
HiredBox – Ask the right questions in your technical interviews - wavelet
http://www.hiredbox.com/
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sarciszewski
Who are these industry leaders who only price their time at $60 to $120 per
hour? (Certainly not anyone who's read the advice by tptacek, patio11, et al.
about consulting.)

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wavelet
Very interesting to see all these comments about pricing. Our introductory
prices were based off similar services where you chat with an experienced dev
for an hour for help with your code, etc.

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tptacek
Are any of those services any good? People who can code well enough to improve
a design after a 1-hour phone call generally aren't incentivized to spend an
hour on the phone talking to random developers.

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nogridbag
I would be interested to read more on their interviewing process since every
"interview" thread on HN receives triple digit comments and there doesn't
appear to be any consensus on how best to interview candidates.

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pmcgrathm
$60/slot from someone that is likely making 5-10X that an hour in their day
job via base salary (not including stock grants) is a bit ludicrous. I like
the idea, but you really have to charge what the time of these people is
worth. On one side, this pricing will likely only serve to further the
interest in the product from a customer. On the other side, you may actually
get real significant talent onto the platform, not people who are trying to
run a consulting business.

How about this - pay the expert a portion of the salary. The $/hour would make
a bit more sense, and the 'experts' aren't going to laugh at how overrated the
recruiter is in the process.

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icedchai
Please. Who, in tech, is making $300 to $600 an hour "base salary"? Pretty
much nobody other than a handful of VPs and CEOs. None of which are likely
able to to do a real technical interview anyway.

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pmcgrathm
$300 constitutes, before taxes, around $550k. This is not unheard of for
senior / director level product management or engineering hires at some large
tech firms. Do not believe what you read on glassdoor. There are plenty of
Googlers that are making around $1M in salary in these types of roles.

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rajacombinator
Sounds like a cool concept. I would want to know how you address the obvious
conflict of interest issue since many of these experts presumably would be
hiring (or have friends who are hiring) as well.

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andy_ppp
Despite all the negativity around pricing I think this is an excellent idea.

I would certainly do frontend coding tests with people for say $100 per hour.
From a beach. In Bali.

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deanclatworthy
Hard to say if your service is valuable without some references but the
pricing looks quite attractive if your people really are qualified. I know job
titles look good but some of the smartest people I've met haven't beent CTOs
or founders, they've been senior developed who have years of experience.

Nevertheless good luck and I think this is a great idea.

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wavelet
Thanks for the comment. True about the titles - the people we work with have
years of experience in industry, and setting out to build their own companies.
They’ve had to recruit along the way too and so know the struggles of finding
good candidates, especially when expanding and having to interview for new
roles. Our process starts with a chat so that we get to know the client’s
requirements and they get to know us before going forward.

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hijinks
as someone who been a sysadmin/devops engineer for 15 or so years now, I think
you should add that as an option. I've interviewed for at least 10-15 first
devops hires and all the interviews technically were a joke. Comparing them to
interviews with at least one other devops engineer in house that is.

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billhathaway
I am curious to see what people should expect as the output of the service.

Does the interviewer return back a single "hire/no hire" bit or is there a
more detailed assessment of the candidate's strengths/weaknesses within the
topics covered?

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lostpixel
There is a lot interesting stuff going on in the hiring space, I like that
this has a human touch - uber-for interviewers.

have you thought of working with something like
[https://clarity.fm/](https://clarity.fm/)?

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scrabble
I'd certainly be interested in having myself interviewed at the listed price.
I think I'd also have someone who I didn't want to hire be interviewed to see
how the results compare.

At the price listed it certainly seems viable.

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samcrawford
Has anyone had any experience of using services like this? I struggle to
interview for completely new roles when we first establish them, and could see
this being useful in those scenarios.

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thisone
perhaps it's how I am, but if I'm not interviewing with people who are part of
the company, how am I supposed to make judgements about whether I want to work
with these people?

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IshKebab
It's a technical interview to assess your technical knowledge. The idea is
you'd have another interview with your boss about your teamworking skills and
similar rubbish.

I can actually see a need for this, but they need to get more experts than
"our mates from nearby startups and their parents."

Also the subjects they've listed are all for programming topics when I doubt
you're going to be in the situation of not already having some in house
experts. They need much more niche subjects.

