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> Candidates pair with members of the engineering team, and work together on problems/projects in the actual CircleCI codebase. Are they compensated for this w

> Candidates pair with members of the engineering team, and work together on problems/projects in the actual CircleCI codebase. Are they compensated for this work?

lghh 8y ago
If you are interviewing X number of people for 1 job, you also have to expect a candidate is applying at ~X number of jobs. Asking them to work on your codebase without compensation, or do any take home work without compensation, is exploitative.
rrdharan 8y ago
I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Are you asking if they should be? Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates? If I were betting on this I would wager that something like 95% of the time, the existing employee would be able to solve the project or problem much faster without the candidate's input at all, but the point is to try and approximate a more realistic work experience and environment. I think that's a reasonable goal and I don't think CircleCI should be vilified for it.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  > I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Not at all. > Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates? Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 That was on the front page three days ago. The GP's concern is legitimate; job interviews should not be an excuse for unpaid labor.
  - rrdharan 8y ago
    > Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time That's fair. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible, and especially given what I've heard from friends who've worked in freelance web development there's a huge long tail of scummy opportunities out there. I more meant to suggest that it was unlikely this was CircleCI's motivation. Also an important distinction between these two situations is that in the example you point out, someone is being assigned a specific task to produce some new IP which the company can then simply steal, whereas in the CircleCI case I am assuming the "problem/projects" they have you pair on are something in the neighborhood of e.g. "let's go analyze some page load performance data together and see if we can fix some low hanging fruit" or "let's figure out how to set up an alert in our Slack channel for this signal we have in some logs". Yes it's still true that a candidate could come up with some brilliant insight that saves CircleCI real money in this scenario, but it just seems unlikely and not something they could profitably build a development strategy around.
- wongma 8y ago
  I don't see any vilification in that question.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  The same could be said about many junior positions. Should they pay for privilege to work for this respectable company?
smiths1999 8y ago
I find this attitude frustrating. It seems like a constant on sites like reddit and HN is a strong disdain for the algorithmic question style technical interview. Some companies take note and switch up the interview process and ask real world questions (like CircleCI using a current bug or problem) rather than how to invert a binary tree and people get upset about not being compensated. How should companies interview people in a manner that assesses their technical skills but doesn't "exploit" them? Personally I think the algorithm based interviews are great but also see value in these modified approaches of a short take-home assignment.
- lghh 8y ago
  By paying them for their work if you are asking them to do anything outside of an interview.
  - smiths1999 8y ago
    Sure if the company gives a long assignment that takes several hours or more, that is reasonable. But I do not expect to be compensated for an hour long assessment/assignment - that seems ridiculous. If a candidate asked for compensation for an hour long assessment I gave them that would be a _major_ red flag. In this specific case, that is not what is happening. Rather than assessing candidates on some arbitrary algorithms question (which people are constantly complaining about), they are giving them a real problem the team is currently tackling. It's your time to shine and show how well you work as an engineer on real problems. I'm baffled that companies have finally heard the non-stop complaints about algorithms questions and are treated to new complaints about not being compensated for time spent interviewing. What an amazing time to be alive
    - lghh 8y ago
      You keep bringing this false dichotomy up, that because some companies have given up white board algo questions they can then as you to do whatever they want outside of the interview. Yeah, if something was only going to take an hour I wouldn't complain. But I have been extended multiple 8+ hour take home work from companies. That's not okay. That being said, I don't know what an hour take home problem could be past an open book white board problem anyways. You're not learning anything new about the candidate letting them take it home than you are doing it in room. "What an amazing time to be alive"
nunez 8y ago
This question is a red herring. I hate this question because the only acceptable answer is to ask candidates about their experience and make a gut feel on that. Which only works if your gut feel is properly calibrated. Which often looks like unconscious bias. Anything else is "too much work" on the candidate. A take-home? "I don't have time to work on unpaid stuff!" A pairing session? "I don't have time to work on unpaid stuff!" Software engineering trivia? "Why are they asking me to build a linked list when I'd just use stdlib in real life?" Asking about stuff on the resume? "They've never worked on ${thing}; how could they judge me on it?"
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Or hire them provisionally, and decide 90 days later. For instance. There are lots of ways to compensate Engineering hires without asking them to do unpaid work.
  - nunez 8y ago
    That is problematic for a number of reasons: 1. Hiring a new employee into an existing team permanently affects the team's dynamic and morale. Bringing in a bad fit can have undesired cascade effects. Bad team members can cause other good team members to leave earlier than intended, for example. You can counteract this by having the entire team interview the candidate, but this doesn't scale for teams larger than, say, three candidates, doesn't work at all for distributed teams and takes their time away from work that needs to get done. 2. Hiring an employee is also a legal risk. Firing people in "protected" classes is touchy and can take a while, for example: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/62846 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/62846. You're also opening yourself up to unnecessary lawsuits that just add more of a headache for Legal to deal with...if you have legal. (Early-stage startups typically don't have legal teams.) 3. Hiring engineers is expensive beyond their base salaries. Firing bad engineers can be a huge waste of money. If you're an early stage startup, you're better off hiring contractors for point work and taking time to find the best hires that you can. Later-stage or profitable companies can afford to not hire "false positives". At worst, a potentially-good candidate you're on the fence about can come back in six or twelve months and try again.

