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Comment by sibeliuss | Hacker News Reader

Having attended a SuperDay, I can hands down state that their interview process is the best I've ever had (didn't get the job tho, which was probably for the best at this phase of life). Designed to perfectly lift signal and minimize noise, for what they're trying to achieve. Don't change a thing PostHog.

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I personally think there are more efficient ways to get a high signal to noise ratio on if you are going to be a good hire or not without having the candidate invest almost 9 hours into an interview process, but that’s just me

A 9 hour investment to make a decision that will strongly affect 50% of your waking life for years or decades doesn't seem like a big ask.

It's not that it's a 9-hour investment. It's that for someone looking for a new job, it's 9 hours * N jobs they're applying to. That adds up quick.

> A 9 hour investment to make a decision that will strongly affect 50% of your waking life for years or decades doesn't seem like a big ask.

You only apply for one job a year? Twice a year?

There are very many good candidates a company will miss out on by asking for a full unpaid day from the candidates.

What happened at the SuperDay?

what was the process like? What made it so good? Asking because I'm trying to build out a process as well

This was one of the reasons why I applied. I wasn't entirely sure it was the right fit (my current job is flexible, which is good, vs a grind, and I'm happy there) but I wanted to study their ways a bit and see what I could bring back, because my company has made some remarkably terrible hires over the past few years.

In short, it's a very well designed "build an app" take home test. There isn't a solution so to speak, but its designed to test your product-engineer aptitude as well as your execution speed, as there are things to get done and requires some thoughtfulness. One can go in a lot of different directions with it. Code can look great, but did you build the right thing, something actually relevant? That's what's important.

Its the sort of test that would instantly filter out 99% of applicants, because of the product emphasis vs the code emphasis, and good product engineers are rare. One could be the best coder around but not have a clue what to build. They want people who know what to build.

I had a lot of fun working on it and loved the challenge, but ultimately didn't know what to build and was fishing a bit, being more of a platform engineer vs product engineer.

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