"This should be a regular consulting gig with an hourly rate, and a clearly defined project mission statement."
I interviewed with a YC company about a year ago and was asked to do #5 except without pay. It's a long story, but in short I let my guard down because it was a YC company only to find myself having wasted a week. The part that really pissed me off is that they came back _months_ later and pretended that no time had passed at all (obviously their hire didn't work out) and asked me to jump through more interviewing hoops. When I rightfully just told them to put money where mouth is they actually insulted me and the free work I had done (written in an email no less).
The point I'm making is that if you need this many hoops for a candidate to jump through you shouldn't be the one hiring. Find someone else with a business-tuned intuition and ability to judge character. If you act like you're the world's greatest company which people will waste hours and even days trying to impress you're going to miss the best people out there.
Also #2:
"Show me a Stack Overflow profile where I can see what kind of communicator and problem solver you are. Link me to an open-source code repository of your stuff."
Kinda cheesy for Jeff to say the first part. I absolutely agree with supporting both info sharing sites and open source. But as a self-taught programmer that ships products and does very well financially, I can tell you that there are effective people out there that don't rely on SO to get things done and therefore probably don't contribute to it.
I do absolutely support open source software but I also don't have a lot of free time. I've written a raster to vector conversion library that I'd love to clean up a bit and open source. But I literally don't have time to do so. Does that make me a second class programmer? Having hired many people over the years I know that I would look very seriously at someone who has shipped a lot of products but doesn't follow programmer community trends like SO. I guess it could mean they're truly horrible programmers with no knowledge to share. It could also mean they're too busy meeting their own (or some company's) targets. It could also mean they like to unplug once in a while and lead a normal life.
I understand why companies like Google take a hardline approach to hiring. They just deal with too many people. But if you're reading Jeff's essay on hiring you're not running Google. If you're a small company you need to look at the outliers first since that where you're likely to find overlooked talent. That's where you're going to find the people who don't jump through hoops but who actually get shit done on a daily basis.
#5 is still a bad rule. It eliminates anyone who currently has a job. That leaves you with people who don't have a job (for whatever reason) or are working as a freelancer.
Freelancers really don't want to work at a company, and in my experience, it doesn't work out. I'm thinking of one person in particular who was an amazing coder, got along great with everyone, and all that... But he wasn't happy there. He quit before his 3 months review came.
Last time I interviewed, 1 of the companies asked me to write a sample app that was useless, but would show I knew what I was doing. I had 48 hours to do it. So yeah, I lost a weekend (well, 16 hours of it) but they were able to know I was capable without a lot of craziness. I actually ended up taking a job somewhere else before my interview with them, though. I had found a better paying job at another company that didn't do any of that stuff. It was just a 1-on-1 interview and discussion of my past work. I'm still here a year later.
I've mentioned this before on HN, I've been given 'homework' after the whiteboard-interview. If they aren't following this:
This should be a regular consulting gig with an hourly rate, and a clearly defined project mission statement.
, then run run away. I ended up doing my not-so-little assignment but I realized he just wanted the unit of work, not an actual employee.
If anyone is in a similar situation and you have the time to do the work, you could do it. Then come in with your laptop with your code and show it to them in the next interview. Don't let someone take advantage of you.
"This should be a regular consulting gig with an hourly rate, and a clearly defined project mission statement."
I interviewed with a YC company about a year ago and was asked to do #5 except without pay. It's a long story, but in short I let my guard down because it was a YC company only to find myself having wasted a week. The part that really pissed me off is that they came back _months_ later and pretended that no time had passed at all (obviously their hire didn't work out) and asked me to jump through more interviewing hoops. When I rightfully just told them to put money where mouth is they actually insulted me and the free work I had done (written in an email no less).
The point I'm making is that if you need this many hoops for a candidate to jump through you shouldn't be the one hiring. Find someone else with a business-tuned intuition and ability to judge character. If you act like you're the world's greatest company which people will waste hours and even days trying to impress you're going to miss the best people out there.
Also #2:
"Show me a Stack Overflow profile where I can see what kind of communicator and problem solver you are. Link me to an open-source code repository of your stuff."
Kinda cheesy for Jeff to say the first part. I absolutely agree with supporting both info sharing sites and open source. But as a self-taught programmer that ships products and does very well financially, I can tell you that there are effective people out there that don't rely on SO to get things done and therefore probably don't contribute to it.
I do absolutely support open source software but I also don't have a lot of free time. I've written a raster to vector conversion library that I'd love to clean up a bit and open source. But I literally don't have time to do so. Does that make me a second class programmer? Having hired many people over the years I know that I would look very seriously at someone who has shipped a lot of products but doesn't follow programmer community trends like SO. I guess it could mean they're truly horrible programmers with no knowledge to share. It could also mean they're too busy meeting their own (or some company's) targets. It could also mean they like to unplug once in a while and lead a normal life.
I understand why companies like Google take a hardline approach to hiring. They just deal with too many people. But if you're reading Jeff's essay on hiring you're not running Google. If you're a small company you need to look at the outliers first since that where you're likely to find overlooked talent. That's where you're going to find the people who don't jump through hoops but who actually get shit done on a daily basis.