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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Start ups will give a chance to junior with a weak resume if he/she can demonstrate skills. You may very well end up with a mission above your skill set as well, and grow because of the challenge and responsability. Less bureaucracy and smaller size also mean a quicker hiring process, direct access to most interesting people in the company and a wide overview of the entire product.

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Usually this is false. Startups are some of the most aggressive users of whiteboard trivia, live coding, etc., to filter out candidates who don’t fit precisely the mold of people desperate to work at FAANG companies.

Some startups are, largely because they often lack the experience to know better. Plenty of startups are managed by people who care about having a better process.

It’s pretty universal.

I've interviewed at a few startups and worked for one. Never got a whiteboard question, just saw them at bigger companies. Small sample size, but 'universal' might not be accurate here

I’ve interviewed and worked at several start-ups, and also conducted dozens of interviews at all the start-ups I worked for, and all of them involved whiteboard puzzles (despite my objections). Meanwhile, I have many friends who have worked across many dozen start-ups over the past 15 years, and all of them report the same whiteboard puzzle culture with zero exceptions. Additionally, it is ubiquitously discussed on Hacker News that this is a known property of start-up culture and is mentioned directly as an interview step in many posting in the Hacker News monthly Who is Hiring thread.

That seems to fit exactly what I said:

> Start ups will give a chance to junior with a weak resume if he/she can demonstrate skills.

They don't hire you on a resume, you need to demonstrate skills. Wether it's a good way to do so is another matter.

I had interviews with startup not even asking for my resume, or testing my skills. But I never had a startup getting me through many hoops in the hiring process. 4 steps over a few months was the max, while FAANGs are known for using more than 10 steps, dispatched over as long as a year.

But whiteboarding / algo trivia are not activities which are capable of demonstrating skill apart from rote memorization and superficial rapid pattern matching.

> Wether it's a good way to do so is another matter.

Do you really read the comments you answer to ?

It’s not a way. Nothing to do with bad vs good: it simply fails to satisfy the properties the parent comment attributed.

Could you please be more careful not to post unsubstantive comments that take HN threads in snarky, glib directions? Discussion quality is noticeably lower when you (or any of us) do this.

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

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