Company wants me to work a day first before contract

[Zyraz]

Could be that their guys are stuck on a specific problem and cant find a solution .
Your one day there might give them the solution for free...

 

[Voicy]

Tell them you don't feel right doing it but would be happy to do it on a Saturday?

Or just that it's in breach of your current employment contract to offer services (paid or unpaid) to other companies.

 

[touch7]

@Nerhzelok. Your response is the way forward. #spot-on

 

[Pho3nix]

I did mention that I have a stackoverflow account that I last answered a question around 2 years ago when I still did PHP and it's got a 1000 points and I know it's not much. Since 2014 I have done Ruby on Rails. I worked on my own projects aiming high to be ready for the industry. Then in the last 7 months I have been at 2 companies and noticed that the knowledge I already have is similar to those who have 6 or 7 years experience. The first time I learned PHP was in 2009. From 2011 June I used most of my free time doing web stuff.

My current favourite stack is the Rails stack. I have a project I completed 2 years ago that makes use of elasticsearch and memcached. I did not use Redis because I was not using any of its feature and at the Redis cluster was not ready yet. It's weird but there is 7 months experience and there is 7 months commercial experience. We need to be clear that I matter the latter. I am more knowledgeable than 7 months. I've been at 2 companies and have friends who are developers.

So no... I did not get 6 years experience in 7 months, it's the realisation that I'll spend the next 5 years gaining experience and not getting better because no one I know knows unit testing, continuos integration and so on. That's the kind of stuff that I want to be doing. I think if you have written code for some considerable time when someone gives you a solution you can tell that they haven't thought it through enough.

So why do you want to join this company?

 

[touch7]

But but OP has amassed "5 to 6 years" more experience during the year he was there compared to his colleagues. Wont one day be the same as a week to him?

I did mention that I have a stackoverflow account that I last answered a question around 2 years ago when I still did PHP and it's got a 1000 points and I know it's not much. Since 2014 I have done Ruby on Rails. I worked on my own projects aiming high to be ready for the industry. Then in the last 7 months I have been at 2 companies and noticed that the knowledge I already have is similar to those who have 6 or 7 years experience. The first time I learned PHP was in 2009. From 2011 June I used most of my free time doing web stuff.

My current favourite stack is the Rails stack. I have a project I completed 2 years ago that makes use of elasticsearch and memcached. I did not use Redis because I was not using any of its feature and at the Redis cluster was not ready yet. It's weird but there is 7 months experience and there is 7 months commercial experience. We need to be clear that I matter the latter. I am more knowledgeable than 7 months. I've been at 2 companies and have friends who are developers.

So no... I did not get 6 years experience in 7 months, it's the realisation that I'll spend the next 5 years gaining experience and not getting better because no one I know knows unit testing, continuos integration and so on. That's the kind of stuff that I want to be doing. I think if you have written code for some considerable time when someone gives you a solution you can tell that they haven't thought it through enough.

 

[touch7]

So why do you want to join this company?

I had just applied. They told me this at the interview and now I know. I wanted to know other people's experiences

 

[Genisys]

Or just that it's in breach of your current employment contract to offer services (paid or unpaid) to other companies.

You make a good point. A lot of employers won't allow this.

 

[Pho3nix]

I had just applied. They told me this at the interview and now I know. I wanted to know other people's experiences

You want A, they offer B and can see B hasn't worked for their devs. Why join?

 

[touch7]

See it as an opportunity to find out how they do what they do. Give them the joel test...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html
https://ayende.com/blog/175170/meeting-the-joel-test-2-0

Ask yourself this also if you are smarter and more clued up than their 5+ year experienced developers do you want to work there? You are going to run into walls of ego and pride by the sound of things...

Good point. Another I like recently is this one Developer Competency.

 

[touch7]

You want A, they offer B and can see B hasn't worked for their devs. Why join?

Well, won't be joining. Companies do make their ads look good though.

 

[touch7]

Yeah but he's got 7 months of work experience, why would they want to commit to that without an understanding regarding his level of experience.

I see this as a risk for them, take on guy with 7 months exp, he totally sucks and then you have to put up with him and pay him for 3 months... Could be avoided with a 1 day demo right off the bat, yes or no?

EDIT: (not saying you totally suck at all just a possible scenario)

Point taken and I don't blame you for thinking I might suck. To answer your question I would go with a "no", I would still need to learn my way around how they do things at the company and so on. Imagine if the company had their own custom CMS and you must match IDs manually, edit and delete content using something like sequelPro. As you do this, you're there wondering why they didn't use WordPress for such a thing. Now you end up looking like an idiot because you ask a lot of question. Not the "how can I run php on the client" but questions like:

- Why is nginx not chosen over apache2 for the new stuff
- What made you choose MySQL over Postgresql
- I see this is a recent angular project, why didn't you consider using Yeoman
- ...many more.

