Wow. Reddit comments contains a company name. First step felt familiar so i just found an email from them in my inbox. Looks like i dodged a bullet 2 months ago. In the first step they wanted me to turn on a camera and do some live programming while being recorded. All without any human contact, all automated emails. It rubbed me the wrong way and ignored them. After reading what the next steps are I'm glad i trusted my intuition.
I’m Juraj, Co-Founder & CEO of Better Stack — I designed this interview process so let me share why I think a PHP project is a good idea when interviewing for a full-stack position where you work mostly in Rails.
First, please understand how we operate.
We’re a small group of full-stack engineers. By ‘full-stack’ I mean that our engineers build products from the ground up end-to-end. There’s no artificial boundary between ‘backend engineers’ and ‘frontend engineers’, ‘database engineers’, and ‘SREs’, etc.
This means we move very fast. There are almost no meetings. No ‘sprint planning sessions’. No brainstorming. No need to ask for a permission from a different team to agree on a common API before you start implementing. You can get to flow, play your favorite music, write code and deploy the feature the same day.
We typically work with very senior people, many ex CTOs and VPs of Engineering. The idea is to have tiny teams of super experienced people.
If you love hacking on side-projects and writing software, you’d typically like it here.
…
Now, why do we ask you to implement a feature into a terrible PHP code from 10 years as a part of our interviews?
Multiple reasons.
A) To test your pain threshold.
Is 4 hours of PHP too painful? Then it’s probably better if you don’t continue in the interview process as you probably wouldn’t enjoy working here.
If 4 hours of PHP is too painful, you’d resign from the job the moment I’d ask you to implement a Terraform provider; or a data transformation function in VRL; or a wasm-compiled function in AssemblyScript or debug a conntrack issue at 3am during a downtime.
I had Rails engineer refusing to write a Dockerfile, “because it’s some else’s job to deploy the code”. That approach unfortunately doesn’t work with us. And if you do only want to write JavaScript and touch no other technology, that’s ok! Please just find a different company that works like that.
B) I consider PHP + JavaScript general knowledge.
One half of our engineers didn’t work with Rails before starting at Better Stack.
We don’t screen for Rails. We don’t screen for any single technology, in fact. We screen for general knowledge about developing software. The best engineers can pick up any reasonable technology quickly.
I want to work with you if you’re able to implement the test project and deploy it in an afternoon even with a technology you never worked with.
Great engineers who never worked with PHP successfully did this years ago. These days it’s even easier since we have Claude, Cursor, GPT o1.
C) Can you write software without modern frameworks? Do you understand how stuff works under the hood?
The task itself is so simple yet so many people mess up very basic things. I obviously can’t share our evaluation check list, but I can tell you that 50% of submitted projects are vulnerable to XSS, for example.
Do you blindly rely on the latest frameworks, hosted databases and PaaS to build your applications; do you rely on your teammates to catch your mistakes in a PR review and a different team of SREs to deploy your code to production? Or do you truly understand how things work under the hood? Are you going to actually test the page’s mobile responsiveness when you implement a UI? Would you implement the very basic best practices of UI usability or you don’t care about usability at all as long as the data gets saved in the database?
D) We test your personality.
Startups are typically a high-pressure environment.
How will you act if you disagree with me/your colleagues? We treasure the atmosphere at the company. We don’t work with brilliant jerks.
Some candidates simply politely reply: “Would it be ok if I implement it in Rails and Tailwind from scratch instead?” We say ‘Sure!’ and if the project is good we extend them an offer.
Some people start attacking us with aggressive responses. That’s a self-selection.
E) When do you consider the project being ‘done’?
What does production-ready mean to you? Some folks never shipped a production software on their own.
There’s no other person checking your work at Better Stack before it goes live. You can design, develop and deploy to production on your own. Will you ship good stuff or half-baked products? Will you ship secure features or introduce a security vulnerability?
The project is intentionally vaguely defined so that we see what you consider being ‘done’.
F) This is a paid project.
I don’t expect you to work for free. We kindly ask you to name your rate and issue us an invoice and we pay what you ask for even when we reject you. That sounds fair to me.
…
A good interview process is a glimpse into what the actual work is like. Interview process is not supposed to be pleasurable to all candidates.
So if you don’t like the process, the tasks or the interviewers — that’s alright! I want to sincerely thank you for investing your time into the process and giving it a shot, but it’d be better if you worked somewhere else. That’s what a good interview process does.
We do our best to be nice. To run a fast process. To explain why we do things the way we do them. To pay you for the assignment we ask you to implement at home. In F2F, if you don’t know an answer to a question we aim to educate and explain. We always ask for feedback.
And we do make many mistakes along the way, too — the company is growing fast and “when you chop wood, splinters fly.” So I apologize if you interviewed with us and had a bad experience.
Interviews are an approximation game: we try to guess if you’d enjoy working with us in a very limited amount of time.
I can’t win a popular vote here as we give offers to <1% of candidates. But I’m always delighted when a rejected candidate replies to our feedback email saying they learned a lot during the process and/or re-apply after a year.
The truth is that many software engineers would probably never enjoy working at a startup. Big tech and a fast growing startup is a very different environment. And that’s completely ok! Everyone is not meant to be working at startups. But self-awareness is key.
So many red flags in what you just wrote. You should delete your response, it's worse than not responding at all.
Who the hell wants to work at a place where they test your "pain threshold"? PHP is "general knowledge" (that's just wrong, I never wrote PHP)? Weird personality tests where people are rewarded for asking if they can do something completely different from what you asked them to do? "No brainstorming"?
In fact, given your description of your development processes it's not even that I never want to work for you, I never want to use your software.
This has been clear for a long time. The question is who has the power and will to do something sufficient about it to stop it. The money is so huge they can buy enough protection. And social media is not even the only one doing it knowingly. But until fine < profit, fines will be paid. And until execs dont go to jail, they will still be happy to rake in the billions.
Some ads have their salary put in local currency, which is a lot less than 100k USD. IE. couple of Polish, Swedish ads. one swedish ad starts at 837k which is comical.
Yes, it's a currency glitch I'm looking to fix as soon as possible (when my little baby lets me have some free time). Thank you for raising this. I've deleted them in the meantime.
On the last plane I was, the door was 17kg and instructions said to pick it up, turn sideways, then throw away. I prefer strong men to do it when my life depends on it.
I googled if it was possible. It harder mid flight, but take offs or landing its much easier. I would rather we accept the fact this risk exists and take the necessary precaution of putting someone at the door that can more handle the situation than pretend it doesn't exist.
