dchhugani

Thanks!!

Probably, but not everyone has the luxury of a great tech person to lead their remote tech team.

Also, if it’s a field where the nontechnical person has some level of domain expertise, they arguably have a better sense of product direction, even if they’re lacking product dev mechanics.

I hope this post helps them get those mechanics!

glad it resonates, painful stuff using waterfall at this stage

Thanks! Will ask my colleagues at YouTeam to fix this!

Glad it’s useful!

Glad it helps!

I'm looking for a technical partner. I think there's no secret recipe, but I especially like the answers below that suggest to be methodical about finding people and assume most won't work out due to life circumstances, timing, not liking each other, and more.

I also have gotten some good traction from writing this post: https://blog.usejournal.com/im-looking-for-a-technical-partn..., maybe you want to do something similar in the inverse?

Glad you like it + appreciate the kind words.

OP here: I wrote this post to shed some light on everything I've learned about managing remote developer teams when you're nontechnical (as in you don't write usable code for your product).

I also wrote this to shed light on how we build product at The Lobby, in hopes that it will attract the candidate we're looking for to lead our engineering efforts in NYC.

Happy to answer questions or discuss anything here!

I'm the founder/CEO of The Lobby (YC W18). Looking for a founding team member to lead our engineering efforts in NYC. Here's a post I wrote describing it genuinely: https://medium.com/@deepakchhugani/im-looking-for-a-technica...

Hello! Thanks for the candid feedback. Only time will tell :). best of luck

They already spend time doing this for friends/alumni/family. Whether or not employees are fully productive at work is a completely different discussion - we're just trying to give people without inside access the same benefits someone with access would get. Also most of our insiders do these calls on weekends, not on company time.

OP here: Thanks so much to the HN community for all the amazing support + critical feedback. Deeply appreciated! Apologies if I don't see / respond to more comments, will try to check back and answer when I can. If you want to keep chatting, please reach out here: deepak@thelobby.io.

definitely a concern. For something like this to happen, The Lobby has to have already reached a very large mass (i.e. employers wouldn't care otherwise), but we'll think of guard rails or measures to avoid this from happening. I think something to verify the candidate's identity in the onboarding before booking calls is a good way to do that - but haven't thought through it.

hello! i like this idea - we'll keep it in mind.

again my only concern is when The Lobby does pre-screening without giving any coaching, we again resort to arbitrary measures such as resume, good grades, etc. instead of trying to be a source of coaching, insight, & improvement for candidates.

For the candidates that reach a certain threshold on The Lobby (say, 3 insiders screened them over a call and see potential), then something like this makes sense so they can make their money back. Vettery gives candidates a $500 incentive to use them to get hired, which is a nice idea. Thank you!

Thank you! On it :).

Got it, I misread that!

Exactly on chicken & egg - but we feel the hyper local approach is a really actionable way to solve it, we're already seeing it work in our niche.

It's not really our responsibility at all, even to make sure people abide by company policies or to prevent insider trading.

I still however answer all these questions because we think about the ethical implications a lot and we thought through everything in detail before choosing this model. I'm comfortable with the risks, I believe the rewards far outweigh them. Thank you!

Again here would suggest you check out GLG, Alphasights and other expert networks. They deal with much more sensitive info than "interview prep,"and much larger dollar figures; they do this with 1099's and have no issues for their supply side (which are employees or former employees at highly regulated institutions).

You are not required by law to report 1099's to your employer from what I understand - but we still encourage them to check with employers before agreeing to join The Lobby.

Last point, we've learned that if you use marketplace features on Stripe or PayPal, you potentially don't need to issue 1099's if you make less than $20k in a calendar year, which we don't know any of our individual insiders will make even at scale (if they make $20k, I suspect they’ll find a way to make the paperwork work!)

Hello! Appreciate your deep dive on the thread and agree that if we look at bits and pieces of my comments, it's not totally clear. So let me write up a unified answer here.

In some cases, this is definitely against the company's policy. For those companies, we focus on former employees most of which are no longer bound by any contract (if any).

We protect our insider's identity and that leaves them protected, but we also encourage them to check with HR to make sure they're allowed to do this.

I already addressed the ethical/moral bits - we are simply giving more people access to the same insights you would get if you had a friend on the inside. You're just paying for it in this one interaction, whereas the privileged person paid for it by being born into or falling into the right circles (higher kindergarten, middle school, high school, college tuition, and being in the right families or circles).

