Crowdsourced Software Engineer Interview Guides
I built Interview Insider to help improve the tech interview process by making it more transparent.
A few days ago, I made it so you need to sign up for an account in order to view more guides. I did this as a way of testing validation. If someone wanted to read a guide badly enough to make a new account, then they probably think it's valuable. Got past 100 new signups today.
Next great challenge: getting people to contribute data.
After spending some time away from the project, I came up with new ways to improve it.
I realized that while companies were a pain to work with, I didn't need them anyway. If I turned it into a crowdsourced website, then I could get all the interview information much faster.
I rebuilt the website from scratch, and started doing a small amount of marketing. Just through dropping links in some CS forums, I was able to go from 100 -> 1000 visitors. No big launches.
Since then, I've been focusing most of my time on this project.
In June, I finally graduated from UCLA, and had more free time again. I had to decide what projects I'd be focusing on.
Interview Insider had not done too well in the prior few months. I was trying to work with companies directly to get interview information, and most of them would take forever to respond to my email, then take forever to respond to my follow ups. It was a long, slow process, and nothing was getting done.
I had other ideas that I was interested in working on, so I decided to leave Interview Insider behind, and start working on something new.
Did a ProductHunt launch soon after building the initial product. It went fairly successful, and ended up being around the 9th product of the day. Got a huge spike of traffic, and felt fantastic.
The day after I launched on PH, a company emailed me asking to be listed on the website. I was surprised that instead of me having to cold email companies, the companies were cold emailing me.
I was trying to think of ways to improve the software engineering interview process. Everyone was complaining that it was broken, but no one seemed to have any idea of how to fix it.
At the same time, I noticed lots of people asking the question "What is the interview process at X?". I realized that there was a lack of transparency about the interview process at different companies and decided to do something about it.
I built Interview Insider to help improve the tech interview process by making it more transparent.