Comment by devoutsalsa
1 day ago
I firmly believe that the only good proxy for how well one can do the job is doing the job. Even if there are good proxies for doing the work, why would you choose to use a proxy when you can just do the work? And if you're work is some complicated that you can't break off some piece of it and do it in an interview, maybe you're making stuff too hard for no particular reason.
Let's say you need someone who can lift 10 kilograms:
- Good interview: "Please lift this 10 kilogram bucket by the handle."
- Not Good interview: "As a proxy for your overall strength, please take off your pants, squat, pick up this 1 kg bucket by clenching the handle with your butt cheeks, and then stand. We know this isn't a real test of your strength, but we want to see how you perform under pressure."
EDIT: what I mean by doing the job, I mean test the skills used on the job. See if a chef knows their way around a kitchen & actually cook something. See if a customer support rep has good written & verbal communication skills in a mock support interaction. See if a phone screening can do phone screens. Stuff like that.
> when you can just do the work
Careful there- I believe a number of jurisdictions will consider using someone's work before you've hired them to be very illegal.
You could take this to the logical extreme and just not hire anyone, instead building your entire product off of the work done in interviews. Many would consider this to be a form of wage theft.
It doesn’t have to be unpaid labor. I just mean if you’re going to ask someone to refactor legacy code, you could assess that. You don’t have ask someone to reverse a linked list if your code base doesn’t event have them. Ask them to solve a hard problem related to legacy software, or even just talk about it.
Hire them for a day/week/month, see how they do the job. qualified? ok, job
bonus is you get to try different jobs, don't like it? you know you can get another one to try out easily. employer also gets to try different candidates easily with little vested resources. able to find canidtes that actually/really like/enjoy the job, better productivity
(of course this is not compatible with employer based healthcare)
> Hire them for a day/week/month, see how they do the job. qualified? ok, job
This would only work if the candidate is already not employed. Candidates looking to move from one job to the next probably won't be able to be hired at the new company for any period of time and be able to do both jobs.
I mean even with out employer based health care there's trouble with mortgages and rent. A sufficient social safety net + UBI might work out for some. You should not discount the fear of a "changing lifestyle" where you lose your cushy job for a chance.
In a debt based economy moving from a (relatively consistent) $250k / year job that (already) took months of random month long "paid internships (that presumably paid less than that salary)" to find a new $275k / year job (that also takes month long paid internships) might not be practical or desirable, especially if I bough a $500k house with a mortgage.
It can get even worse in places like the UK. "Oh you need to refinance to afford your home (because you do that every several years)? well your salary (and your temporary job) doesn't qualify you, so you're paying extra (or selling your house) -- because we can".
The main take away of my statement is that even if you can avoid employer based health care there are other shackles that keep your proposal from working practically for lots of people. This whole "we can fire you at any time because we feel like it, and it will totally ruin your life" is really hard for people to actually manage their lives around.
Because that takes too much time. They are using proxies biased towards false negative rather than false positive to filter large numbers of candidates.
Making a bad hire takes more time.
Yes, that’s the idea.
It usually takes significant time for someone to get up to their base level of effectiveness in a new organization, so I don't really think this is better, in fact it's much worse because "doing the job" includes a lot of ancillary things like familiarizing oneself with the tools, metrics, codebase, etc.
Much better to just have a live coding test that tries to measure your communication, effectiveness at working on a problem, and your raw coding skills.
I'm curious how you would respond to the folks who are concerned that asking people to 'just do the work' in an interview are asking for unpaid labor, and that's unfair?
(post made me lol, thanks)
Some interviews are paid.
It's extremely rare. Although I suspect it should be more common. If your salaried employees burn through ~$1500 in the time it takes to interview a candidate then you're kinda saving money by just forking over ~$500 to the candidate to do a take home interview if your employees can then interview less candidates.
Earning $500 for applying to accompany would incentivize people to farm this reward which would clog up the hiring pipeline with people who don't actually want the job.
So what's your solution? Make a thousand candidates work for your company for free for 6 months and then hire the best one?
Do something that is actually the type of work. If you need legacy code support, refactor some legacy code (it doesn't have to be YOUR code). If you need a vibe code product manager, do some vibe coding & project management for a sufficiently interesting use case. If you need a QA Engineer, give them a bug to solve & ask them to write a bug report.
Testing the skills people will use is less obvious than I realized. I could have communicated "do the work" more effectively as "test the actual skills people will use".
> why would you choose to use a proxy when you can just do the work
"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.
"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"
"About six inches to the mile."
"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"
"Have you used it much?" I enquired.
"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science