Ask HN: Your opinion about “tournament” to hire people?
Today I received an email with a "tournament" 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/y.
I don't think that's something a people should do these days, this looks more gladiator stuff... what is your thoughts?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 !!!
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?
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!
I wouldn't equate sourcing unpaid closed-source work and typically paid open-source work.
I occasionally get paid to work on open-source projects that happen to help my company. Because you know, it's my job.
"If this is their mental model of how work should be done, imagine what it is like inside the company" - exactly!
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.
I guess you might be able to go, eat the food, work on your own project, and walk out.
Where is this? Which coutry/city? Where I live it's the opposite, you receive 200 emails per year from recruiters for jobs.
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.
Sounds like a typical hackathon, people participate in those for free all the time so I don't think that this is strange.
Hackathons typically let you
1. Choose your team
2. Choose your project
3. Keep the IP
Who said that those things don't apply here?
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.
Massive waste of developers time if they are not paid for this.
I think they are relying on recruiting younger developers.
Are you get payed for the day? If so then it's fine I guess, no harm no faul.
If I got paid and got to keep the IP I might consider it.
That's incredibly unethical.
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.
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.
If you treat your own time as if it's worth nothing, others will too.