"programming"

The longest for me is 5 hours but this is ridiculous. The only people that would be able to apply are people who are unemployed. As someone who has interviewed people for programming jobs, it really doesn't take more than 2 hours to figure out if someone is a good fit.

Violation of labor laws. This is illegal. They have people doing full time work for less than minimum wage. The fact that they call it an "interview" is hardly a reasonable distinction. I hope the idiots involved suck a nice 6 or 7 digit fine for this.

If you think about it. If you are currently at a job, you can get vacation pay, for that week, you get to see if the company is really a good fir for you. Also the company sees if you are a good fit for it.

Now if the company just doesn't hire people. Then there is a problem. Because they just found a way to get free labor. However I don't see that the case because it is really hard to do a lot of real work the first week.

So I go into my boss' office and say "So I need a week off next week to go down to Florida and do the world's most insane interview. Do you mind?" I mean, it's not like this is the sort of thing you can plan for months in advance and come up with a reasonable reason that you need the week off. If I ask my boss for a week off next month without any details, he might go for it without questions, but next week? He'll want to know who died. This is ignoring the fact that I like to use my vacation time for... ya know... vacation?

Completely untrue. Countless people have enjoyed, and do enjoy programming in PHP. I myself am one.

Yes, I recognize the language's many obvious (and many not-so-obvious) failings, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun using it. There are plenty of ways to write good PHP code (Zend standards/framework, for instance).

PHP's biggest problem aren't its (numerous) issues as a language. PHP's biggest problem are the 90%+ of the "PHP Programmers" who are abhorrently bad at programming in general, and think they're programmers simply because they wrote a little bit of HTML with embedded PHP, or installed Wordpress *shudder*.

Granted, I prefer Python to PHP any day of the week for both fun and function.... Never written any Ruby.

I don't see how this unpaid week-long stint is of any benefit at all to the employee. Sure, it'll help the employer avoid hiring poor performers or people who don't fit into the organization, but what does the employee get out of it? The only benefit for the employee I see is if the candidate is going to have to make a long-distance move to take the job; moving (esp. from out-of-state) incurs significant costs, which can take a while to earn back in paychecks. However, this is really something the employee should consider themselves; it's frequently a good idea to just rent a room or efficiency short-term while you're in your "probationary period" with such a new job, so if it doesn't work out (which could be for all kinds of reasons, not just poor performance on your part; maybe the coworkers are assholes or you find the city to be a cesspool and didn't realize until you had to live there for a while), you can quit the job and go back home without losing much, but still retaining the pay you earned. This goes double if the employer isn't giving you any relocation bonus (which is probably usually the case these days; these used to be common 10+ years ago, but not any more unfortunately).

I think this week-long interview thing is a pile of crap really. They're getting a week of free work out of the candidate in exchange for nothing besides the cost of renting this condo (which they've probably rented long-term to save on costs, and they just stick a new candidate in it every week) and airfare, and the candidate walks away with nothing if he doesn't get the job, except for week in a beachfront condo which isn't all that great when you have to spend all day at the workplace, and not at the condo. The candidate's significant other might be getting a good deal here, but only if they had nothing better to do than spend a week on the beach while their SO was interviewing; if they have their own job or don't want to burn their vacation time this way, it's not such a great deal at all. I think this would be fine, however, if they paid the candidate for their time on an hourly basis like any normal contractor, but this company is probably too cheap to do that. I'm surprised this is even legal actually.

Not if you want the best candidates it is not. Often those types already have jobs.

Quite possible. xaoslaad didn't say that your friend had a fucked-up personality, just that it might not be a fit. If the company is full of assholes, and he's not an asshole, then he wouldn't be a good fit. There's a lot of companies like that. As the old saying goes, "birds of a feather flock together", and you frequently see this dynamic in workplaces. You go to one company and everyone's really friendly and great, and you go to another company and everyone has serious personality problems or is an asshole. The assholes don't stick around company #1 because they get fired, not hired in the first place, or don't like that their behavior isn't well-tolerated when they get called out on it. The decent people don't stick around company #2 because they don't like being around assholes and look for a new job ASAP, or they don't get hired because "they're not a team player".

I do a lot of work in Ruby, too. I notice that lots of Ruby gems contain C code. Someone competent is writing that.

Language fascists aren't generally as good at programming as they think. They'd understand where interpretive languages make sense, if they were.

Homo sapiens? That's good enough for me.