I have thought about this because I've wanted such a platform as a candidate, and I think an interesting angle would be having the jobseeker's loved ones buy it for them as a gift. Many times, I've been sad that I wanted to "help someone " with their search but I did not myself have a role and didn't feel effective. Friends who are unemployed usually won't accept cash from you but they might accept a subscription to a job search service.
If you're good at 3d graphics or game programming I have a lead on a contract that could work (it's too much work to do by myself, client wants people in Canada, my network won't do it for less than 5 figures). If not your skill set, my point is reach out to other contractors, they may have overflow work or e.g. design/front-end contractors might need someone to refer for backend/devops work.
> we're heavily subsidized by huge grants and funding
this is how it is in Canada too! My city has a huge manufacturing sector so a lot of these little startups with super niche products that take lots of R&D are found there. But no one talks about us because engineers aren't paid doctor money here (the grants aren't THAT good, which I think in the US defense sector they are).
Software engineers have full-time managers (which are a lot more overhead to pay for but kinda serve that purpose from the client perspective) and are paid well enough and consistently enough to usually only work one job on a given day. Subcontractors sometimes do decide not to show up to your job site because another employer offered them a bonus to do theirs that day instead. The point isn't (only) to humiliate or do a show of power to the workers, it's to counter an economic incentive they have.
That said, for a lot of subcontractor trades, it's so hard to find anyone that I'd worry about the reverse: you get known as "the freaks with the cameras" and no one good bids on your stuff anymore, and then the delivery is even more delayed.
> it's to counter an economic incentive they have.
I think economists would call that a feature and not a bug. It is essentially an auction (something economists LOVE). You could instead take that money that you're spending on surveillance and instead spend it on giving the contractors a bonus to show up to your place instead.
I really don't buy that this would "shame" them into coming to your place first. Everyone already is aware that they don't always show up because you got out bid. You're "solving" the problem the wrong way because you're not addressing the actual problem.
I would imagine shaming doesn't work because I think residential GCs have higher demand for workers than there is supply, but the cameras still solve the problems of making it easier for the GC to react when it happens (and the reaction could be offer to pay that sub more if the project is late or all the other subs have been showing up, realizing the work from the earlier stage wasn't done, and going home, or it could be lengthening their project schedule).
There are also "legitimate" reasons to fail first round interviews, such as the recruiter picking your resume for a role that you are not actually qualified for (which the hiring manager notices after the interview), your salary expectations being too high for that specific company size/geography/role (usually a communications mismatch where they advertise a more senior role than they actually have), or it coming out that you are not legally allowed to work for them (they cannot sponsor visas; they don't hire in your country; they require citizenship; etc).
All these cases are technically the company's fault, not the candidate's, but they do often come out right after the screening call.
I'm a manager whose definition of conflict mostly matches yours, so here's how I handle it (as an interviewee) and how to translate the "default behavioral interview question" to something you can answer:
- the scope of the question is usually "how do you reconcile your worldview, desires, and best interest with someone else's". When answering, I tend to first clarify to the interview that "conflict" is a word that has intense connotations for me, and then ask "Are you asking about a time I had to negotiate with a person that was coming from a different point of view or background, or about how I handled an emotionally charged situation?" (As a manager, it is more common that I do get asked about emotionally charged situations, which also take skills to defuse, just different ones.)
- At least for me, I often think of non-emotionally-charged disagreements as negotiations; there are absolutely negotiation skills to be used to resolve disagreements efficiently and effectively, and if you can't think of any, it may be something for you to practice. Do you often get what you want? When you do, is it mutually beneficial? How does that course of action happen?
- Sometimes you can sidestep the question and showcase better conflict resolution skills by thinking of a time you arbitraged a conflict between two other parties. Describe how you dealt with each party. Did you feel you were unbiased? If you were initially more on the side of one party, how did you set that aside to listen to the other person?
- Don't mention abuses of power (by you or the other party) in a conflict resolution question. Also don't mention conflicts that are primarily personal - the origin of the disagreement should be about work, not tone, physical threats, intimate history, etc.
- If you do have a story about building a working relationship with a known problematic person, so that your work with that person yielded good results and you didn't fall into the trap of a bad personal relationship with them, you can mention what you did to get there. E.g. "X was widely known for his temper and would often yell during code reviews. Although this caused problems with all his teams, and he doesn't work there anymore today, I always got civil, useful code reviews from X by sending him my points in writing in advance, and expressing that I valued his feedback which was why I wanted a trace of it."
I've worked on the reliability team at a place that made what they call an "edgy app" (long before fly, so we made our own stuff on baremetal) and to be fair, reliability is the actual challenge when you're talking multi-region seamless deployments of scalable web platforms. It makes or breaks that kind of product at least for the original market.
Money doesn't contribute all that much to solving it though. It's usually time to make the early mistakes, continuous improvements, etc. But AWS had several decades to solve this, whereas fly clearly hasn't, so I'm not sure I'd count them out yet.
I'm not seeing how your example includes an "obvious improvement" that "only the best engineers would do". I would use arrays over lists but I have a ton of low-level experience so I tend to care about performance, but I wouldn't necessarily expect the "best" engineers to do so unless the prompt says "Please take special care to turn in the fastest solution".
There's a couple obvious tests (written unit tests) that I would expect the candidates to think of for their roman number sorting function, and I usually graded the take homes better when there was 1) evidence of testing 2) evidence of smart, appropriate edge case testing, but not having time to write polished tests in 1h isn't necessarily a red flag.
I'm really struggling to find how simple examples like this can demonstrate anything like GP mentioned.
Woah, I've been a hiring manager long enough that it's been a while since I've done a take-home code exam myself but I don't even think I would grade a LLM that way (because I moved to AI now). Unless your code exam is super trivial or the boxes themselves are table stakes ("code runs without errors", "code includes more than one function"), coding is creative enough that it's hard to come up with 20 checkboxes that cover whether a sample is any "good" let alone "shows better decision making".
I've had a few bad experiences when sharing feedback with candidates myself and I would understand doing the checkbox approach for feedback and/or just never sending detailed feedback, but actually grading submissions pass/fail based on a subset of criteria you jealously guard from candidates essentially selects for lucky people. If I wanted to do that, I'd just shuffle the submissions by number of bytes and discard everything that's a multiple of 5 or something.