The reason I say I'm probably 5 to 6 years down the line is because I see people with over 3 years experience as frontend developers who only know html and css. It's a wtf moment for me. 4 years experience and still not using any build tool even where it will work great and avoiding sass? Maybe other companies have better developers but only time will tell. Will need to start going to meetups.

Here is the problem I have:
The guy I work with has worked for over 4 years now. We were working on this application and it had to work in multiple languages. My idea was to do what the rails and android guys do (I think laravel does so to) which is Internationalization (I18n). We don't have a library we can use but since this whole frontend is in Angular1, we could download a custom language json file based on the user's chosen language and then write a function that will look up a value from the downloaded json file given a key. Then instead of hard coding the labels, you use this function to get the label.

When we then have to translate the website, we just make a copy of the language file, change it's name and change the values for each key as required. That's the idea. I explained this for nearly 40 minutes. Eventually it was shot down and we duplicated the folders and manually went through each file looking for words to change. It was painful for me because I know there is a better way than this. It would have been acceptable if he understood what I meant and gave me a good reason to go with a different method. The problem is the folder way is more prone to errors and even harder as you have to find your ways around tags(noise). I won't even go into the translations they gave us. They gave us PDF's and Word Docs. I remember checking almost every word in Google Translate just to be sure that I am translating the right stuff. We were working hard and not smart. All this because he has 4 years experience and I have 7 months. I'd learned about I18n 18 months before that moment.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Ask yourself this also if you are smarter and more clued up than their 5+ year experienced developers do you want to work there? You are going to run into walls of ego and pride by the sound of things...

I think that part falls directly in OP's self-important ego and probably not even remotely based in reality.

Or the guys he has matched himself up against just aren't very good. A dishwasher for five years is after all still a dishwasher.

 

[scienide]

what if in that day, you do programming and fix an issue they had for months.

then?


At end of the day, if you want the job, if it is a big salary jump, then it is up to you.

 

[cguy]

I've never had to work at a company after my initial interview for an "interview part deux". I have, however, after three phone screens, had to take several days off to fly around the world, interview for a full day, and fly back. The real questions are how much do you want this job, and how badly do you want to leave your current job? For the first part, it was a no-brainer for me, so I just took off a week and did it.

This is just a judgement call - I wouldn't go with "what's typically done" as any sort of guideline.

 

[igi]

the way i see it,if you in a market for a job it means you are not to happy with the current-1.

out with the old and in with the new,

 

[MrMag]

Actually I would tell them I don't mind having a 2nd Interview but working a day
is unfair to me and my current Employer who pays my wage and has my loyalty, until you make make an offer and a Employment Contract.
Wanting me to work a day sounds like a trust issue that may of happened in the past where you have hired and the people where not upto the job. I can assure I would be able to handle the work and have ambitions to progress further in the Company if you cannot meet me expectations then I have been looking at the wrong Employer.

 

[Thor]

The title might not be clear enough but I was recently at an interview and the test they gave me was too easy, I am one of those guys who have only worked for about 7 months now but from what I can tell I am at the same skill level as guys with 5 to 6 years experience. It's a whole other story on its own.

But after writing the easy test, they told me I would have to:

• come again to meet the manager
• then come in to work a whole day with them to see how I work
• come in one more time to meet the CEO

All these seem like a process to me. Why didn't the manager come to my interview? I am already working and so why the hell would I want to take a day off to go work for some company that has no guarantee they'd hire me? Why don't I meet the manager and the CEO at the same time? The point on working with them the entire day gets to me as they could have made their test more technical and interacted with me more.

And another thing about the industry is there are many people that have been working for 5 years or more but don't seem to have progressed in my opinion. The number of "frontend developers" that have worked for more than 4 years and don't know how to use either grunt, gulp or webpack is a lot. The amount of time something like live-reload or browser-sync save is a lot in my opinion but some don't know them. If you know javascript how do you not know how to use NodeJS?

Maybe it's because I work at a consulting agency but South Africa has very little to teach. Or maybe it's because I take initiative on my own by watching conferences to keep updated and learn more that many don't do.

Back to the question: has anyone ever had to work for a day at a company before they got hired? I am already employed and just don't like taking a day only to go work at some other company.

Feel exactly the same as you do regarding the level your on and high level of stagnation in this industry by peers.

 

[Cicero]

I really don't see the big deal (as long as its not paid), this is just another full day interview second round, loads of companies do that.

In this full day interview, they're just having you work along side them. It sounds chilled.

Other companies might give you set tests all day, psychometric and technical, elaborate problem solving quizzes, tell you to do whiteboard programming, test your algorithm knowledge, ask you to explain everything and optimise whilst explaining big-O notation etc etc, the list is endless.

 

[_kabal_]

Feel exactly the same as you do regarding the level your on and high level of stagnation in this industry by peers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

 

[[)roi(]]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Hahaha... I had the same thought.