Me and the other directors at my new company have been toying with a new idea, paying people for the work they do on interviews (well sorta).
Basically the idea we are toying with is when we give a programming test as part of the interview we basically offer them the choice of either doing a toy project that has no value to us as a company, or giving them the option to fix any outstanding tickets on one of our open-source projects with a bounty attached to it. This way if your programming test gets accepted you stand a good chance of getting the job AND get paid the bounty.
Programming tests never sat right with me because it seems like a huge time investment to ask of someone who might not get a job. So I wanted to make the process more fair and beneficial to applicants.
Would love to hear what #fedihire thinks about this.
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@freemo@qoto.org
Originally this was my thought as well. The reason i like offering a toy project route is because I dont want a under-paid force labour exploitation happening. Basically where I get people to do real world problems for very low pay (bounties are meant to be bonuses not fair pay). WE could (not that we would) literally just have interviewees fix our problems at slave-wages if we forced them to do real work for bounties.
I feel like offering the option is nice, but can have the opposite of the intended effect when its required.
@freemo that makes sense hiring at a junior level, but if you are hiring at a senior level, I think you need to be really careful that the toy project has adequate complexity to show the skills and experience you are looking for.
@musicman I totally agree that a toy project needs to be equal difficulty and complexity as a real world ticket. When I say toy i just mean "something not commercially useful to us" not to imply it is less complex. In fact a toy project would likely be more complex since it would be a greenfield thing rather than contributing to something that already exists.
@freemo That's not bad. Personally, I prefer trial periods. Like someone enough in an interview? Agree to hire and pay them for one week as a contractor. If all goes well, then you hire them on as a full employee after.
@LouisIngenthron I like trial periods too. thing is in at-will employment states (As usa tends to be) you can fire someone at any time for any reason. So in my mind its always a trial period, there is a certain standard you are expected to maintain.
@freemo Right, but when you do it explicitly, (a) it's like an extended interview, and (b) during this period you can avoid the W2s and some of the onboarding overhead, in case you choose not to hire them.
it often happens so with noobs.
but maybe you'd get some people encouraged to bugs bounty hunting without plans to work for you company.
@iron_bug Our tickets that have bounties are at least a full day worth of work usually. and with open source reviewing submissions is common anyway.
@freemo omg, yes. Pay people for the work they do.
@freemo First off, a caveat. my role is VERY strange. My title is Enterprise Architect, and I have seen my fair share of code, but I have *never* had a purely programming position, so I might not understand how hiring works.
In any case, my thought...
this seems very fair, but wonder if u might just send everyone the bounty route. If they don't have at least passing familiarity with the codebase, how likely are they to get the job? The toy project seems like it might give a false sense of hope