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I have a fun one.

In 2015 I was laid off from a startup that unfortunately shut down.

During my search I was intro'ed by their VC to the CTO. The CTO told me they were hiring for my exact, kind of niche role. I was pretty pumped as I hadn't really lost a job before and wanted to get something new quickly.

I met the CTO at a coffee shop, he kept asking me a bunch of questions that were clearly more being asked with the intention of picking my brain about a project versus interview questions. I asked him what was up and he said they hired someone for the role the week before, but that he wanted to pick my brain so he kept our time on calendar.

I had taken BART into the city, pushed back a different interview and taken time out of my day so a CTO with a ton of funding could exploit my labor for zero compensation.

I said something along the lines of, "um, okay I need to focus on my job search, good luck." and got up to leave. He then kind of did this act as if I was being kind of a dick for not helping him.

Luckily a Director of Engineering I'd worked with at a past company was sitting two tables away and I said hi and he said he had overheard what happened and I ended up interviewing at his company.

Still, to this day, seeing all of those "Flexport is hiring!" posts has always made me wonder how much of their interview process is just wasting the time of potential employees. They seem like they have a fairly noble mission, which is why I interviewed in the first place. But man, that whole situation still feels really gross to me.

What's sad about this interaction is that, at least for me, if that person had said "Hey, we actually already hired somebody for this, but I'd still love to meet up for lunch and hear how you'd approach some of these problems" I'd do it.

I like problems, and I like solving problems. I've been lucky enough that the pay is honestly just a bonus most of the time. Having a contact at a company I think is cool is way more valuable to me than the cost of taking a train an a few hours of my time.

Totally! I don't think I've ever turned down a request to help someone. But in this case he basically admitted that he kind of lied to me so that he could get my advice, while asking for my advice. Bleh.

Yeah the lying isn't cool at all. Totally agree.

Thank you for sharing your (poor) recruiting and interviewing process. I'm a hiring manager in our company, and I tell anyone (and everyone) that while a positive experience that results in a hire is shared locally, a poor experience when we don't hire is shared far and wide. I don't understand why companies put their worst interpersonal people in front of candidates; it should be the other way around. An unsuccessful candidate should leave wanting to work with you more than when they applied! There are some really good processes out there: respectful of your time & energy, transparent in expectations and timelines. My hope is that globalization and remote work forces everyone to up their game, because if it's poor for senior developers, imagine what it's like for people who aren't in such demand.

I think another aspect is that a lot of things don’t matter. For example, some employers have a better brand (as employers of tech workers) and some are worse. Some will also try much harder to present such a brand to people. But the effects of this brand may not actually be so important to the company if they can achieve their goals.

Examples of some employer reputations:

- Google and Facebook both have reasonably good reputations as employers. Facebook has a reputation for paying better than their typical competitors. But both had much better brands 5-10 years ago and they have since fallen out of favour (in hn comments a lot. Not super sure about programmers at large). A lot of it is also from their worse reputation in the public discourse[1]. I think to some extent they are no-longer new exciting companies, and they are now big enough that they will do more things (in absolute terms) that people don’t like.

- Amazon has a reputation for being bad at engineering, whatever that means, yet somehow aws does much better than the competitor from Google, a company with a reputation for strong engineering. Some people will tell you it’s about sales or customer support and other people will tell you it’s about not deprecating year-old apis that don’t even have the features of the things they replaced.

- Amazon has a reputation for being a bad employer (of engineers) with lots of turnover. Some evidence could be that they (would?) backload their equity vesting schedule because of this turnover but that could also be explained by hiring more people on the margin or putting more weight on retaining employees with more tenure.

- There’s a lot of ‘working at a startup is great fun and highly profitable’ sentiment that probably advantages startups. I think some of it is true, some of it reasonably organic, and some of it promoted by VCs like pg.

- Palantir is thought to be evil by some people.

- Microsoft is uncool (I mean come on, they use windows) and supposedly has terrible or undesirable tech processes (rebase hell due to discontinuous integration, no VC at all, backwards compatibility quagmire, no ‘big’ systems) and also supposedly got full marks on the Joel test 15-20 years ago.

- Apparently if you work at an investment bank you’ll be shouted at, work long hours, and be seen as less important than the bankers, but you’ll be highly paid. (Or maybe some subset of those things)

- Some smaller companies can get an outsize positive reputation by writing good/timely/popular blog posts (two that spring to mind are cloudflare and fly.io) or through positive blog posts by employees (e.g. read Steve Yegge’s old post about the ‘good agile’)

To some extent it feels like this sort of brand should matter, but I’m not sure that’s really true. If you only hire new grads then it is probably more important to provide a lot of good free food and fun at campus recruiting events. If you are already able to hire sufficiently many acceptable candidates at an acceptable price, maybe there is no need to increase that price by putting effort into the brand. I think it’s also true that many professional programmers don’t care about or share the opinions about companies that are frequently posted and highly voted on HN, and it is easy to ignore such opinions when weighing up other aspects of a job offer.

