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by tks 5416 days ago
Clearly this type of service isn't going to be the only way developers get jobs, and yes it may be somewhat insulting to people further along their careers to make them do this, but for someone starting out who doesn't have a large portfolio of achievement, or (even more importantly) doesn't have the degrees or college backgrounds that have increasingly become the primary metric for determining who gets entry level software engineering jobs (despite the ample evidence that these metric have minimal to any correlation with programming ability or productivity) this seems like a potentially life changing type of service. Anything that takes steps towards rationalizing the hiring process in our industry should be rejoiced. And if there are other services trying to do similar work too all the better- it's a big problem.

That said it would be great if you all did work on trying to push the meter more towards real world type of challenges as opposed to what do tend to be fairly contrived 'interview' style questions. The benefit of the platform you are building is that you can get people do work on larger scope problems that do a better job approximate the real day work of engineers. See as an example in this direction reddit's challenge to aspiring front end developers to build a reddit clone a couple months back:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/?utm_sour...

Congrats on the launch, good luck