Ask HN: Anyone Interviewed at Fly.io?

I have, for an engineering position.

I put the experience on GlassDoors, but in general... it's fine, but took way too long.

On plus side. The coding challenge was amazing and I learned a lot doing it. I passed the first code challenge, then I didn't pass the followup exercise which was on slack. It was very clear that the exercises are directly related what I would be doing.

On the negative side, the whole process took far too long and there were around 1 month delays in all the messaging. That made me think I don't want to apply there again, because I don't have infinite time in my life. However, if you can afford to wait, it is fine.

For posterity I talked to them tonight, this was legit and it's something they're working on internally. No love lost, just a little confusion.

If you didn't clear the platform code challenge, leveling didn't come into it.

We do respond to responses we get after rejecting people, but it can take us a few days; we tend to do batches of them all at once. My take is: while people are still in consideration, we have an obligation (we don't always meet) to be responsive, because people are pending their career decisions on our own decisions. Once we've communicated that decision, we're less obligated to be zippy, because you have the high-order bit of what you need from us.

I don't know anything about your submission and deliberately didn't try to look it up, because our grading of your work sample is nobody's business here, and I don't want to create the impression of communicating anything about it.

Having said that, I can tell you what we tell everyone who asks why their code sample didn't pass:

We've made a decision to budget the amount of time we ask from candidates, end to end, from application to final decision, to the amount of time they would spend in a hiring loop at a typical company that just did interviews and resume screens.

That implies that we have to keep our coding challenges short and succinct. I can't ask you to spend days coding something; that's more than an interview would ask of you.

A consequence of a short coding sample is that there's less surface area for us to derive signal from. We have to be pretty greedy about selecting coding decisions to judge, because there isn't all that much code to work from (for anybody who doesn't know, our current platform code challenge is to write a TCP proxy).

A consequence of having to jealously collect signal from coding challenges is that we're limited in what we can tell you about our grading. We can't offer you the rubric we use (there is one; reviews are mostly blind, and done by a pool of engineers), because that deprives us signal. We'd learn how good you are at following directions, but not much about how you approach systems programming problems.

I'd want a scoring rubric (and fast responses to emails!) too. I see where you're coming from. All I can do is tell you where we're at.

I applied to Fly.io and a big part of that was because of their hiring process. Reading about the way they think about finding good candidates resonated with me. The role for which I applied was something I am deeply interested in, and would love to get into, might _possibly_ have the chops, but for which I probably do not yet have "the" resume. It felt like a Hail Mary to apply but I figured if nothing else I'd learn alot in the process and if I'm really lucky, might even get some constructive feedback.

I didn't clear the work sample but man, I had fun doing it. I learned a ton. I most appreciated that they gave me legitimate feedback as to why they decided not to move ahead with me. It highlighted a gap in my current knowledge/experience that I was glad to discover.

That being said, it did take a very long time to get a final answer back from them, but overall I'm a happpy reject. Could even see myself applying again some day.

That's nice to hear.

The actual interview was really fun (although it was at the end clear you are looking for someone a little different) and I learned about eBPF, which was great.

If you fixed the delays, then it's even better.