garyjlin

9 ms·

1.
by garyjlin 5y ago
It's idealistic and naive to say that we'll replace the entire onsite interview, and I wouldn't even recommend we go in that direction. What we're trying to do is clear out the technical evaluation part of an onsite so t
2.
by garyjlin 5y ago
I think you make a good point here, you're right, because leet code style interviews don't work for most companies, but they do work for some companies with specific needs. I recently spoke to a prospective client where they menti
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by garyjlin 5y ago
This is exactly the problem we're trying to solve for. You have too many candidates, you want to be fair to all of them, but you don't have the resources to manually talk to every one of them one by one. You could give them a Leet
4.
by garyjlin 5y ago
Yeah we generally discourage users from using Litebulb as a "weed out" exercise, first of all because we just don't agree with that practice as a principle, and second because Litebulb is a terrible pre-screening filter. As a
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by garyjlin 5y ago
> If you want to test someone's ability to do the real work, then give them an obscure error code from a little-used utility and see how long it takes to find the fix. This is actually a type of interview we're trying to suppor
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by garyjlin 5y ago
Appreciate this tons, because we'll definitely need the help! Would actually love to connect over email (gary@litebul.io) or directly in a chat ( https://calendly.com/gary-j-lin/30min ).
7.
by garyjlin 5y ago
Yes! Gumroad.com is not hiring until late April, but their initial coding challenge is async, untimed, and uses Litebulb: https://www.notion.so/Jobs-f43f816013b2405aa41ddefb663a4a38 . Some other companies are On Deck, Mashgi
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by garyjlin 5y ago
I completely agree, our marketing message needs to hammer in the concept that a Litebulb interview is pretty much just picking up a ticket off the backlog. We've actually had candidates say that halfway through an interview they forgot
9.
by garyjlin 5y ago
Really appreciate the support here and you make some excellent points! We're trying to make something that already exists just a bit better. :)
10.
by garyjlin 5y ago
1. That point is actually one of the reasons behind Litebulb! For most LeetCode-style tools, getting 100% is easy if you just google the question, copy the top answer, then change up a few variables. For Litebulb, a legitimate submission ha
11.
by garyjlin 5y ago
Thank you! Data science interviews are definitely on our roadmap, but unfortunately we won't be able to get there within the next quarter. Biggest reason for this? Nobody on our team has data science experience! I'm not going to p
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by garyjlin 5y ago
That's perfectly fair, in fact I don't even recommend using Litebulb for senior positions. The problem for senior openings is always going to be sourcing (there's just not that many good engineers to begin with that meet that
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by garyjlin 5y ago
I certainly hope so too! And yeah getting to know the team is really important as well.
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by garyjlin 5y ago
Yeah this is actually why we recommend liberally-timed take homes instead of a sit down 45 minute block. It's super frustrating to get 95% of the way there just to be cut out by time.
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by garyjlin 5y ago
Great set of questions! 1. Complex cases: We can spin up isolated AWS or GCP environments with some resources pre-filled, and the rest is up to the candidate to build. Basically a systems design whiteboard challenge, except instead of a whi
16.
by garyjlin 5y ago
Ah ok so that flow needs to be sharpened a bit. It's actually not a video, it's an interactive demo where you can play around with a small subset of the app in a controlled environment. It's a series of guided DOM snapshots o
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by garyjlin 5y ago
Yeah for now it's primarily for frontend, fullstack, or backend cloud devs. We have an iOS Swift interview already built but it's not polished, so it's in the backlogs for now, and dev ops and data science interviews are comi
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by garyjlin 5y ago
This is a really good point, thanks for bringing it up, @dang has already helped us update the HN post title, and we've made that copy change on our website as well! From now on, our messaging will be "coding interviews", not
19.
by garyjlin 5y ago
Engineering management skills are very, very hard to evaluate. From what I'm aware of, you can get a general idea of someone's competence as an engineering manager by seeing how their engineers perform under them vs under someone
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by garyjlin 5y ago
We're mid-way through building a V2 of the scorecard. This "Senior - Weak" grading model isn't working, since everyone has different ideas of what a senior engineer is. Instead, we're going to just expose raw data a
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by garyjlin 5y ago
I've thought about this as well, the biggest problem here is that I have Github repos from 7 years ago with very, very, poor code quality, and also just a bunch of incomplete test repos. I wouldn't want that to lower the perceptio
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by garyjlin 5y ago
We have something for this in our roadmap. Currently: candidate does a Litebulb interview, gets a report, that report can be shared with whoever they like, hopefully speeding up interviews at other companies. Next up: candidate does a Liteb
23.
by garyjlin 5y ago
Yup, our clients have brought this up with us as well, which is why we recommend they offer 3 choices for the candidate to do the interview: 1. Hop on a call, do the interview in one sitting together and share thoughts/questions 2. Hop
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by garyjlin 5y ago
I wouldn't necessarily put it that way, primarily because some of our interviews require less than 20 lines of code! It's a bit more about selecting candidates with the right fundamentals. You don't need to write too much cod
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by garyjlin 5y ago
Yup! That's why we recommend using Litebulb as a mid-funnel tool. Initial screening should be with a hiring manager (or a founder if it's an early stage startup), final meetings should be with team members/managers to get cul
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by garyjlin 5y ago
This makes a ton of sense to me. Seeing how you solve a difficult problem with someone collaboratively is a great insight on how you'll continue working together, because that's exactly what you'll be doing. It's also ve
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by garyjlin 5y ago
I completely get what you're saying. We've seen many candidates that have expressed the concern of "if I'm going to put X units of time into this, you should also put X units of time into this". A good approach of r
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by garyjlin 5y ago
Yeah so this is a common concern we've seen. "How do I know your idea of a senior engineer is the same as my idea of a senior engineer?" And the answer is you don't. We're modifying the report to no longer say thing
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by garyjlin 5y ago
That would be super cool, and we'll be adding support for new stacks by popular demand. We've already had a few people mention support for Unity, so it's on our roadmap (but likely won't get to it until Q4)!
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by garyjlin 5y ago
Thank you, and love that you promote great interviewing practices! What were some examples of prompts you routinely used for interviewing? And any learnings on great (or not so great) interview design?

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