Provisional employment doesn’t work for most cases, though. It might attract people who have no job and it might attract people who have so much saved that they are okay with potentially being let go after 90 days. But I imagine the vast majority of the potential employment pool are not willing to quit their current job to accept a “maybe” job from another company.
But the "way more than 4 hours" thing smuggles in a premise: that every candidate should be able to finish the challenge in the allotted time. But candidates with greater aptitude or conversance with the problem domain will complete work sample tests faster than candidates without, and selecting for those candidates is the point of hiring qualification.
If I ask you to write me a python function to convert OSGB easting/northing into WGS84 longitude/latitude the task has a very clearly defined scope. If you knock it out in a quarter of the allotted 4 hours, you've saved time. You can't use the remaining time to go further and demonstrate your mastery.
On the other hand if I ask you to write me a website for organising photos, there's no such thing as 'done' - no matter how good you are, after 4 hours you'll still be able to think of ways to make it faster, more beautiful, more featureful, more scalable, cheaper to operate, etc
Obviously, as a hiring manager I'll notice if you've spent 40 hours on the 4 hour task - but if you've spent 6 hours maybe I just think you're a fast worker with relevant experience and sharp tools. And my sense of how far you can get is calibrated by other prospective hires; if lots of people are spending 6 hours and claiming to have spent 4, my expectations will naturally be high.
For all its flaws, part of the benefit of an interview is it's time bound and equal for everyone. Similar to a test.
This isn't a college application.
The rest of this I'm not interested in. For as long as we've been talking about hiring processes on HN, there have always been staunch defenders of interviews. Lots of people have spent time getting good at them, there are classes on it, there are books, there are drilling exercises. I don't anticipate talking those people out of their investment in interviewing.
People aren't saying that. They are saying that other candidates will put in more time. If I do a professional job in four hours, then an equally talented candidate who puts in eight hours will produce a much more polished effort, and they will get the job.
I guess the fix is to ask the candidate to pick a four hour window, and to ask them to complete the task in that time.
I understand that some people are concerned that they're competing with candidates who will put in 12 hours to do what they should be doing in 4. But that's not their problem. Their problem as a professional is to evaluate whether they can do the challenge in 4 hours; that's the expectation the job is setting.
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to look at the hiring process we're running and say "no, this communicates to me that this job wouldn't be a good fit for me". That's a good outcome! Most jobs aren't a good fit for most people; that's the whole challenge of hiring.
With AI coding this is also largely useless. These “build this thing in 4 hours” assignments come with a literal prepared prompt so that they can be churned out in 10 minutes.
Again, the underlying smuggled premise here is that candidates have to finish the work sample. No they don't. In fact, that's a strong sign it's not an effective work sample. A test that everybody passes isn't a real test; it's just a hazing ritual.
So you saved yourself/the team several possible hours of interviewing, and me quite a few hours - I think it took me about 10 to 15 minutes to see what you wanted in an engineer and that I was not it, and a total of 1 email which felt quite automated (whether it was or not) so there was a very low social cost as well.
> Again, the underlying smuggled premise here is that candidates have to finish the work sample. No they don't. In fact, that's a strong sign it's not an effective work sample. A test that everybody passes isn't a real test; it's just a hazing ritual.
Now this is an interesting take. Usually when people talk about these take home assignments, they talk about assessing the quality of the work. How good is the design? How is the coding? Is it efficient/elegant/whatever?
Here you take a much different approach, saying that the completion itself is the filter. If one person completes your assignment in the allotted 2 hours and another needs 12 but never tells you that, do you not care about that discrepancy?
I'm having a real hard time seeing how this isn't strictly better than an interview, which, as the article (and basically everything written in the last year about interviews) points out, is basically a random function.
The AI thing is an interesting problem, but a solvable one. We continue to hire resume-blind.
Would this company permit an employee taking 3 months unpaid leave to provisional hire somewhere else and have free choice whether they stay or go at the end of it.
It might be a more salient concern now, in the era of AI agents, and we are much warier today than I was at Matasano, but generally I think this risk is more talked about than experienced.
Yes, standard interview loops also discriminate, and the more time they take, the more discriminatory they are. Any on-site requirements compound the issues.
Like Yegge says: provisional employment/internships solve all of these issues. You get the best of all worlds: stable employment for the candidate where they get paid a regular wage and aren't under a stressful interview setting, and lots and lots of work samples for you, the employer. It's not perfect. For example, it can be difficult to entrust the provisional employee/intern with anything impactful if you don't know whether they'll be employed at the end. But it is significantly better than the alternatives in most contexts.
It works. I’ve seen it in two different places.
At the second one, the fundamental realization I came to was that it is virtually no different than “regular” employment, where the new employee can get fired for not meeting expectations within an arbitrary time period after being hired. This can be months, or even weeks. From the perspective of the candidate, regular employment and provisional employment have roughly the same level of risk: in both cases they take a job where they might be let go at some point. The benefit of provisional employment is that they know how long they will be evaluated for and against whom. It turns out a lot of candidates do in fact like the all-cards-on-the-table approach and enjoy being given the opportunity to prove themselves on the job.
Nobody does this, of course, but then provisional employment is a silly idea to begin with.
If you are going to take a day off to do 3-4 in person interviews at a company then this slots in well.