from Hacker News

Ask HN: Your opinion about “tournament” to hire people?

by chukye on 8/18/17, 11:28 AM with 24 comments

• by matt_s on 8/18/17, 12:10 PM

  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.

• by sevilo on 8/18/17, 6:57 PM

  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.

• by lsiebert on 8/19/17, 2:06 AM

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

• by bsvalley on 8/18/17, 1:29 PM

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

• by thisone on 8/19/17, 11:35 AM

  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.

• by Klockan on 8/18/17, 8:04 PM

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

• by UK-AL on 8/18/17, 12:15 PM

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

  I think they are relying on recruiting younger developers.

• by romanovcode on 8/18/17, 12:51 PM

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

• by kojeovo on 8/18/17, 12:07 PM

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

• by bjourne on 8/18/17, 12:32 PM

  That's incredibly unethical.

• by 29052017 on 8/18/17, 1:05 PM

  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.