Why we’re pausing our Pay Later Program

We recently made the difficult decision to pause our Pay Later Program. In this post, we’ll talk about why we made that call and what we’ll be doing instead to ensure that engineers who can’t afford to pay for practice will still be able to get it. We’ll also explain some things we’ve learned along the way about funnel optimization, some mistakes we made while iterating on this program, and what we’ll do differently when we hopefully unpause it in the future.

The definitive list of companies who are hiring engineers right now

interviewing.io is both a mock interview platform and an eng hiring marketplace (engineers use us for technical interview practice, and top performers get fast-tracked at companies), so we have some unique insights into how recent hiring freezes have affected engineers’ behavior. We also have unique insight into which companies are actually hiring. As such, in the spirit of being useful during a hard and uncertain time, we thought it’d be interesting to survey our users to see what’s actually going on in the market. TL;DR There are lots of engineers actively looking. There are also lots of companies who are actively hiring. Read the actual post to see the full list of 447 U.S. companies who are hiring software engineers right now.

Building interviewing.io's collaborative & replayable whiteboard, or making systems design interviews not suck

During the spring of 2022, I went from being a user of interviewing.io to being one of the engineers on the team.

I discovered interviewing.io in 2021 while preparing for my internship interviews, little did I know that I would end up interviewing for interviewing.io via an interview conducted on interviewing.io to receive an internship opportunity at interviewing.io upon passing the said interview. Yes.

During my 11 weeks, I solved an important business problem, quadrupled my problem-solving skills, and collaborated with the fantastic folks who built the product made for engineers, by engineers.

What’s actually going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes? We surveyed 1000 engineers to find out.

It looks like we’re entering a recession. One of the hardest things about it is the lack of reliable information about whether companies are still hiring and what hiring freezes even mean. Arguably the two most impactful eng hiring freezes were announced by Facebook (May 4, 2022) and then Google (July 20, 2022). Facebook’s freeze is allegedly partial, targeting roles below L7 and excluding machine learning engineers. Google’s freeze is allegedly all-encompassing but may only last 2 weeks. But what’s actually going on? To make some sense of a bunch of contradictory information about Google’s and Facebook’s hiring freezes in the press and on Blind, we decided to ask the people who, outside of Google …

Does communication matter in technical interviewing? We looked at 100K interviews to find out.

The interviewing.io platform has hosted and collected feedback from over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones. It’s generally accepted that to pass a technical interview, you have to not only come up with a solution to the problem (or at least make good headway), but you also have to do a good job of articulating your thoughts, explaining to your interviewer what you’re doing as you’re doing it, and coherently discussing tradeoffs and concepts like time and space complexity. But how important is communication in technical interviews, really? We looked at the data, and it turns out that talk is cheap. Read on to find out how and why.

We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work. Here are the results.

At interviewing.io, we’ve hosted over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones. As it happens, we know where our users currently work – they tell us that when they sign up. Given that we have this data AND given that we know how well people do in their interviews, we thought it would be interesting to see which companies’ engineers are especially good at technical interviews. Our resulting top ten lists are in this post!

Announcing our Pay Later Program: Don’t pay for mock interviews until you get a job

In the wake of COVID, I made a public promise to launch a program where engineers could defer paying for practice until they found a job. Today, we’re making good on that promise by launching our Pay Later Program! With this program, you get instant credits to spend on interview practice and then pay us once you’ve found a job. And if you get a job through our job board, then you don’t have to pay anything…

We’ve raised our Series A!

I’m really excited to announce that we raised a $10M Series A, led by the fine people at M13. This round of funding is a long time coming. I don’t know what the average company age is when successfully raising an A, but it took us 6 years to get here. It was a long and windy path, and for a little while, we almost died (more on that below), but we’re still here, and we’re so grateful and excited to finally have the resources to do what we’ve always wanted to do: fix hiring, for real. What does “fixing hiring” mean? We believe that the only way to really effect change, is to make …

Hamtips, or why I still run the Technical Phone Screen as the Hiring Manager

“Hamtips” stands for “Hiring Manager Technical Phone Screen.” This combines two calls: the Technical Phone Screen (TPS), which is a coding exercise that usually happens before the onsite, and the HMS call, which is a call with the Hiring Manager. By combining these two steps you shorten the intro-to-offer by ~1 week and reduce candidate dropoff by 5-10%. It’s also a lot less work for recruiters playing scheduling battleship. Finally, Hiring Managers will, on average, be better at selling working at the company – it’s kind of their job.

How to write (actually) good job descriptions

When you start writing a job description, the first question you should ask yourself is, Am I trying to attract the right people, or am I trying to keep the wrong people out? Then, once you answer it, write for that audience deliberately, because it’s really hard to write for both…