I swear, I read the article ... but everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer. Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, but they seemed more like a footnote than the point of the story.
If 24 hour SLA and employers helpfully following up on what you got wrong in the interview and offering to get on office hours with you so you could retry in six months is "basically the same as every other employer", I have been interviewing at the wrong places for 15 years.
This is, of course, assuming that everything the author says is true. They could be exaggerating. It sounds exhausting to do these office hours as an interviewer in addition to running a company.
My colleague and I worried about the same things back then. It turned out that because we imposed hard constraints on ourselves, we fairly quickly built a system that we could run under those constraints.
Particularly the office hours offers... We had a feeling not many would take it up, but we were not sure. But we were also not sure if we could pull it off along with our day jobs. At the end of it all, our guess was correct.
A reason I decided to publish it is because it was not exhausting! That's part of the "unwitting" part :D
Also, being able to make the steps ourselves was key. I expect nothing but exhaustion and disaster, if those hard constraints are imposed on any pre-existing hiring loop, and the interviewers have no say in tweaking the system.
Yeah, that's the danger with writing a first-person account. Easy to read it as self-adulation. And detailing one's operations in that vein makes it look like lots of back-patting. That said, it is what it is; for a blog post, like a book, is written twice---once when the person types it out and once when someone reads it.
The difference is in how we ran our, otherwise normal-seeming, interview loops. Speed, async-first, clear up-front communication (no corporate speak), and open-door policy all compose and work together.
> Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, ...
Seems like you answered your own question there. As far as I'm aware that practice is pretty much unheard-of, and you're dismissing it pretty casually...
I've seen one or two software companies that are explicit about this. If memory serves, Jane Street is one example. These companies explicitly say in their "regret" emails that one can re-apply after six months of the last application.