[lifeisstillgood]

OMFG. their hiring process is ... worrying. An online test, phone screen, hour of paired hacking then a conditional offer and a "hack week" - a weeks try out.

I balk at doing screening tests like hackerrank. I don't get how you can expect someone to spend a probationary week, with no real guarantee of work. they stop the job hunt, tell other employers no thanks, and bang 50/50 pass rate perhaps?

I don't get it. Hiring remote is hard but this seems too much.

[Spooky23]

I used to agree with you 100%, but there are so many fraudulent candidates out there, it is ridiculous. My team just went though a round of contractor hiring that was atrocious... literally 80% obvious fraud.

If you attract the wrong kind of attention, there are companies that basically provide phoney resumes for candidates who often don’t exist. Typically you interview remotely, encounter technical issues or even talk to a totally different person, and a different guy shows up for the final interview.

For some skill sets, like SAP or Oracle stuff, candidates go to a boot camp, buy a BS resume with fake references, and have a few months of access to a help desk for somebody to walk them through basic tasks.

[pedalpete]

What?? Where are you hiring? What kind of roles are you hiring for??

I thought when you said fraud you meant somebody who says they know Javascript, but it turns out they only know jQuery, or puts SQL on a resume, but doesn't know what an index is.

What it sounds like you are saying is that there is an industry built around getting unqualified people hired in engineering roles??

[arenaninja]

I'm in the same boat. I take a hard pass on any company/exercise that can't be done in the span of 2 hours.

The one time I took one that was 4 hours it was (luckily for me) a disaster

[bitL]

There is one company in Hamburg that sends their candidates a test from Codility whose difficulty is way higher than the ones from Google/FB, all for positions that pay between 40-100k (heavy bias to lower bound), in office where utmost discipline is required. They use bad results in negotiation to lower offers and then are surprised when most candidates walk away and they can't get any people working for them.

[arenaninja]

Yep, many companies are choosing beggars; wondering why they can't attract/retain talent. I actually saw a megacorp quoting some study that said millenials "...don't care about money and are looking for fulfillment". While I'm sure that's true for some percentage of any population, I'd be surprised if they raised their wages and their hiring troubles persisted.

[walshemj]

Interesting I just did a presentation for a job interview and threw it together in < 6 hours.

Apparently it was better than other presentations (even though I didn't get the job) I suspect that I seem to have become to good at my specialisation

[tintor]

SpaceX has 4 hour test for software engineers, but it can be done in 1 hour.

[dhd415]

Yeah, apart from contractors who are between gigs, I can't imagine very many people who can work for a week as part of the hiring process. And even if many applicants could, I think it takes longer, sometimes quite a bit longer, to accurately assess the degree to which a developer will contribute to a engineering organization.

[a_imho]

I balk at doing screening tests like hackerrank

Hackerranking is not a good proxy, unless the job is solving online quizzes. Nevertheless, most can't turn their back on a job opportunity at the very first red flag.

[walshemj]

Yes hacker rank and the like are the result of the credentialist culture, which is a negative influence on the industry as a whole hiring people based on rote learning and memorisation does not really get you the best candidates.

You just get cheap and desperate people with good memory who are unlikely to do the research required and produce a solution when they come up against a solution they haven't rote learned.