
Ask HN: Can we make an ethical, effective standard for programmer interviews? - aethertap
Issues with technical interviews for programmer positions come up often here. The latest one made me wonder if it would be possible to come up with a standard interview process that would tick a few boxes:<p>- Technically deep enough to reveal useful information<p>- Fair to the applicant (no free labor&#x2F;conflict of interest issues)<p>- Time efficient for both the interviewer and the applicant (doesn&#x27;t take a week of life to interview for a single position)<p>- Maybe give indications on other important things? (work habits, social interaction, etc)<p>My off-the-cuff thought was to ask for them to work on a smallish issue on an open source project they haven&#x27;t contributed to before. After the work has been done, they&#x27;d come in to be interviewed about what they did and how it worked out. If this was a standard process, they&#x27;d be able to use the same work for multiple interviews, so job hunting wouldn&#x27;t be such a huge burden. It also gives them a chance to showcase a few skills that I&#x27;ve found important in my own career (navigating a new codebase, integrating and testing a bugfix&#x2F;enhancement, interacting with team members). It would also have the nice side effect of providing some motivated help for open source projects.<p>That was just a quick stab at the issue to use as an example, I&#x27;m sure it has a number of fatal flaws. The question is, could there be a solution that would actually work?
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AnimalMuppet
> Fair to the applicant (no free labor/conflict of interest issues)

Absolutely.

> My off-the-cuff thought was to ask for them to work on a smallish issue on
> an open source project they haven't contributed to before.

I think you just contradicted the previous quote. Sure, you're going to let
them re-use it across multiple interviews, which is somewhat better. It's
still not good, though. No free labor for interviews!

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dawidw
If all the interviews were similar, how would you distinguish between good and
bad company?

