loud holy war opinions on minutiae.<p>A valid criticism of this approach is that it can be expensive and disruptive to turnover a position in three months.
This article is disappointingly shallow. Maybe it worked for Algora, but it doesn’t mean it would scale well across the industry. Then there’s the problem with undesirable secondary effects as other comments on this thread have mentioned.<p>I’ve done hiring before and the fact that the cost of considering a candidate is relatively low both in terms of cost and time, meant that I could consider candidates with non-traditional backgrounds. A resume and job application only tell you so much. If I was on the fence about someone it was easy to jump on a call for an hour with them to get more data. Sure the signal you can get from an hour long interview isn’t great, but it’s something.<p>If there was a higher cost associated with bringing a candidate in (more than the wage, I’d be worried about the paperwork involved), employers might start relying even more on signals like alma mater status, current employer pedigree etc. as first pass filter before bringing someone in.
Vastly misunderstood this from the title and I suspect a few others have as well.<p>This seems to be more about internships than interviews for a qualified professional (or whatever you want to call those candidates).<p>Just make unpaid internships illegal. If you do work for a company that a paid employee would normally do, then you should be compensated.<p>But not paying someone to run around and get you coffee is just completely nonsensical these days.<p>I'd laugh all the way out of the door, and my country has a 40% unemployment rate. I'm just not going to do work I don't get paid for, because it turns out living is expensive.
It's an interesting idea, but there are lots of problems this article doesn't address.<p>At most of the companies I've worked for, there is a bunch of up front ramp up before someone can complete even a simple task. You have to become familiar with a team's frameworks, the business context, and the structure of the code base. To do one real task then requires all that ramp up first (or else, you'd need to simplify it so it's not a real task).<p>How big a task? If you are interviewing new college grads, it might not matter, but people who already have industry experience either have to use a large chunk of vacation time or leave their current job if the task is non-trivial (taking, say, a sprint or two to do).<p>How much do you pay? Do you have a fixed bounty? Do you pay senior engineers more?<p>I get how you want to see someone do this for real, but I've already built something like this 20 times. If a company trying to recruit me asked me to build this, I could spend a few hours building it again, or I could just tell you about the times I did something like that (and the challenges I ran into), which would take 30 minutes.
We pay candidates for interviews, $100 per hour.<p>Companies are starting to adopt this, but it still blows me away that we aren't getting there faster.
Alternatively, stop pretending this industry is a precious snowflake and conduct reasonable-duration, non-exploitative interviews like everyone else in the history of modern employment.
I'm looking at a 4 hour interview in my near future, so yes I'd like remuneration.<p>But even more than that, I'd like an interview that doesn't take 4 hours.
It sounds like it was specifically for a real, non-trivial problem out of their backlog.<p>> the strongest candidates self-selected into this paid screening challenge<p>...<p>> to make developer interviews more valid & inclusive, introduce payments.<p>This still makes them exclusive. Someone with a full-time job who's busy with life could easily not care about $600--they're time-limited, not money limited.<p>They also provide little evidence supporting their motivation of hiring better engineers. I buy that better engineers are better for the company, they just didn't show that paid interviews select better engineers.<p>All that said, I agree that a long-ish, real-world problem is a great indicator of job performance. Paying people just means you're not taking advantage of them. The bigger problem is still around time.
If you’re gonna give out take home project, they should definitely be paid.<p>I tend to reject take home projects out of hand because they take up my time but not the company’s, unlike a phone interview. I need to know the company is serious and values my time.
Is it possible to pay someone in the US without getting their SSN/EIN? In other words, is there a way to do this without any major strings attached in either direction? I think that's the impediment for most orgs. By the time you've gotten to the interview process most companies have invested thousands of dollars per candidate in the process, adding on a $500-1k cash outlay per short-lister would be a rounding error.<p>Also, giving someone an actual backlog item would turn off most companies, but building a representative task where you vet performance against your current staff seems to be reasonable.
> Earlier this year we decided to hire 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.<p>Was the first interview sprint planning?
The only other industry I can think of that has interviews anywhere as close to as ridiculous as ours is the performing arts.<p>Why is that other industries don’t need 6+ rounds of interviews for experienced candidates?
I agree to a point. You need to do a good job of screening beforehand, because there's no shortage of "developers" who are applying for jobs they aren't qualified for and seeing what sticks. I'm speaking from the perspective of a small company, where we have a shorter, flatter process, so it may make more sense when it's a longer, more extensive process.
