Work samples beat interviews for assessing talent

I always make people do work. I think we've gone back and forth on Twitter about this. And it's funny, it's definitely something that it's just in the last, I don't know, five or six years, I feel like people are really pushing back on doing what they I think unfairly characterize as free work for a company.

"This" refers to Linear's paid work trial process, where candidates work as mini-contractors on real problems before being hired.

Why we do this is that we just seeing that it's a very good way to see for both of us, both for the company and the candidates to see how we work together.

Cursor hires engineers through a two-day onsite work project where candidates build mock features in their actual codebase.

We have people onsite for two days, and do a project with us, a work test project. And that has worked really well, that increasingly you're finding that.

What are you going to learn from let's say even eight hours of interviews that you're not going to have learned from four months of real work experience?

"Kodak" appears to be a transcription error for "Claude," which along with ChatGPT and Cursor are AI coding tools used for software development.

I think the people that can leverage AI to do whatever their day-to-day workflows are... We'll give people interviews where we say, 'Use ChatGPT and Kodak. Use Claude code. Use whatever tool cursor and whatever tools are available to build a website and let's see what product you're able to build in an hour.'

We do a lot of trials for people. So trial work to see them in action for a couple of days. We pay them as part of the work trial. We have some probation periods that we start people on, because this company is not for everybody.