If I were a large company with money I would simply ask all qualified applicants if they would be willing to work on a small part of a real project as a contractor with the possibility of getting hired. Applicants get paid for their time, productivity is achieved, jobs might be offered, everybody is happy.
Sure - That would neatly eliminate majority of qualified candidates :-)
Very few people who are successfully employed would take a risk / have a luxury to forsake their certain employment for an extremely short term contract (with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!) and extremely limited chance of gainful employment.
(it's perspectives like these that make me realize how much of a grouchy old man I am and have always been - always being a buzzkill by thinking things through next 3 steps! :P)
>with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!
It's not if you are in the US.
You will get a 1099 from where you worked, you write it on your 1040 and include the 1099 with your taxes if I recall from when I was an independent contractor for a while.
It takes maybe like 10 minutes extra and 1099-ing is incredibly common nowadays (unfortunately) so not a super weird case.
And it's not regulation. You don't need to worry about anything besides getting the 1099 like you would your W2s and appending it.
>with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!
>It's not if you are in the US.
Its also not if you are in Australia. I'd suggest that the number of developers and designers who at least occasionally take on paid side gigs or who have revenue generating side projects (even if it barely covers hosting etc) is about 1/3.
What if you get a 1099 from another state? Multiple states? Don't you need to file taxes with those states now? (Genuinely curious, I am not a CPA so I really don't know).
What if you don't have any other 1099s (so you have to pay self-employment tax just because of that one interview, at least I had once when my moving expenses were paid with a 1099).
Not even getting into possible illegal work for the candidates on work visas.
My city considers 1099s as businesses due to some shady contractors in the past. So my local government would try to collect a chunk of any contractor earnings (with that chunk getting huge if you didn't register with them first).
You are making a point that many others have made, and it makes me unhappy to see it yet again.
What you are saying in effect, is that hiring regimes can't be (or ought not to be) designed to include a group that is (commonly) discriminated against, if that discriminates against anyone, particularly the majority.
Implicitly, I see you defining the optimum as where everyone uses the same criteria that are as inclusive as possible, and just shrugging and saying "we're doing our best" when some are left out in the cold completely.
But isn't there an alternative vision where the optimum is employers using different ("diverse") sets of criteria that individually discriminate but create a society where there's a place for everyone?
Hmmm; I feel you are making some interesting and valid points, and I would like to engage in a conversation; but I am (genuinely) having trouble articulating/parsing what they are. I don't know if you are trying to be diplomatic if the message may not be politically correct, or are the key points very generalized and lean more toward implication/insinuation; or whether it's a philosophy-textbook-style language and I just lack experience in it to parse generically-sounding words in a specific-context-meaning.
My best effort:
* Who/what is the group you feel is a "commonly discriminated group", that would benefit from "contract first" hiring practices?
* If a company uses a practice that "discriminates against a majority", is that a practically beneficial funnel/sieve/practice for the company? Alternatively, if we are discussing companies which are making a stand / moral decision through hiring practices, I feel that's a very different discussion than what I interpreted original poster to posit as "best hiring practice for everybody in all situations / everybody should do THIS".
* I feel your last sentence is proposing each employer using different criteria in hope that cumulatively they'd create an overlapping and comprehensive venn diagram. My response to that notion would be a) I don't trust either free markets or regulation to make that venn diagram complete and b) that kind of stratification of the market sounds horrible... no matter what, I can only go to specific companies who have specific hiring practices that happen to match me? (I fully understand the irony in that this may in fact be the underlying unspoken reality of the market! my point is that it should be something we move away from, not explicitly design as a goal).
But again, I may be misinterpreting your argument and inadvertently taking discussion in the wrong direction...
>trying to be diplomatic if the message may not be politically correct
Not exactly; whether my message is politically correct depends on how you generalize it and what groups you apply it to.
You could use it selectively in other contexts and demonstrate either a left or right wing allegiance, but right here and now, I'm talking about people suited to whiteboarding vs. take home tests as the groups.
>that kind of stratification of the market sounds horrible
It's what we've got though, and always have. In your words, "the underlying...reality". Of course we agree things can be improved somehow. I think hiring should be more inclusive, and I think most people would at least give lip service to that.
But if different people are always going to be different, then a hypothetical convergence on a single "fair" standard means telling some fraction of the population they have no place in society at all.
Eliminating whiteboarding, strictly speaking, seems reasonable to object to. It would be unfairly discriminatory. But wanting that to be the only standard also is an extremist position.
If you want to draw a more general opinion out of what I wrote, one of the things on my mind is the general scourge of optimization by tech people who assume the solution to anything is to find the one best answer based on some metric.
True, true. In my poor defense I was imagining all candidates as identical versions of myself in a bubble and never considered taxes or anybody else's lifestyle.
I have a small child and a full time job. It's really not very feasible for me to make time to do a "real project", paid or not. Especially if I'm interviewing with multiple companies.
Yea, I didn't consider that. My thinking was that the hiring process is such a time suck that the applicant should at least paid for those 'take home tests' and 'in person interviews' everywhere in that list ... but yea I'll go back to the drawing board.
It seems that you and a lot of people look at hiring as a zero sum game, because there can only be one standard. If it doesn't include someone, but changing it to include them would exclude you, then tough cookies. That's a very depressing outlook.
I prefer take home projects as opposed to whiteboarding, because my personal situation better allows for it - no wife or children, preference for building things, no NDA at my current job, and so forth. For me specifically I would prefer take home projects followed by a debriefing where I explain my design decisions over solving whiteboard problems. But that's just me. Why can't there be multiple accepted ways of interviewing instead of forcing everyone through a whiteboard gate, if whiteboarding isn't the best way for you to prove your competency?
At least we have lists of companies with different hiring processes as in TFA, so there is a small amount of choice. But we're still dependent on the goodwill of companies to make their hiring processes more tolerable.
That only works if the workload is low enough to do with a full time job, potentially out of state.
It is a good idea, but nobody is going to be quitting their current job to be a contractor with a job MAYBE attainable. It remains me a lot of retail seasonal employees who work their butts off to MAYBE get a full time position.
I'd also want there to be a clear decision-point (i.e. it isn't a way to get you to be an indefinite contractor, they make a hire/no hire decision within some set timeframe or at the end of the current work).
I don't think quitting is necessary to work on an unrelated side project. Many of the companies on the list ask you to do a either a take home project, test, or tele-coding - real work that doesn't guarantee a job - how does getting paid for your work suddenly make it different?
This proposal comes up in every interviewing discussion on HN. Apart from the usual rebuttals (you are generally hiring only from unemployed people pool this way), here is a fresh one - this opens your company's codebase for reading and writing (even supervised but, still) to anyone. If you already open-source your code it's not a problem but otherwise you don't want random people looking into your code due to: patents, trade secrets, possible exploits to name a few reasons.
All large companies already have large contractor workforces that work on the non-critical products, I don't really see how that's different from employing highly qualified candidates with probably better resumes and referrals than those who are employed at 3rd party contractor companies.
Contractors are ran through background checks and bound by various NDAs and the literal contracts. Not to mention that the mentioned 3d parties are financially liable for the damages their contractors may cause.
It would increase the barrier to entry, reduce the pool of potential candidates, and increase the load on HR and hiring managers. Most candidates already have a job and may not want to start contracting for multiple companies in addition to their current job. This would also exclude candidates on a work visa like H1-B.
