
Why all job interviews should include doing *real* work - weswinham
https://medium.com/policystat-product-development/why-all-jobs-interviews-should-include-doing-real-work-34b54d393939
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marssaxman
I don't see how this can be practical when it generally takes at least a week
of ramp-up before a new hire has gained enough familiarity with the tools and
codebase to do anything that could be called "real work".

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weswinham
While that 1-week (or longer) ramp-up is generally true for companies, it's
clearly not true for most (successful) open source projects. The things that a
good open source project has (good documentation, onboarding, tests, etc.) are
also the things that a good work sample will have.

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bigtimeidiot
> _Why all job interviews should include doing real work_

And _real pay_ to go along with it?

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weswinham
If the work is in any way usable to the interviewing company, definitely. We
went that route for one of our work samples where abstracting out a context-
mirroring scenario was going to be very difficult. We then paid the candidates
for the time spent doing the 4-hour take-home work sample.

One anti-pattern here involves turning all of your work samples into week-long
consulting engagements. Those are a great way to evaluate candidates, but it
means you can only hire folks who are already doing consulting (or are
otherwise unemployed). For some companies, that works.

