[marceldegraaf]

Exactly! This is why we, at my job, only hire software engineers after a (paid) two-day test period in which they actually build some new feature on one of our products. Nothing too fancy but interesting enough for them to be a challenge and representative enough for us to see what they're capable of. At least as important: they will have lunch with us, talk with us, have fun with the rest of the team, ... This allows us to very rapidly see if a person really fits our team.

[NamTaf]

How do you cope with people who are presently employed but want to interview? Do you expect them to find two days of absence from their present employer to test themselves at your company?

I mean for me that's no problem, but I don't live in the US and therefore have pretty liberal employee leave arrangements. I know that many companies in the US are a lot harder on giving out leave. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if this issue is minimised in the tech sector with their progressive business approaches.

[gizmo686]

I've never been in the job market yet (still in school), but I have seen some of the hiring process for teachers at my high school.

For every position they are hiring, there would typically be 2 or 3 candidates who spend the day in the school (including teaching a class).

Is getting 2 days off of work really that difficulty (if you plan far enough in advance)?

[Tloewald]

Yes it's terrible.

If you work in the US and have kids for which you take any level of responsibility chances are you can barely keep up with a typical schedule and have very little leave to play with. Pulling two days out of your ass for a job interview is almost impossible.

For a sufficiently awesome job, sure.

[NamTaf]

Correct. I get 4 weeks leave a year plus have flexible working arrangements (1:1 time in lieu if my work schedule e.g.: meetings permits), but that's partly because I'm ex-government (we were privatised) and also because I work in Aus, where 4 weeks is the base standard. Then I get personal leave (illness, caring for ill family, etc.) on top of that.

I know that in the US, it's often less. I've heard friends mention only a handful of days per year for leave, with sometimes needing to take that for 'sick' leave because of such low limits. For them, 2 days off to do a single interview would be impossible.

Obviously they're at the low end of the leave spectrum in the US, but given that the culture there is on the whole more restrictive I wasn't sure how that would affect interviewing.

[marceldegraaf]

Yes, people who are currently employed will have to take a few days off for this. As we're in The Netherlands that is usually no problem. One of the reasons we pay people for these two days is to compensate them for the two days off they'll have to sacrifice.

[taude]

How big is your company? I can't imaging this scaling. This sounds good in theory, but I think one could only hire 1) people currently unemployed or 2) new grads who haven't had jobs. Also, I imagine plenty of good engineers balking at this type of time commitment in building out a feature when the company should likely be proving why the engineer would want to work there?

Is your stack that simple that someone can get up to speed on it in a few minutes so that they can actually build out a feature in two days? Most places I've worked, requires significant onboarding to setup dev machines with all the environments and then understanding how the code flows.

[marceldegraaf]

We are a small startup, currently with 11 people. You are right about the scaling issue, I suppose our approach would be more difficult in a large organisation. But why would we only be able to hire unemployed people or new grads? I joined this company myself when coming from another job, as did a colleague that was hired later.

Proving why an engineer would want to work with us is exactly why we interview with this system of two try-out days. How can we possibly convey that we're doing cool stuff in a one hour talk around the table? Besides, we think the try-out is not only for us to "judge" the candidate, it's also the ideal time for the candidate to see if he fits our culture and way of working, and if he actually likes what we're doing. Hiring someone that decides to leave a month later is waste of time for all people involved :-).

Of course we also do the regular "around the table" interview before we invite someone to work with us for two days. We have a chat of about an hour, tell the candidate we will contact him and then have some internal discussion. If everyone agrees we invite the candidate for a two day try-out. If we feel the candidate fits our company and we like his work, we usually try to make him an offer on the second day.

Concerning our stack: it's all Ruby and Rails, and a lot of Amazon Web Services. Our engineers all have at least 3 years of experience with Ruby and Rails (or similar) and we are usually only looking for somewhat experienced people. We simply don't have the time nor the budget to train a new hire for a few months. To get going on a try-out feature a candidate usually only needs Ruby, git, an editor and a small introduction to our codebase from one of the engineers. Most of them are productive within two hours of entering our office on their first try-out day. Of course these try-out features are very isolated and require little to no background knowledge of the entire codebase. Once the candidate is hired we will take sufficient time to get him comfortable with the code.

[hippee-lee]

I forget the exact details but my current employment agreement has a paragraph saying I won't do contract or consulting work while I am a full time employee here.

Ethically, I would never be able to interview for your company. Don't most companies like tech companies operate in a similar manner? If so, aren't you limiting your hiring pool to either programmers without those types of agreements or thise whom are ethically challenged.

[nitrogen]

Interesting. Many (if not most) of the engineers I met in my earliest jobs were moonlighting. How common is such an anti-moonlighting clause in employment contracts?

[BSousa]

Quite common.

But in many cases, unenforceable. For example, every contract I signed (both in the UK and Portugal) have it, and while I don't know for the UK, here in Portugal you can't sign your rights away which this falls under. So people just sign it and know if worst comes, the courts will always side by you.

[walshemj]

Legal in the UK I think every contract I have ever signed says no outside work with out clearance from your boss.

You can sign some rights away just not all of them.

[BSousa]

It says on the contract, but is it really legal? I'm honestly asking as I mentioned, I know portuguese labour law quite well (my cousin is a lawyer specialising in labour law and as such, she looks over all my contracts and say what is valid or not.) Have you talked with a lawyer about it over there in the UK? I know the UK didn't sign some EU directives about overtime pay for IT workers so they don't fall on the common EU law, but when I was in England, noone I worked with actually knew if the 'outside work' clause was legal. I personally did freelance work (which my leads knew about) and never got any problem for it even though the contract specified I couldn't.

[walshemj]

BTW Professionals are exempt from a lot of the Directives on working time and 99% of IT workers are considered professionals.

Um IANAL but I am an "approved person" as it applies in the UK (ie I could represent some one at a discipline or grievance hearing)

In the UK and the USA employment law descends from the Masters and servants act.

The argument used would be having another job without your employers agreement is a fundamental breach of trust between the employer (master ) and the employee (servant)

[taude]

Most companies even try to own your "thoughts" while employed at them, even for your after hours stuff.

[wtracy]

I'm not sure, but that sounds unenforceable in the state of California (where a lot of HNers are). If you work outside of California, sucks to be you, I guess.

[marceldegraaf]

Interesting point! As far as I know we've never run into this issue. We are in The Netherlands, so perhaps that makes it easier. However, were this ever to become an issue with a particular candidate, I'm sure we are flexible enough to work around that. The two day try-out isn't set in stone, it's just a way for us (and for the candidate) to see if we like each other. There are plenty of other ways to solve that if a try-out poses legal issues.