Recruitly: Evaluate Code to Get Paid | Hacker News Reader

Recruitly: Evaluate Code to Get Paid

recruitly.co

36 pointsrecruitly45 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

"If your work isn't ready for people to try out yet, please don't do a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then."

Can you specify in what way this isn't "ready?" I'd assume it's because they seem to be peddling "early access" in which case that's not an immediate indication that's "not ready."

"Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs."

Perhaps this should have been the quote pasted above instead.

I'm sorry. I should have known better or/and taking the time to read the rules.

However, like delinka says this is an invitation to a private beta, where our beta MVP is sent out to a select users we screen. Hence, the landing page will remain until we open our MVP to the public. In any case, many who signup to the mailing list now will gain access to an early version real soon.

This reminds me of how unions used to certify that their members were competent. Specifically, the Carpenters' Union in my area administers tests for different levels of skill, and rates union carpenters based on the results of these tests. To be rated a Journeyman, for instance, the test requires you to demonstrate competence at a variety of carpentry techniques that would be required in framing a house or concrete form, for instance. Then you pay your dues and can be added to the list of union members without a job. Then when you hire someone whose union represents that they are a Journeyman, you can be confident that they're competent.

"Evaluate Code to get paid"

This statement is not telling me (a dumb user) what exactly is it that you do. The name is Recruitly so I am guessing it is a recruitment platform ? So is the ultimate goal to hire developers through your platform or is it more like a portfolio for devs who can evaluate code to get ratings for themselves ? Or is this a freelance type of platform when you say "get paid".

I suggest you make it more clear in your copy.

Thank you for your feedback!

Recruitly is a community that helps its members code better. It does this by helping managers to pair with other developers and by having members rate each other.

Given your confusion, how would you rephrase the headline "Evaluate Code To Get Paid" to reflect this?

Thanks

The cycle will be complete once there's an exclusive hiring site for people who work on hiring sites.

In other words: Many things about hiring are broken. It needs a cultural change, not more software.

"It's a people problem"

The hardest 5 words for People Who Like To Build Stuff to grasp. Me included.

The amount of times I should've just hired some help instead of building myself out of the issue is ridiculous.

What's the incentive for giving rating to people?

It seems like I will be benefitting them financially with no guarantee what so ever that I will get rated positively as well.

If people start giving ratings out of reciprocity, then what's the point?

How do you guarantee that people's ratings of each other are relevant?

They appear to be paying evaluators based on candidates keeping the job for which the candidate was evaluated. It says "You'll receive a percentage of the hired candidate's annual salary for their first full year." If we interpret that to mean they have to work a full year before you get the commission, it's in your interests to make sure your rating is accurate.

That's motivation to give ratings, but not necessarily accurate ones.

Actually since your commission per employee is likely to be very small, it's in your interest to cast a wider net by giving ratings to as many developers as you can. Since you can't really lose anything.

And you have every incentive to give (just) positive reviews...

This is interesting. Knowing the online community, it will attract really strict graders (I'm using a euphemism, you should know what I mean) - so you can piggyback on this to just paste code that isn't working from a throwaway and have the pedants tell you exactly why and why you shouldn't be hired (for reviews that say the code is broken, it can be a requirement to say where) -- which I'm sure they'll be thrilled to do for like $5. "total idiot, didn't even cast to a float so the comparison is wrong. would not hire. keep away from real systems." Cheap alternative to debugging!

I'm not sure how this works. I submit random snippets of my own code, then others get paid for reading it? Then if enough people read it I can approve people for jobs? Very confusing landing page

" All developers are graduates of accredited online programs that meet the highest international standards."

So I'd need a certification to participate?

Just based on how that phrase is worded ("all developers..."), this would seem like a market almost purely to hire bootcamp graduates.

Stupid question:

What safeguards does this have in place to stop me from building a set of bots that game it?

Or just vetting everyone and hoping they get hired?

Not a stupid question at all.

As far as I can tell, their concept is not very well thought out.

Its OK for it to not be completely thought out. It is a startup. They probably don't know how to make money from it. But I'm curious as to what checks they have to avoid gaming. Its pretty straightforward to build various bot to commit, evaluate, and accept code. Some people might even get a kick out of making such things... ;)

Edit: Spelling.

Thank you for clarifying it. I agree everything hasn't been fully thought out, and there's lots of questions that needs to be answered. This is why we welcome any feedback people may have as it will help us clarify things.

My gut is that this product will add more noise than signal to the process.

