[H-GEN] Forming a consultancy [was: New HD in Sunblade 100]

Greg Black gjb at humbug.org.au
Thu Apr 18 22:35:48 EDT 2002


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Jason Henry Parker wrote:

| Quite frankly it's a disgrace that any company of any size should
| baulk at paying their employees or contractors. [...]

Yes it is a disgrace, but unfortunately it's very common
practice, not just in our field.  Can anyone remember Ansett?

| I've seen a number of people get shafted by being asked to
| `demonstrate their skills' on some important problem [...]

Ah yes, you should always refuse this kind of invitation.

Speaking from the point of view of the prospective employer,
it's necessary to discover if the new person does indeed have
suitable skills -- but it's never necessary to exploit them to
sort this out.  The following discussion applies to an applicant
for a C programming job, but can be adapted for other tasks
easily enough.

You can ask them to bring in printed samples of their work as a
first step.  Printed is good because it means they know you
can't steal it from them as you could if they copied it on to
one of your systems and they can be sure to take the printed
copy away with them when they leave.  Of course, they might have
stolen the printout, so you need to be able to test them a bit.

I have found that asking questions like "why is this line of
code placed there?" to be quite helpful.  You find a line that
looks interesting (preferably wrong), place your finger on it
and ask the question while watching their face.  This usually
gives a good clue about their relationship with the code.

The thing is, the candidate will be inclined to bring the most
impressive possible code in for the interview and this can lead
to them making errors of judgement.  They need to be on top of
the code; the code has to look decent and maintainable; the
approach to the problem has to make sense; and the interviewer
has a background that is unknown.  This puts enough pressure on
the candidate for most bad ones to fail quickly and most good
ones to be obvious.

If all else fails, I give them a terminal and ask them to
implement the Unix cat command, as described in the manual and
without using any code from the real source.  If that goes well,
then they get put to work and remain subject to performance
review on a regular basis until they have proved their ability.
This avoids both exploitation and wasting money on people who
misrepresent their capabilities.

Greg

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