> Candidates pair with members of the engineering team, and work together on problems/projects in the actual CircleCI codebase. Are they compensated for this work?

lghh 8y ago

If you are interviewing X number of people for 1 job, you also have to expect a candidate is applying at ~X number of jobs. Asking them to work on your codebase without compensation, or do any take home work without compensation, is exploitative.

rrdharan 8y ago

I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Are you asking if they should be? Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates? If I were betting on this I would wager that something like 95% of the time, the existing employee would be able to solve the project or problem much faster without the candidate's input at all, but the point is to try and approximate a more realistic work experience and environment. I think that's a reasonable goal and I don't think CircleCI should be vilified for it.

Analemma_ 8y ago
> I feel like this is a disingenuous question. Not at all. > Do you believe that CircleCI has some nefarious plot to increase engineering team productivity by mining spare workcycles out of interview candidates? Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661338 That was on the front page three days ago. The GP's concern is legitimate; job interviews should not be an excuse for unpaid labor.
- rrdharan 8y ago
  > Your tone suggests that you think this is impossible, but it happens all the time That's fair. To be clear, I don't think it's impossible, and especially given what I've heard from friends who've worked in freelance web development there's a huge long tail of scummy opportunities out there. I more meant to suggest that it was unlikely this was CircleCI's motivation. Also an important distinction between these two situations is that in the example you point out, someone is being assigned a specific task to produce some new IP which the company can then simply steal, whereas in the CircleCI case I am assuming the "problem/projects" they have you pair on are something in the neighborhood of e.g. "let's go analyze some page load performance data together and see if we can fix some low hanging fruit" or "let's figure out how to set up an alert in our Slack channel for this signal we have in some logs". Yes it's still true that a candidate could come up with some brilliant insight that saves CircleCI real money in this scenario, but it just seems unlikely and not something they could profitably build a development strategy around.
wongma 8y ago
I don't see any vilification in that question.
vbezhenar 8y ago
The same could be said about many junior positions. Should they pay for privilege to work for this respectable company?

smiths1999 8y ago

I find this attitude frustrating. It seems like a constant on sites like reddit and HN is a strong disdain for the algorithmic question style technical interview. Some companies take note and switch up the interview process and ask real world questions (like CircleCI using a current bug or problem) rather than how to invert a binary tree and people get upset about not being compensated. How should companies interview people in a manner that assesses their technical skills but doesn't "exploit" them? Personally I think the algorithm based interviews are great but also see value in these modified approaches of a short take-home assignment.

lghh 8y ago
By paying them for their work if you are asking them to do anything outside of an interview.
- smiths1999 8y ago
  Sure if the company gives a long assignment that takes several hours or more, that is reasonable. But I do not expect to be compensated for an hour long assessment/assignment - that seems ridiculous. If a candidate asked for compensation for an hour long assessment I gave them that would be a _major_ red flag. In this specific case, that is not what is happening. Rather than assessing candidates on some arbitrary algorithms question (which people are constantly complaining about), they are giving them a real problem the team is currently tackling. It's your time to shine and show how well you work as an engineer on real problems. I'm baffled that companies have finally heard the non-stop complaints about algorithms questions and are treated to new complaints about not being compensated for time spent interviewing. What an amazing time to be alive
  - lghh 8y ago
    You keep bringing this false dichotomy up, that because some companies have given up white board algo questions they can then as you to do whatever they want outside of the interview. Yeah, if something was only going to take an hour I wouldn't complain. But I have been extended multiple 8+ hour take home work from companies. That's not okay. That being said, I don't know what an hour take home problem could be past an open book white board problem anyways. You're not learning anything new about the candidate letting them take it home than you are doing it in room. "What an amazing time to be alive"

nunez 8y ago

This question is a red herring. I hate this question because the only acceptable answer is to ask candidates about their experience and make a gut feel on that. Which only works if your gut feel is properly calibrated. Which often looks like unconscious bias. Anything else is "too much work" on the candidate. A take-home? "I don't have time to work on unpaid stuff!" A pairing session? "I don't have time to work on unpaid stuff!" Software engineering trivia? "Why are they asking me to build a linked list when I'd just use stdlib in real life?" Asking about stuff on the resume? "They've never worked on ${thing}; how could they judge me on it?"

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Or hire them provisionally, and decide 90 days later. For instance. There are lots of ways to compensate Engineering hires without asking them to do unpaid work.
- nunez 8y ago
  That is problematic for a number of reasons: 1. Hiring a new employee into an existing team permanently affects the team's dynamic and morale. Bringing in a bad fit can have undesired cascade effects. Bad team members can cause other good team members to leave earlier than intended, for example. You can counteract this by having the entire team interview the candidate, but this doesn't scale for teams larger than, say, three candidates, doesn't work at all for distributed teams and takes their time away from work that needs to get done. 2. Hiring an employee is also a legal risk. Firing people in "protected" classes is touchy and can take a while, for example: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/62846 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/62846. You're also opening yourself up to unnecessary lawsuits that just add more of a headache for Legal to deal with...if you have legal. (Early-stage startups typically don't have legal teams.) 3. Hiring engineers is expensive beyond their base salaries. Firing bad engineers can be a huge waste of money. If you're an early stage startup, you're better off hiring contractors for point work and taking time to find the best hires that you can. Later-stage or profitable companies can afford to not hire "false positives". At worst, a potentially-good candidate you're on the fence about can come back in six or twelve months and try again.