[ronilan]

I agree, a 60 minute judgment may just be a random gut feeling, but...

Your new service offers to connect ex-Google, ex-Facebook, ex-YadaYada with work. It’s all pedigree. Pedigree in my face, on page and in the website title tag.

And... I’m none of those.

So... I personally prefer a world in which I have a chance to be misjudged to a world where I have no chance at all. Maybe it’s just me though...

I think you got the observation right. The solution, no so much so.

[rsweeney21]

Yeah, we're not trying to solve the hiring/interviewing problem yet. We've completely punted on that by only working with people that have a very specific type of experience. We know that leaves out a HUGE number of excellent engineers.

Right now we are focusing on a small niche to try and build a sustainable business. Then we'll have the resources and impact to solve the broader problem.

[henryfjordan]

What problem did you attempt to solve? You are essentially offloading the vetting problem to all the companies who's former employees you work with. The only value I can see that you create is in liquidity in the market.

Sure, there's some benefit to solving market inefficiencies and making some money along the way, but don't pretend for a second that this isn't just another recruiting firm using pedigree as a proxy for actual skills.

[alias_neo]

I had written basically this same response fearing I was being overly judgemental before seeing your response but my gut was the same.

The posts read like sales pitches for someone solving a problem of making money for themselves by limiting their portfolio to candidates for whom $company had done the hard work of vetting by having previously hired.

Click-bait is a generous summation, I feel.

[rsweeney21]

Some people find our service valuable. There are devs that would prefer to be freelance but don't want to spend the time doing sales to make sure they have consistent work.

[rsweeney21]

> What problem did you attempt to solve?

Two problems.

1. Finding a senior freelancer is hard. I've been unhappy with sites like Toptal and Upwork. 2. Being a senior freelancer is hard. Finding work, getting paid. We offer services for freelancers to take care of that.

Some people find it valuable.

[jrochkind1]

But someone hiring doesn't need you to use "has worked at a FAANG or similar" as a filtering mechanism, so that's not the value you can provide. Perhaps they'd have trouble finding someone who "has worked at a FAANG or similar" for a contract job without you, and that's it.

[rsweeney21]

Senior software engineers are reluctant to leave their safe FTE jobs to go contract because they don't want to do sales, chase payments, manage a business, etc. We help contractors with that. Once a contractor goes full-time contract through Facet, we try to keep them always busy with as much work as they want. So yeah, it's hard to hire those types of devs on a single contract. It's also hard to find them on sites like Toptal or Upwork because they get priced out of the market.

[jrochkind1]

That makes sense, it just means the brief post you linked here isn't really relevant to your firm's actual competencies and value provided, which are not really about filtering programmer abilities.