Today I'd like to speak briefly about the differences I have experienced between full-time employment, freelance, and consulting interview processes.

I'll also comment, for each case, on what the actual work asked of me was once I got to the place. https://twitter.com/drogus/status/1490045261997035521

Who am I to talk about this:

- I've done countless tech interviews, and some of them I even passed. I work at Mozilla FT.
- I do contracts, mostly mobile or data/ML work. 4 active clients, 2 additional awaiting grant awards.
- I give workshops 10-15x/year

I have needed to know how to use a binary tree countless times in my career. I have needed to know how to implement one twice. Both were FT interviews.

I have needed to use recursion twice in my career. I have needed to demonstrate that I could nine times in interviews.

I think those kinds of challenges are fun.

I like them because they're a rare chance to demonstrate, in a feedback-rich environment, the CS knowledge I've taught myself.

And therein lies the rub: this stuff doesn't come up at work.

Lemme be clear: there ARE people who need to implement sorts or searches. They work on programming languages, frameworks, and sometimes libraries.

End user app dev, like most devs at, I dunno, Shopify are doing, almost never have tickets like this.

You know what I do every single day? Track down illusory issues in an existing code base.

No interviewer, ever, full time or part time or consultory, has asked me to demonstrate that I can do that.

I think that this actually costs organizations a metric ton of money, because...

...in addition to the fact that debugging is tough, no one is incentivized to get proper good at it because you're never interviewed or promoted on that skill.

We are, as a group, a buncha prima donnas who can't demonstrate our virtuosity outside a greenfield project.

Best debugger I ever met was this super chill 'mid level.' He sometimes got retro kudos, but that was it.

He never got into passionate implementation arguments or jammed harebrained schemes into a communal code base. He just made shit that worked, and fixed shit that didn't.

I know y'all think I'm talking about J and actually I am not. J was great, but this guy was ridiculous.

He'd pipe up at retro like "Hey, so that flaky build y'all've ignored for 3 years while nose-goesing deployments to avoid dealing with it? I fixed it. Enjoy!"

ANYWAY, I'm getting sidetracked.

That's the first thing I guess, is that FT interviews are the only ones where I have been asked to demonstrate exclusively skills that I know have nothing to do with what would be asked of me when I get there.

Idk if it's because companies have budget for hiring FT and not for getting "outside help," or if they don't have a Google Archetype to follow for it, but staff-aug and consulting interviews are much more to the point.

"We need X. Can you show us evidence that you can do X?"

In fact, these interviewers seem to PREFER it if they don't have to give me a coding challenge.

I can be like "Indeed I CAN do X, here's a blog post where I demonstrate that" and they're like "Oh thank GOD, thank you for making this easy!"

Do that with a FT hiring manager and they're like

"You know, I discussed it with my team, and they still think we need you to do ours."

"This weekend, someone from HR will send you a PDF at an unforeseen time. You'll have 4 hours from send time to submit."

Now, the difference in the WORK between FT and contract:

Turns out, they're both working on the app. One is for less time than the other, maybe.

Now, there is one difference: if I were to say one is, on average, more technically challenging, I'd say it's the contracts.

That's right. For the "UGH let's just get this over with" interview process, the work ends up being more technically challenging than it is at the places where they want me to implement younameit-sort from memory live in front of four scowling men.

Part of this is because of how I have positioned myself as a consultant.

I do a lot of work with clients who have complex requirements and limited tech teams of their own (academics who run scientific research projects, often).

But EVEN for clients where that's NOT the case, the work just averages more challenging.

My hypothesis, for which I have no empirical evidence besides my experience, is that they bring in a contractor to do it after the FT team has either failed or won't touch it to begin with.

I've had folks remind me "yes, but in return for the extra effort up front to go though an interview gauntlet, you get a full-time thing that can last years, with benefits, instead of a couple-month thing with no benefits!"

True.

Lemme talk about why this ain't a selling point.

So first of all

I live in the USA, a country notorious for its limited-and-shrinking labor protections.

I once had a manager pull me aside to SPECIFICALLY remind me that Illinois is an at-will state, meaning, they can usually legally fire you without warning or reason.

This is not somewhere in Europe where taking vacations is normal and firing someone needs serious legal backing, where labor unions are strong or strikes are both common and effective.

This is not a place where starting a FT job means I'll still be employed there in 90 days.

However, what we DO have, is the "job hopper" stigma and, in tech especially, offers that are heavy on equity that only vests after a year.

i.e., they can get rid of YOU, but YOU'RE stuck with THEM for at least a year if you want to keep your money and/or reputation.

Have you ever been in an interview and listened to the hiring manager sell you a boldface lie about what you're getting into? I have.

I'm supposed to PREFER signing for a year, minimum, with a place where I might have no idea what it'll actually be like?

And even if the hiring manager tries to tell you the truth, in my experience, they don't know either.

I have never crossed the year mark at a full time employer with the same manager, or even a team 50% consistent, with the one I had when I got hired.

That's precarious for me. It's a lot safer for me to be able to say "let's do a 6 week contract to see how we gel. If that works, we'll renew every 6 months. Good?"

Always good. No client of mine has ever said no to this.

That is, in the absence of info, I'd RATHER sign on for six weeks than at least a year/maybe multiple years.

Moreover, I've never lost a client I liked. So the "years vs a few months" thing hasn't applied for me. If I want to keep them for years, I keep them for years.

"Okay but what about health insurance?"

Fair. Again, this would also not be an issue if we lived in a country that had not deliberately legislated people's dependence on corporations to get things. Places with nationalized healthcare don't face this tradeoff.

THAT SAID...

In TECH SPECIFICALLY, I also don't face this tradeoff currently because our healthcare marketplace, while kind of annoying and kind of expensive, is not nearly as prohibitively impossible to use as employers would like us to think it is.

When I did not have a FT job...

...I paid for a health insurance plan that was, I guess, OK. Not amazing, but it covered me.

I paid, monthly for that, about 3x my hourly rate. A technologist with more medical needs than me might get one for 10 or 15x their hourly rate. So, 2-3 days of work per month.

Like I said, annoying, expensive, but not, at least for me, compelling enough to think full-time employment competes contract work completely out of consideration.

So, to me, FT work is no more guaranteed than contract work, and doesn't get me things I can't get for myself.

Futhermore, apropos of our original conversation about interviews, contract work is easier to replace than FT work. So it's less precarious for that reason too.

So I guess, to sum up my perspective on the whole kit'n'caboodle

Yeah, employers have some borky interview processes. I think they draw so much ire for precisely the reason they get away with it: the workforce feels like they can't opt out.

In tech specifically, though, the workforce could opt out to some degree.

And if folks were more open to considering that, collectively, that might even provide pressure on FT employers that would be useful for getting these interviews fixed.

Ah, and for the record, what this person said

I work at Mozilla in a compelling role and, critically, they did not demand I quit my contracts (several prospective employers did; these places really have no idea how little they bring to the table, do they) https://twitter.com/ryanbigg/status/1489741952056762369