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Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#21

Post by tptacek »

aosmith wrote: post #8
fpater wrote: post #7

I interviewed for a role there, got quick replies to my emails too. Didn't need to use any credits to do the challenge (but they mentioned that I could ask for it if I wanted to). The challenge itself was not easy, and I assume that was exactly what they were aiming for. Besides the interview I've already talked with them and they were really friendly and eager to help (it was not a business talk, I'm doing some acad…

It just felt wrong, thanks for letting me know. Seems weird to run an orchestration system in another one. Fly wasn't meant to be a VPS / server host and using it as one seems odd to me.

The orchestration system you're talking about is Nomad. We run a huge Nomad cluster (we're in the process of moving away from it, but it's one of the harder parts of our infrastructure to wrangle).

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#22

Post by tptacek »

kasey_junk wrote: post #13
pcthrowaway wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They posted maybe 6 months ago that they were migrating from Nomad to K8s (and expected it to take a while) so it's possible they're not on Nomad anymore.

I would be _shocked_ if they moved to K8s.

We would sooner all eat a bug.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#23

Post by tptacek »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #14
kasey_junk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be _shocked_ if they moved to K8s.

I must have misremembered, they did say they're moving away from nomad in https://fly.io/blog/a-foolish-consistency/ edit: And here they say they're replacing nomad with their own thing: https://fly.io/jobs/platform-engineering/

The new thing is `flyd`. I'm writing a blog post about it, right after I write a blog post about our inscrutable hiring process.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#25

Post by tptacek »

jjice wrote: post #4

They were polite and gave credits as well, but I really thought the programming challenge was ill defined and broad. From the interviews and challenges I've run, it was much too broad and really required rereading and a lot of assumptions. Their response wasn't very clear either. Could have just been me, but I've never run into that situation anywhere else/ I will say though, they were very polite.

I have a lot to say about "ill defined and broad", starting with "I agree with you" and followed immediately by "c'est la vie". In a nutshell: we are extremely limited in how much time we can ask of candidates: our budget is the typical amount of time we believe those candidates would spend in more typical interview process (phone screens and an on-site interview loop). That means our programming work samples (WSTs) are small, which means we have to take every opportunity to extract signal from them, which in turn limits exactly how much we can document about our expectations.

We try to be clear in our assessments (and to give some feedback about our decisions). I feel like we do a better-than-average job of being transparent, responsive, and fair, but I would feel that way: I'm the Retail Sales Manager.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#26

Post by tptacek »

mbrain wrote: post #2

I've also had a not so cool experience with them, the interviewer canceled 30 mins before the call and mentioned they will send an email to reschedule tomorrow. That was in September 2021, haven't heard back again :)

I see the hiring conversation you had back in September '21; I don't see us canceling a meeting, but I'm sure that happened. That sucks!

Getting an inscrutable Russian Nesting Doll response from the erstwhile retail sales manager of a company asking you to set up Nomad on top of Nomad and ELK on top ELK is an off-putting experience, but it's the kind of off-putting experience we're comfortable giving people: what we're talking about is either going to click, or we're probably currently not a good fit, and that's fine.

On the other hand: the experience you apparently had, of going through our process and being unceremoniously jettisoned without explanation is off-putting in a different and less tolerable way. It's something we try hard never to do, but we're a small team (much smaller in 2021) and we screw up sometimes. I apologize.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#27

Post by quickthrower2 »

tptacek wrote: post #26
mbrain wrote: post #2

I've also had a not so cool experience with them, the interviewer canceled 30 mins before the call and mentioned they will send an email to reschedule tomorrow. That was in September 2021, haven't heard back again :)

I see the hiring conversation you had back in September '21; I don't see us canceling a meeting, but I'm sure that happened. That sucks! Getting an inscrutable Russian Nesting Doll response from the erstwhile retail sales manager of a company asking you to set up Nomad on top of Nomad and ELK on top ELK is an off-putting experience, but it's the kind of off-putting experience we're comfortable giving people: what we'…

ELK on top on Nomad, surely?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#28

Post by quickthrower2 »

aosmith wrote: post #15
detaro wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the problem. If you applied for an infra role, you are clearly not representing their target market, but they want you to show an infra thing on some VMs. And it makes sense for them to let you run those VMs on their platform, where they can easily pay for it?

Fly is a no infra platform like heroku. It's like being asked to setup k8s on heroku.

Best possible interpretation if your comment is you are baffled that they asked you to use fly.io to run Nomad instead of say something “lower level” like AWS EC2 or bare metal.

Had they asked the latter you would be more enthusiastic?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

#30

Post by half0wl »

I'm currently doing so. I'm pretty early in the process, and I've had a great experience thus far: quick replies, nice challenge (it was actually a challenge for me because I haven't touched the relevant language/framework in many years), and I generally appreciate these sort of interviews (I know I'm an outlier; unpaid work isn't a huge deal for me).

Out of curiosity, what did they send you, and what do you find weird/off about the process? It's definitely not the norm [0] but isn't it better than spending a bunch of time working through back-and-forths in "normal" hiring pipelines?

[0] https://fly.io/docs/hiring/hiring/

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