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Comment by throwawaybbq1 | Hacker News Reader

You've got a cool site and I appreciate all the hard work creating high quality content (I've looked at the free questions and considered subscribing a few times in the past). I think your business model/pricing could use work. Unless I'm mistaken and things are going well .. in that case, I'll withdraw to my cave :-p

My suggestion would be to have a slightly cheaper tier (probably no more than a hundred bucks). This mirrors the cost of two-to-three interview books. You could add a custom grading or personalized tutoring option for the full 500, or heck, even more (this is sort of like the GRE/GMAT prep option). Come to think of it .. I wonder why the GRE/GMAT prep crowd hasn't tackled programming interviews?

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Thanks for the note. Definitely a great point. Not sure yet how we tier out our product, but tiered pricing is definitely the state of the art.

We've been working on some /tech/ to enable tiered pricing in the meantime. The Site's all custom, and so far there's no notion of a "product" yet...just "paid" and "unpaid."

Share your question re: where's Kaplan on this stuff!

Price seems expensive to me as well. In data science there is a similar site which has become pretty popular if you are interviewing in those top tech companies, but it is cheaper.

As the guy above was suggesting, that data science site does personalized feedback and that justifies the high price. Otherwise, the way it is now, it feels like it should be priced similarly to CTCI.

What's the data science site!

http://datascientistjobinterview.com

It's crazy that there is a whole industry dedicated to cheating ahem gaming job interviews in software/IT. Imagine if doctors or lawyers or real engineers did this. No wonder we can't get taken seriously as a profession.

Is it cheating or gaming the system if the vast majority of QUALIFIED engineers would not pass an interview without preparation? Reviewing these cheat sheets every couple of years is essentially part of the job.

Imagine if docs could be rejected from a new job because they failed to repeat the obscure diagnosis that was featured on the last episode of House, that really has nothing at all to do with the job they wanted to do.

Imagine if lawyers could be rejected for not being able to explain the minority opinion in Foobar v. Bazquux, which again, has absolutely nothing to do with their expected duties as prosecutor of poor people with small amounts of marijuana.

Imagine if real engineers were asked to build a suspension bridge out of silly putty, table salt, and carbon fiber.

The interviewees are simply doing their jobs, which is to analyze a problem and implement the most cost-effective solution. The interviewers are the ones causing the problem. Granted, it isn't always because they are non-technical people trying to gauge the value of skills they don't understand. A lot of times, it is because the interviewer is a tech person that still can't effectively gauge the value of skills they do understand, and also wants to look clever in front of a stranger, subtly discriminate to preserve "culture", and do the same stuff to others that had been previously done to them in their interviews.

subtly discriminate to preserve "culture"

Indeed; this is a point I make over and over. HR departments aren't smart enough to detect ageism being openly practiced right under their noses...

Agree I would have signed up if it wasn't for the pricing...as it stands now it's totally not worth it.

We are definitely on to tackling the prep thing. Been around for 3 years actually: http://interviewkickstart.com

Looks like Kaplan is not going to be interested in these things after the recent shutdown of DBC.

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