
Ask HN: Your opinion about “tournament” to hire people? - chukye
Today I received an email with a &quot;tournament&quot; of a company for hire process, they want 200 developers in a room the full day, working in some solutions and in the end they will select a few to work for their company earning $100k&#x2F;y.<p>I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s something a people should do these days, this looks more gladiator stuff... what is your thoughts?
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matt_s
200 hundred developers for ~8 hours and they value developers at roughly
$50/hr. So they want $80,000 of free work with a reward at the end of getting
a job for $100k/yr.

Steer clear of it. If this is their mental model of how work should be done,
imagine what it is like inside the company.

I would also wonder, if in the US, what laws they might be breaking for this
"hiring" process.

~~~
brudgers
What makes this stand out is not the business model, but the lack of
sophisticated PR polish and the nakedness of the value proposition.

That's how a lot of big open source projects like Chrome and Android and React
work...except it's more than 100 developers for more than a 8 hours and there
is a lower ratio of jobs on offer at the end...and NPM and Github have a
similar model except that they profit by aggregating code people contribute
for free.

~~~
matt_s
I understand how open source work gets "sourced" but this approach to hiring
sounds very much like they see developers as entirely replaceable. How would
you evaluate people in a tournament style as a good fit for a job? This sounds
very much like they think devs are like cattle.

~~~
brudgers
Is this better or worse than the apps stores? Or similar?

For the app store, developers write code without being paid and compete with
each other. The corporate entity behind the competition doesn't pay the losers
and takes a cut from the winners and the winners rarely make $100k/year and
have no job security because the corporate entity can change the rules
arbitrarily.

Or to put it another way, a tournament of 100 developers competing for five
$100k/year jobs provides each developer with an expected value of
$5k/year/eight_hours. That's an expected value of $612.50/hour. In terms of
the App store that's like writing another FlappyBird.

Like I said, the main difference here is the lack of PR polish and the
nakedness of the value proposition.

~~~
mars4rp
"Or to put it another way, a tournament of 100 developers competing for five
$100k/year jobs provides each developer with an expected value of
$5k/year/eight_hours. That's an expected value of $612.50/hour. In terms of
the App store that's like writing another FlappyBird."

this would have been true if the selected developers didn't need to work for a
year and get paid for it!!! you can calculate it by ($100k - $marketRate )/
year / eight_hour !!!

~~~
brudgers
I agree. I got carried away ranting about app stores...again.

How likely is it that a developer will develop an app in 8 hours with an
expected value of $5k/365 or $13.70?

~~~
mars4rp
Every developer that spent a year developing an app does so on the hope of
$millions. No body create a band to perform in their garage, everybody do so
in the hope of being Beatles!

------
sevilo
My problem is not so much about getting paid, lots of companies when they hire
they carry out at ~4hour in person interview, within which you'll be spending
at least 2-3 hours solving problems and you're not getting paid to do it.

However I will not feel comfortable working for this company knowing this is
their hiring process, they pay no respect to a developer's skill to
communicate and work with others, their knowledge in building software at
large scale, ability in bringing improvement to other people's skills and the
company's processes. Sorry to be blunt but it sounds to me they're trying to
hire code monkeys/coding robots not software developers.

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lsiebert
I guess you might be able to go, eat the food, work on your own project, and
walk out.

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bsvalley
Where is this? Which coutry/city? Where I live it's the opposite, you receive
200 emails per year from recruiters for jobs.

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thisone
from my perspective of someone who likes working in collaborative
environments, it's bullshit and indicative of a place that I would never want
to work for.

------
Klockan
Sounds like a typical hackathon, people participate in those for free all the
time so I don't think that this is strange.

~~~
quickthrower2
Hackathons typically let you

1\. Choose your team

2\. Choose your project

3\. Keep the IP

~~~
Klockan
Who said that those things don't apply here?

~~~
quickthrower2
They may do but how would they judge i For example if each team uses a
different programming language.

I would imagine the tourney would fixate on a specific challenge to be done in
a specific programming language. It's going to be a fizzbuzz experience.

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UK-AL
Massive waste of developers time if they are not paid for this.

I think they are relying on recruiting younger developers.

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romanovcode
Are you get payed for the day? If so then it's fine I guess, no harm no faul.

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kojeovo
If I got paid and got to keep the IP I might consider it.

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bjourne
That's incredibly unethical.

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29052017
A lot of people here are whining about getting paid.

If there are 200 developers who are willing to participate in such a
tournament, then its most likely that they are either jobless, or looking for
a better position or find this kind of tournament fair game.

Regarding getting paid for your code, I just want to ask do you get paid for
writing/designing programs or solving problems when you go give a regular
interview. Of course not. Apart from perhaps from a free lunch at the onsite
facility and the travel tickets, do you ever expect to be paid your average
hourly rate when you go to give interviews at companies like Google or Apple.
I don't think so.

If someone whines about getting paid, then you need to assume that the person
has either made it or is not jobless. A lot of jobless people would go great
distances to land a job - sitting in a AC room for a day writing programs is
surely not that unpleasant a demand.

I am sure that a lot of folks here would have a very different opinion if they
were jobless/homeless or looking desperately for a job.

~~~
quickthrower2
I've read people complain about not getting paid when a company asks you to do
a test as the first step but there is no effort exerted by the employer. They
want 4 hrs of your time but put 0 in of theirs so far. This thus allows the
company to get tens or hundreds of candidates to spend that time when really
only one will be selected.

