[calibration263]

> I'm not going to do free work for you

Our industry could follow after the restaurant industry and implement stages/trialing. You come in and work a full day. If you get the job that days pay shows up on your first paycheck, if not they send you out the door with a check.

[dmoy]

That does not work for anyone who currently has a job, unless your current employer has extremely lax moonlighting policies.

[delphinius81]

True, but a paid short-term contract to do an actual task for the company would work. Knock out a small feature during the night/weekend. Keep it something contained and relatively straight-forward. If they can get it done, it demonstrates the candidate's ability to parse your codebase (so they are learning something they'd need for the job anyway) and they have contributed.

I think most companies just don't want to take the time to set this kind of thing up. Easier to just pass on people that won't do the requisite song and dance.

[dmoy]

No it still wouldn't work for someone with a current job. That's a huge risk if you're responsible for supporting a family. If you quit and the new job doesn't work out, then you're kinda hosed.

[pm90]

Its a good idea but speaking as a non-citizen on a work Visa such kind of work would technically be illegal for me to do.

[TrickyRick]

Doesn't really work for any larger scale product, it's unlikely that any candidate will be productive in their first day. Sure they could build something separate but then the value for the company probably diminishes. Unlike serving dishes the process of making software differs quite a lot between workplaces.

[calibration263]

That's not entirely true. The way kitchens are set up/configured, what goes into dishes, how stations are set up, etc can change quite a bit from place to place. Additionally there's usually kitchen slang/words for most items on the menu which need to learned.

Also I've had many dev interns at my company, it takes work on my end to enable them to be productive quickly, but it's not impossible. Maybe you need to write some skeleton code for them to fill out and unit test, maybe you need to document things well and spilt up your tasks well, but you absolutely can have some one come in and be productive day one.

In fact my interview was a college hire group interview, we were given a laptop with skeleton code in multiple languages, a problem to solve with fixed inputs. The problems were similar to what you'd likely encounter for whiteboard coding, except I got to be left alone with a computer, the internet, and my editor of choice to write actual code to solve the problem.