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Comment by napolux | Hacker News Reader

Let me get it straight… Is the quality of the code still checked manually? You’re a startup setting up interviewing environments, then.

I thought there was some sort of machine learning involved.

“fake it till you make it”

Who can guarantee that your “reviews” are aligned to my goals and not just outsourced to the cheapest contractor available?

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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 things like "Strong Junior dev" but rather to just give you a bunch of raw data, and then you decide how that data is interpreted.

Some examples:

1. 7/10 unit tests passed

2. GET:/api/v1/vehicle/{id} OOM'd out at 1.5M records in the DB

3. Linter returned 10 warnings, 0 errors

4. Cyclomatic complexity counter returned max of 24

5. 5 new commits, shortest commit message 3 chars, longest commit message 45 chars

Also, the concern with outsourcing to a cheap contractor is a very legitimate concern, because we ALMOST actually did that. Instead, we decided that it was a bad move and to double down on building product + surfacing clear, unambiguous data. That's also why we're intentionally staying away from ML (at least for now), because it's inherently unpredictable.

To be blunt, a lot of those data points are not useful in evaluating a candidate beyond entry level positions. I really don’t care that much about commit message length or some linter’s idea of complex code. To me, trying to evaluate candidates on these kinds of quantitative factors is just not useful and it feels like grading a standardized test (in a bad way).

I agree. But that's the only metrics you can use to "judge" some code.

<sarcasm> I always forget number of lines of code. </sarcasm>

> We're modifying the report to no longer say things like "Strong Junior dev" but rather to just give you a bunch of raw data, and then you decide how that data is interpreted.

Nothing against you man, but that's something I (and maybe all the people looking for a dev) don't really need.

I can run linters and static analisys tools by myself if I really want. I never did that myself when I was interviewing people and I've never seen any other interviewers doing that.

And you're asking 600$/month for this?

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