‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly

100 points · 17 comments · pvdebbe

  1. hungryhobbit · · focus · HN ↗
    I don't understand the article. LOTS of patting himself on the back and saying how great his approach was ... and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.

    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.

    1. quadrifoliate · · focus · HN ↗
      > everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer

      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.

      1. adityaathalye · · focus · HN ↗
        Author here...

        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.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.