Is this a pair programming site, or a hiring site? It's very unclear

Thanks for all of your feedback. I have updated the website in the hope of getting our message across more clearly. We will roll out the MVP in a few weeks, but we want to ensure that people "get it". Please have another look, and we welcome all feedback. http://recruitly.co/

I have mixed feelings about this because people may game the system just to protect people they know or to simply try to make money without actually being honest with the evaluation.

I don't know the details on how the evaluations happen, but I think you should only be able to evaluate the code and recommend people without knowing who the actual author is. This way you prevent some biases.

I'm looking forward to this and new ways of getting coders connected. I know a lot of freelancers, including myself, that are always hard pressed for work when there seems to be an abundance. The only thing I'm afraid of is having too many profiles and services to manage. If this could somehow link into services we already use, like github, that would be great.

I know a lot of freelancers, including myself, that are always hard pressed for work when there seems to be an abundance.

Tell me about your marketing.

I submitted my email address and received an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error

I'm reminded of https://codereview.stackexchange.com/ except for the getting paid part.

503 unavailable

I'm sorry. I wasn't expecting that many traffic.

cough probably you need to evaluate code of your site then.

I don't think you understand what a 503 means.

Edit - In the wild, a 503 usually means that the person who built out the site did not do a very good job of estimating traffic. An empty response can return 503 if the server is overwhelmed with connections.

In other words, a 503 more likely than not has nothing to do with code and has everything to do with provisioning enough resources for the amount of traffic received. Unfortunately, that's a tough thing to get right, particularly when you land on the front page of Hacker News during extremely busy times.

My comment was just (probably ugly) joke attempt. Though, you was right - I didn't understand 503 fully, and then I became interested after your hint and googled for it.

Now I know, that it can be easily a cause (out of the many) when owner simply "suspended" site for a while, and fixing stuff.

Thank you.

Uh oh, I fear that I may have started you down the cold, dark path towards becoming a sysadmin!!! :)

If you're interested in taking this further, it's a great chance to figure out how you would:

a.) Deal with a 503 if it happened while your site was under heavy load.

b.) Harden your site to avoid 503s.

Have fun and thanks for your kind response!!

Returning a 503 for a "Code Review" site isn't exactly putting it into a good light...

Perhaps your own needs to have done so.

A bit off-topic, but: to all the people complaining about the 503 and suggesting that this is a code issue, I don't think you understand what causes a 503. You can have a 503 with an empty page if the web server gets overloaded with more connections than it can handle, for example.

Good day everyone,

I'm Jonathan, CEO of Recruitly.co. https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jonathanfetienne

I would personally like to thank everyone for their interest. I recently wrote the following blog posts, and hopefully that may answer many questions you guys have. If not, let me know, and It would be my pleasure to address them. =)

http://www.recruitly.co/blog/brand/recruitly-bringing-educat...

http://www.recruitly.co/blog/community/improve-coding-skills...

Interest? This thread is full of people saying they have no clue what this is.

And I assure you, most developers don't give a damn about more recruiting software.

Also, the blog posts you link to both return a 500 error, and now the link to your marketing site you posted is returning 503 for me.

Hi Elliot,

Thanks for your comment.

Receiving honest and brutal feedback is the only way we're going to move this thing forward.

I made this post long before many of those comments and as a response to the significant amount of people who kindly decided to join our mailing list, resulting in our site shutting down multiple time due to an unprecedented level of traffic.

Please try the blog post link again. If not try it later tonight or tomorrow. We will evaluate later on today what's the best step to take as a team, and this after taking all of the comments into consideration.

If you have any other concerns, please feel free to address them.

Best, Jonathan Etienne

CEO of Recruitly.co

Here is some honest and brutal feedback: No one is going to buy the idea that your site went down due to the number of people giving you their email. It went down due to the amount of traffic. I doubt the HN crowd was clamoring to hand over their email to a generic looking, templated landing page with no product to actually see.

Thanks for your comment.

I would be more than happy to share with you my mail chimp mailing list, but out of respect and privacy for the user I will not. I am not trying to sell, and quite frankly i have little to gain in selling "this idea" to anybody.

There's lots to be learned here today, and we are ready to adjust because as you know this startup world is all about learning. When we do have the product up and running, i'll make sure that our server are ready to accommodate an unexpected, and large amount of traffic.

However, before even getting to that stage we have learned that we need to communicate better, and will use many comments here to refine our idea, our approach, and the way we convey it to the public.

As for "generic looking, templated landing page with no product to actually see." We actually built the landing page from the ground up. but we recognize there's room for improvement.

In our landing page, at the bottom right there is a little widget called "feedback" if you click on it you can not only comment but draw specific areas you have concerns with, or leave your specific concerns here, whichever is easier.

Any feedback is of tremendous value.

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