Viewing profile — rachofsunshine

To where are you local, what are your desiderata, and what does your resume look like? I can take a look privately if you'd like, or publicly here if you want broader opinions / to…

Rationality on an individual level is not the same thing as what produces the best long-term outcomes for both parties. On an individual level, bringing up comp immediately signifi…

This is a specific application of a good general principle. Big companies need to watch for failure modes. Small ones need to watch for success modes, because the default is always…

We can. That's kind of the entire point of our business. Check back in a week or two - we've got another blog post on some of our interviewing data in the pipeline.

Yeah, so did I. Being both a ride-or-die leftist and the owner of a company is a weird place to be sometimes, and it's basically the way I figured I could best implement the world …

It isn't, but neither is the original post! It's an important addition.

Those things are fakeable, but there are plenty of people who will aggressively signal a LACK of hunger. It's more of a negative predictor than a positive one.

Yeah, to some extent you have to be willing to deal with this stuff in recruiting, which is why I've taken on the clients under discussion at all. In my Triplebyte postmortem (also…

It doesn't even need to be "good enough". People SHOULD be picky about founding engineers. But they should be picky about HIRES, not about top-of-funnel proxies for skill.

This is a good addendum. Do you mind if I add it to the post (credited, of course)?

Depends on the business. Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configur…

There is some truth to this, but I would argue (with a considerable amount of data on both assessments and hiring behaviors) that it is less true than people might like to hope it …

There's a bit of doublethink involved. On the one hand (and as I mentioned in the post), yes, most employers are not as dumb as I'm making them sound. In principle they know they n…

And, more to the point, that they'd hire a _better_ imperfect candidate by taking those four months doing tough interviews with lots of imperfect candidates (rather than hiring one…

The market is definitely not dead. It started warming up last summer and has continued to do so throughout 2025. But the market is two-tiered in a way it hasn't been before, partic…

I've been in recruiting for seven years! If I weren't frustrated with clients sometimes, there'd be something deeply wrong with me :)

Author of the OP here - to put some more empirical backing to this, virtually every single engineer in our candidate pool values illiquid equity at 20% or less of face value, and a…

Sometimes simple points are important, especially when those simple points are not generally agreed-upon. A proposed law declaring pi to be 3.00 would indeed be bad, and the simpli…

Zero-knowledge proofs allow unique consumable tokens that don't reveal the individual who holds them. I believe Ecosia already uses this approach (though I can't speak to its crypt…

Everyone's just playing a bunch of investor signaling games, because founders/VCs by nature are living in the world of finance, not the world of decision-making (at least in their …

> Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. People who are learning a new topic are pr…

New networks always start on top of old ones - presumably someone will, at some point, standardize an agent interface for these sorts of systems. Funnily enough, we already have a …

What makes Goodhart's Law so interesting is that you transition smoothly between two entirely-different problems the more strongly people want to optimize for your metric. One is a…