cporios

if anyone's wondering, the post title is wrong -- both of the first two characters are en dashes (U+2013).

Exactly, which is the entire reason the array pattern exists, and yet the article forgets to mention that entirely.

We don't want to replace all interviewing. We won't test for culture fit, or presentation skills (although we can test for some industry-specific knowledge and communication skills). You can think of it as technical screening stage.

These are all great questions, thank you.

We don't want to serve non-hardware companies that are hiring their first hardware engineers. We want to serve companies of all sizes (including startups) that are building products that are so critical that they can't waste their senior engineers' time to do 10-20 technical interviews a week. These customers will care a lot about their hardware engineers.

Yes, our customers should do more interviewing for candidates that pass the Touvlo interview. We think that our service should be primarily a technical screening before the company invests more in additional interviewing, but you're free to use it for at any step of your recruiting process. There is also more to evaluate in a potential hire than technical skills (for example, cultural match).

> Why did I spend 4 years in engineering school, and build my professional track record, yet have to keep doing these negging tests? Does this company not employ anyone who can get a sense of a fellow engineer's skill and professionalism just by talking with them? Did they read my resume? And now they're not even administering the test themselves?

There's two parts to this: (1) On one hand, the interview should never feel like a negging test and the interview of a graduate should be completely different from the interview of a senior engineer with 5+ years of experience. And if you are extremely senior with an amazing professional track record, then perhaps no technical interviewing is necessary at all. (2) On the other hand, no one should feel offended for having to do a technical interview that matches their seniority and experience. It's outsourced to a third party company, because we can do it better and faster. Candidates will be happier, because they can interview outside business hours (incl. weekends) and have a positive experience. Also, the alternative in many cases is that the company won't bother interviewing the candidate at all, or worse, they might send a take-home test that takes hours to 100 candidates and then spend 0-3 minutes reviewing each.

Currently a job-seeker can not get their report card sent to multiple employers, however this is a good idea to consider after getting to a certain scale. At that point, we would essentially become the standard in hardware technical interviewing. Figuring out a fair payment model would be one of the challenges.

Thank you - we think we’re at least 10x better than a non-technical recruiter (also because they have completely different incentives).

These reservations are fair. Hopefully, eventually we’ll have enough endorsements and references to give you some confidence. If you’d like to give us a try before then, happy to talk whenever at [email protected]!

We don’t do cultural fit at all, and we don’t intend to. I agree this is very important, yet very difficult and inefficient to outsource. We don’t aim to replace all interviewing: becoming a better substitute for early-stage technical screening is more than enough.

Thank you, this is good feedback. We’re both native greek speakers, and we meant it in a lighthearted way, but you’re right that not everyone will see it this way.

You’re absolutely our target market! You’re not delegating the decision, you’re delegating the interviewing. We don’t make a decision, we give you a video and scorecard of a one hour technical interview. You can integrate our interviews at any stage in your pipeline (e.g instead of a phone screen), and do more interviewing for those that do well. Please note that this is common in software, see karat.com.

Yes, we can use any CAD software (or at least, we will seriously consider it). We’re a new company and following the YC advice of doing things that don’t scale. If that means buying 5 different software licenses for our first 5 customers, then we’ll do that.

Thank you!

That’s a good point regarding hardware in the name. Eventually we’d like to do all hardware and more (e.g. architecture), but currently our expertise is in mechanical and robotics engineering.

Our pitch: We make recruiting easier, better and cheaper for the companies building the hardware of tomorrow, by letting them focus on their product rather than repetitive candidate skill assessments. Currently, senior engineers in small startups and scale ups spend a lot of their time interviewing, and they often don’t do it well (remote CAD sessions aren’t really a thing). We save them time and money.

We will scale this by hiring freelancer interview engineers. This has already been done in software, very successfully: karat.com. So we think it can work at least equally well in hardware.

We’re both greek, it’s meant in a joking way :) What do you think of the name?

This is onshape indeed, but we run a collaborative VNC (soon-to-be RDP) session through the browser. We can run anything that runs on Windows (so everything).

Hi! We’re not simulating anything, we run a collaborative VNC (soon-to-be RDP) session through the browser. We can run anything that runs on Windows.