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
@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
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.
@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 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.