You Should Pay to Interview Me

 I was recently interviewed by a company for a web developer position. After an initial screening call they informed me that the technical portion of my interview was going to be implementing some website functionality based on written requirements they would provide.

The requirements were well written and straightforward. The task was to create a customer subscription page where the customer could choose to sign up for different months of service. As the months increased the price per month decreased. This page had to integrate with PayPal. The HTML had to be written so that someone else could make it look good using CSS.

In about a day I turned this code back in. For this they compensated me $1,000. They received a functioning piece of software, learned that I could follow requirements and implement them, and didn't waste their developers' time interviewing me. I made some money instead of wasting my time on yet another interview.

There are a few things to point out here.

1) Someone had to put effort into defining the business requirements and articulating them clearly to another human being.

2) The code was naturally broken into small pieces. This follows the Unix Philosophy and leads to more easily maintainable, and therefore cheaper, software.

3) The interview process has provided value to the company. By clearly defining the requirements the company has acquired a drop-in implementation that they own and which improves their software. Compare with traditional interviewing where tens of man hours are burnt with nothing to show for it.

Note how all three of the above points were benefits to the company doing the interviewing rather than me.

If your company were to make this process the norm imagine how much better your software would be by having clear requirements written before coding begins.