Hacker News Reader

Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

In summary, the beginning of a brand new business relationship, you demoed a single, first version of your custom purchase, you understood that it needed tuning, and then proceeded to immediately cut them without providing further direction.

(EDIT: Note that I previously contracted with Karat and feel loyalty to them, but have no formal association or stake in them, nor do I represent them.)

View on HN

Well, witnessing this behavior has certainly turned me off from considering Karat in the future. I often appreciate how on Hackernews, you can voice a criticism for an online service and someone from that service will show up, take accountability, and help out and/or take feedback - happened to me with the CEO of DuckDuckGo a while ago, a product I really like but had an issue with.

What a contrast this is.

He seems to be a (former) independent contractor rather than an employee/representative, so I think this is more just misguided fanboyism rather than intentional astroturfing/reputation laundering.

Karat is probably the best/fairest you can do for purely algorithmic interviews, but I'm not sure they're even able to do anything else (the parent commenter's experience suggests not).

I would also consider it more of an exam than an interview - the process is very standardized and sterile, and obviously since it's being outsourced there is no way for the candidate to ask any questions about the company.

(disclaimer as well: went into the interviewer onboarding with them as a contractor but dropped out as I wasn't comfortable proctoring tests that I myself wasn't an expert at).

Hello I work at Karat in engineering (have had a great experience so far). I will make sure someone hears about this. I know there is some degree of customization in the format/content of interviews but sounds like it wasn't to the degree it was advertised which is unfortunate.

You should probably disclose that you are a Senior Interviewer at Karat

To be clear, we gave a ton of feedback and direction before the demo. All of that was completely ignored. If it was a problem of just tweaking things or making changes then I would have done that, but the fact is that they completely ignored all of the input we had already given.

I'm curious why you're so intense about this- do you have some sort of stake in karet?

They worked for Karat, according to their comment history. So yes.

I'm seeing now that I should have disclosed this again at the beginning of this thread with my first reply, because now it's coming across as a deception, which was truly not the intent as shown my by earlier comments. Apologies folks

I contracted with Karat previously, but don't have any present relationship with them or their executives.

Communication is hard, and not everyone has time or energy to bridge the gap, which is fair! It's just a bummer to hear that this has somehow lead to words like "awful", "real negative impact", "useless". That feels very intense to me, and I have probably responded in an intense way as well. There was no harm intended

Reply on news.ycombinator.com