On the other hand it feels like some companies do poorly at this by not doing anything at all so improvements could be relatively easy like changing the interview process to avoid candidates feeling shit about it or ‘free’ cultural/process changes like making it easier for employees to produce quality company blog posts. Even a seemingly good organic reputation could be bad if it comes from the wrong place and if you don’t present much of a brand that can be a lot of what you’re left with. It’s also possible to get a poor reputation in a hard-to-control way like Citadel Securities (the market-maker) getting a poor reputation from people who believe what they read on Reddit (while maybe those Reddit true-believers wouldn’t be good hires there is likely still an effect on the margin)

If you’re applying for jobs then it might be worth keeping these reputations in mind: some companies could be better or worse than you’d expect because you’re naturally biased by their poor/good brand.

[1] I think partly they are rightly unpopular, partly the single (er, double) biggest threat to any publication, and partly an easy punching bag for politicians

I recall in an interview Peterson saying their hiring process to look for "insecure overachievers", maybe they have a way of screening for that? I never really understood what that looked like in practice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjUs7o-TnjY&t=1365s

>And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems.

This is an established business play for VC backed startups.

A SAAS is always two things, the product, and sales. You absolutely must have sales, because no matter how good the product is, you don't have a business if nobody buys it. So the product is optional.

The pitch is "We're the completely automated solution for X", but internally everything is done by hand. You then try to find some customers. If you don't get product-market fit, you shut down without having to spend anything on engineering. But if you do get product-market fit, great! Time to build out the actual automation. During the gap, it doesn't matter how bad your unit economics are, you can just use infinite VC money to hire thousands of people while promising the board you'll eventually lay them all off. You will experience hypergrowth during this period because you can underbid everyone else thanks to your endless spigot of money.

Look at the careers page: https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/ Lots and lots and lots of openings for account managers and client solutions associates. I guarantee you these people spend 8 hours a copy and pasting stuff from one form to another, or on the phone reading the contents of text boxes to someone who enters that text into their own green screen terminal.

I’ve been curious why they are constantly advertising on HN, it doesn’t seem logical to need that many posts.

Is the hiring process bad? Is the turn over that high? The constant advertising gives a bad impression. If they are just expanding at a good clip, it seems there are better ways.

I work at Flexport. We are growing market share in existing businesses, entering new lines of business, and building a new technology platform underneath it all. It’s like being at AWS 10 years ago.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, and HN has good people.

Are y'all sunsetting Ruby completely as you break apart the monolith?

Advertising is perhaps the wrong word. AFAIK HN does not charge for those placements, it is a privilege[1] given to YC startups. If they are getting enough applicants on those posts and HN rules allow them to post often then why would they not keep posting ?

[1] Technically paid with the equity companies give YC I suppose

I have to say Flexport was a extremely poor hiring experience that I went through. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say I was just unlucky. Each technical interview was very condescending with no communication or feedback from the interviewer. The interviewer in my first screen even made a mistake on their own code, clearly lacking basic syntax knowledge of the language we were using, despite expecting perfect syntax answer to a basic algo question. The interviewer just struck me as very junior in their skillset, and made me a bit concerned about the hiring process overall. The other interviewer was very happy to tell me that Flexport only hires the best engineers, to be honest, it was difficult for me to keep a straight face when he said that. Now I know what hiring for a 10x rock star engineer looks like, lmao

> From the very first moment, he seemed utterly disinterested in the call. He would not look into the camera - never made eye contact... asked questions as if reading from index cards, but registered no recognition of any responses. To me it was obvious that he either did not like me (from before we said hello) or was already determined not to hire me.

Interviewed with three different logistics companies last year and the experience got less and less friendly as I made my way up the chain in each of them. All frowning at me in a "well, I don't know about that" kind of way before we even spoke. Maybe they all had gas, I have no idea what was going on.

On a abstract level a lot of problems are business process problems and can be modeled in that way , it doesn't mean one company working one one type of problem should have excellence in another, hiring problems are very very different from freight logistics.

I don't know anything about Flexport, I know about hiring tech that perhaps helps you to understand what goes behind such processes.

Hiring tech usually can be grouped in 4/5 buckets. Applicant Tracking Systems(ATS) /Workflow tools, Sourcing, Screening / Selection , Offer / Negotiation and Finally on-boarding. In each category depending on type of hire(Full Time/Contract), departments/skills(tech/sales/finance etc), and geographic locations(U.S./Europe/Mexico etc) you could end needing dozens of tools.

It is not unusual for a startup not have tools to manage their workflows yet, the hiring processes evolve a lot in early stage companies, they insource/outsource and shift all the time, each dept or new VP brings theirs own ideas with little standardization etc. Few startups invest in an ATS ( not just buy actually put effort to deploy) at < 500-1,000 head count. It takes a long time for all this to settle down for any growing company.

Workflow tools like ATSes are systems of records designed for compliance and to help the recruiter not the candidate. That means most recruiters have little incentive to update the records of a rejected candidate into the system, they are only measured by offers made/ joined etc, once you are rejected a typical recruiter will loose interest fast, few would even let you know that properly, even fewer would know why you were rejected and update the system ( if it exists at all) .

Hiring managers are also guilty, post an interview rarely do they give comments( to the recruiter after the interview) even if they do, it is even less likely that those can be be shared to a candidate.

Also finally even for companies working on solving hiring problems, it is not easy to solve their own hiring process issues. It is rare for one company to be building all the tools needed by a company to hire. i.e. HackerRank/Codility may build great coding tools, but they still need to use ATS or sourcing tools in their hiring processes, and that can mean their processes are also not perfect and have similar problems.