Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

The idea is great, but everything else is not. A few points:

- You say "engineering" verification, I checked and it's all computer science, monkey coding, full stack whatever, not only is that NOT engineering, it wasn't before generative AI, and it's definitely not now. This is programming. Programming is writing, and with AI it's more of storytelling rather than engineering.

- How would this platform measure real engineering skills? Critical thinking, problem solving, etc.? What about Electrical Engineering? Civil Engineering? Robotics design? Etc.

- I didn't open an account, but on the first page it asks for LinkedIn.. really? I don't trust most of what I read there. GitHub? Not only does it bring us back to software-related topics, but what if I don't use GitHub?

I think the best way to verify someone's skills in the engineering world is a portfolio that shows their projects and what was accomplished during them. A resume will never be enough, and interviews should be limited to personal interactions and assessing how the potential candidate communicates. Where needed, maybe an assignment to complete and return after a few days -one that mimics the potential project or role they will be working on- because asking questions during an interview is not enough to measure their skills at all.

Thank you for the feedback. It is meant to be all kinds of engineering, the vision is to have all type of engineers from software engineers(which you are correct it is focused full on that).

> How would this platform measure real engineering skills? Critical thinking, problem solving, etc.? What about Electrical Engineering? Civil Engineering? Robotics design? Etc

- This will be all up to the hand picked person to measure your skills, for example the verifier will be assessing everything required to determine if someone is really good or not, that includes critical thinking, problem solving so on. Let's say this verifier they work/ed for Google, they will bring Google's interview framework to this candidate software engineer in our case to asses their skills, the expected result would be "I passed the assessment, I could be good as an engineer at Google" which helps with credibility. The platform itself will store the final decision on your profile (you can hide or show anything up to the user).

> I didn't open an account, but on the first page it asks for LinkedIn.. really? I don't trust most of what I read there. GitHub? Not only does it bring us back to software-related topics, but what if I don't use GitHub?

- Linkedin, github or gitlab are all optional fields, I have pushed a fix on that to communicate it better, thank you. I am thinking of making it a free link field to be portfolio rather than profile from github, gitlab or whatever else. Personally I understand this, not a fan of github at all, I just put it there since it is the most used.

This is how I imagine it and actually tested this concept and it worked and you are 100% right it brings a lot of results. What I did was fist meet and greet talk, then assign take at home project, after the project was done, then we discussed the decisions made and approaches and how the problem was solved, and talked about past projects from the portfolio. This reduced the chance significantly of a bad hire, and the candidates liked the concept a lot.

What don't you like the most from the current hiring processes? For example in software engineering for me is solving meaningless problems during interviews like reverse a binary tree that have nothing to do with the actual role.

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