I agree with the conclusion, and my startups always use a 1-2 week paid "microinternship" before final hiring decisions (unless I've worked with the person before).<p>That being said, this article makes no sense. The justification it gives sounds like it was autogenerated by a bad markov chain.<p>First it claims without justification that market salary equals "mean productivity", which already isn't true. But suppose that we believe that.<p>Then it says that there is a large productivity difference between good and bad engineers. Ok.<p>Finally it says (paraphrasing), "because good engineers are so much more productive, it's rational to pay them for interviewing." But that's just a restatement of the title of the article, not an argument.<p>For single day interviews, I think the opposite is true because of adverse selection. Good engineers aren't looking for 1 day of pay, they are looking for a job. The people who value your 1 day paid interview the most are people who are not looking for a job.
Last year I did a week-long work trial for a popular product startup. I will never do it again, reasons:<p>* The interview pressure of knowing you’re being assessed based on every interaction and piece of output, but for an entire week.<p>* A week isn’t enough time to truly assess what it’s like to work with someone…<p>* …yet, is long enough such that it’s only a viable option for people with capability to dedicate a week. Which basically means the unemployed, or those working at companies where they can take a week off at short notice.<p>* The tax situation can be complicated, which adds to the stress of it all.<p>My anxiety and stress levels have never been higher, and this was after being laid off and a subsequent 6 months of unemployment. If they hadn’t decided against hiring me (apparently my code and product mindset were great, but I didn’t work fast enough), I was ready to decline them on the basis of concluding that this approach to hiring (it was mandatory) was inhumane.
This may be legally impossible to do for someone who's already employed. You can make the claim that it makes your interview more "valid" (although, I still think that you would be testing for the wrong things and focusing on what 1 person can deliver alone is a bad metric), but not more "inclusive".
The article makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims, but one that catches my eye is the idea that paying people to interview is more inclusive because it allows companies to issue challenges that are more representative of the actual job. But are there actually any data out there that support this claim?<p>This is a common canard. I can see how it might make some intuitive sense, but it appears to be utterly mistaken. When I brought up the idea at my current workplace, we ended up choosing not to pay candidates, because almost 100% of our female software engineers declared that they would not have started an interview process where they were being paid unless they were VERY certain they were qualified for the role.
Great, it was done with interns with good results. Now, was this applied to working professionals? Why is the blog post not describing how it worked out? All you can say at this point is that it seemed to have helped to hire interns.
My initial thought is that paid interviews might shift the incentive of candidates from getting hired to doing more interviews regardless of interest in a given company. That might lead to a reduction in the interview -> hire rate, which then might increase the cost per hire even without considering the payout to the candidates for interviewing. This hypothesis should be testable. Though, the dynamics would probably be different if this policy became an industry standard.
I like the idea! This makes interviews a bit more paperwork (people need to sign NDAs and stuff) and it's surely not perfect [0], but there is probably no perfect approach and this is a lot better than most other forms of interviews. It also helps the Interviewee to find out whether he likes his daily work.<p>[0] One could, for example, argue that different people take a different amount of time to get started, but be similarly productive in the end.
Or, once companies start paying for interviews, they start outsourcing all of their work to interviewees, never hiring anyone. I don't think this would ever actually scale well, but if there's any way to exploit labor, corporations are going to figure out how.
I would much rather have a licensure process that covers the leetcoding part of most interviews rather than having to basically take the equivalent of that exam repeatedly and also for every position you apply to. It is a monumental waste of everyone’s time.
Software engineering is one of the most lucrative and high paying jobs out there and y’all want an extra few hundred for doing interviews?? Come on now.<p>I understand the point being made in the article but that amount of money just isn’t the best incentive
1. Be a company whose mission is to "Create, share & reward paid coding tasks".<p>2. Make an article with a self-serving title encouring paid coding tasks.<p>3. Provide no justification.<p>4. Cover up the lack of justification with a graph of a normal distribution. Mention standard deviations for additional perception of credibility.<p>5. Share this with people who would like to be paid for things they would do anyway. (The CEO of the company posted this on HN)<p>6. Profit?
In this market multiple rounds of interviews are a competitive disadvantage, good devs don't stay on the market long enough to schedule that second on-site.