I don't get this. Karat provides their customers with full, detailed text writeups of every single interview, as well as full recordings both of the interview video call and the code timeline. Why didn't you just review that material?

I absolutely did review the interview, that was the whole point. I just wasn't willing to risk sending a potential candidate through a pipeline I myself hadn't gone through. I'm happy I caught the problems in advance myself, rather than subjecting someone I potentially wanted to hire to a useless interview.

I do want to stress the useless part here too- even with the notes of how the interview went I wouldn't be able to make a decision on things, since they didn't hit the points that were actually relevant to the role.

In summary, the beginning of a brand new business relationship, you demoed a single, first version of your custom purchase, you understood that it needed tuning, and then proceeded to immediately cut them without providing further direction.

(EDIT: Note that I previously contracted with Karat and feel loyalty to them, but have no formal association or stake in them, nor do I represent them.)

Well, witnessing this behavior has certainly turned me off from considering Karat in the future. I often appreciate how on Hackernews, you can voice a criticism for an online service and someone from that service will show up, take accountability, and help out and/or take feedback - happened to me with the CEO of DuckDuckGo a while ago, a product I really like but had an issue with.

What a contrast this is.

He seems to be a (former) independent contractor rather than an employee/representative, so I think this is more just misguided fanboyism rather than intentional astroturfing/reputation laundering.

Karat is probably the best/fairest you can do for purely algorithmic interviews, but I'm not sure they're even able to do anything else (the parent commenter's experience suggests not).

I would also consider it more of an exam than an interview - the process is very standardized and sterile, and obviously since it's being outsourced there is no way for the candidate to ask any questions about the company.

(disclaimer as well: went into the interviewer onboarding with them as a contractor but dropped out as I wasn't comfortable proctoring tests that I myself wasn't an expert at).

Hello I work at Karat in engineering (have had a great experience so far). I will make sure someone hears about this. I know there is some degree of customization in the format/content of interviews but sounds like it wasn't to the degree it was advertised which is unfortunate.

You should probably disclose that you are a Senior Interviewer at Karat

To be clear, we gave a ton of feedback and direction before the demo. All of that was completely ignored. If it was a problem of just tweaking things or making changes then I would have done that, but the fact is that they completely ignored all of the input we had already given.

I'm curious why you're so intense about this- do you have some sort of stake in karet?

They worked for Karat, according to their comment history. So yes.

I'm seeing now that I should have disclosed this again at the beginning of this thread with my first reply, because now it's coming across as a deception, which was truly not the intent as shown my by earlier comments. Apologies folks

I contracted with Karat previously, but don't have any present relationship with them or their executives.

Communication is hard, and not everyone has time or energy to bridge the gap, which is fair! It's just a bummer to hear that this has somehow lead to words like "awful", "real negative impact", "useless". That feels very intense to me, and I have probably responded in an intense way as well. There was no harm intended

Can you delete this? I don't want a conversation that I'm having to lead to someone being harassed.

It's okay, I'm not anonymous. Thank you for looking out though. I appreciate you and apologize for coming across as adversarial, the company has a special place in my heart and I'm obviously very biased. What you experienced sounds like it was pretty bad, and I hope that they have grown from it

Can we not doxx someone over a benign comment thread on HN?

Not the GP but it's not "doxxing" to point out someone has a conflict of interest, and it's important that we all be open about our potential biases when discussing topics like this. And perhaps even more important is that hiding these potential biases get called out to disincentivize bad actors.

It's possible to say "this person works at this company" without sharing their entire work history and other info. Several people did this.

It’s not really doxxing someone when they freely put their name out there, in many places, including in content they themselves have posted to Hacker News. That said, parent probably didn’t need to post a linked in profile either heh.

Good on you for not subjecting someone to that.

+1, we had a similar experience using it to hire engineers. It felt like our feedback went into a black hole and they did not change their process.

We had a few months of really painful full interview loops with candidates not appropriate for the positions.

From your comments it seems you're at Google. Isn't Google mostly algorithm/leetcode problems? I thought Karat was mostly that as well. Wouldn't Karat be a good screen for that sort of thing so as not to waste Google Engineer time?

I commented below. I work at Karat in engineering and have had a good experience so far. I'll make sure someone hears about this. I'm not aware of exactly how customizable our interviews are but it should be consistent with what is advertised or that needs to change.