Without The Lobby - the alternative is to live your life cold emailing and trying to find these connections, which is both inefficient and in our view very different. If you get some of these folks to answer you - you're not sure if they're going to be helpful or just discount you as a non-eligible candidate because you don't have what they're looking for. Being in a friendly dynamic where their goal is to help you makes this the opposite.

In terms of legal risks, please look up GLG, AlphaSights, and other expert networks. They have been doing this in what I consider to be a real ethical gray area with higher up executives and much larger dollar sums - and still is legal. Let me be really clear here - I'm not agreeing with what they do, I'm just pointing to it as an example where this has worked with much more sensitive information than "interview prep" and has maintained to protect its supply side and operate, which is why I'm confident we will be able to as well.

The only thing I hope this thread proves is that HN or those seeing The Lobby execute is that we have the right intentions. That goes a long way - whether you agree with our particular approach or not.

This was a personal problem, and our solution we've seen solve a real problem mainly as an information gap. Solutions like the ones you're suggesting on karma points or donating to charities as suggested below are on our roadmap- but for now we're staying focused on making this work well first :).

Hope this answers the question and if anyone wants to chat on this topic further - please reach out! deepak@thelobby.io

Yes! See your points. We'll have to agree to disagree :). Good night!!! Appreciate the candid feedback.

I heard this podcast too! I've also heard of people trying similar ideas. I have many strong opinions on why it didn't work for them and others. The main reason for Hacker Rank (And he says it in the podcast) is that in India the money you make per session is insignificant to build a business on vs. the US - and they didn't start focused enough on a few companies or an industry. It was just "software engineers" at large.

It still might not work - like I say below, our guiding compass is happy users + growing numbers and we try not to bias ourselves with what others have / haven't done. In true PG fashion I hope!

Thank you for the kind words and feedback! I'm copy pasting some stuff from the thread below.

"Definitely agree that this could be a problem. Practically speaking - we keep identities anonymous and so employees are protected.

Ethically speaking - if you have a buddy inside the company, they'll tell you how to prep with information the company wouldn't want you to know anyways.

It all comes back to our main point - if you don't have an inside connection, you don't get the juicy insights someone with that advantage does. So your odds of landing the job, let alone knowing what it takes to land it, are always lower. We bridge that gap - everything else in our view is a solvable problem because this engages current/former employees in the recruiting process + helps companies discover more talent.

The summary is that we're fine with keeping it anonymous now and here we have to take a bit more of a disruptive approach. Airbnb and Uber were both illegal (As in literally breaking laws) and still scaled and ultimately succeeded because they believed in the fundamental benefit of their service to the world.

The Lobby is completely legal, just maybe against some company policies, but we feel the benefits far outweigh the cons of some random company policy, even for the company itself as described above."

I'm very scared to speak about something I don't know in-depth, but my engineer friends (And even some HN readers in the thread) are very vocal that even in tech this is the case.

For example, the product marketing team at Facebook has pretty different skillsets & requirements they're looking for than the product management team for a specific silo (perhaps even more so than in banking, where the skills are still kind of similar in terms of Excel/PowerPoint and financial analysis).

In tech - I'd bet it's even harder to commoditize advice and every team is even harder to prep for. One team might focus on Python, the other on mySQL, the other might have a manager that likes to test in some weird way. And tech has very high turnover (banking alike), but interviewing processes are more flexible from what I hear so it must be even more dynamic (as in if your manager changes every 12-24 months, interviewing processes for that team change too), whereas banking interviews have largely remained the same for years and still people crave for this advice.

This is what I've heard- so feel free to refute any of this, it's not primary knowledge.

I think I understand why it bothers you. I think if you heard one of the calls or how it happens you'd understand the magic behind them.

Paid dynamic just makes it all about making it valuable to the candidate. It also lets the candidate say/ask anything in a 1-on-1 private & personalized dynamic.

The problem with AMA's or meetup style things is again it's not as personalized or private.

But those are things we want to tinker with as well.

Thanks for pointing that out - I missed it here. Answered a similar question elsewhere in the thread:

"Definitely agree that this could be a problem. Practically speaking - we keep identities anonymous and so employees are protected.

Ethically speaking - if you have a buddy inside the company, they'll tell you how to prep for these questions anyways.

It all comes back to our main point - if you don't have an inside connection, you don't get the juicy insights someone with that advantage does. So your odds of landing the job, let alone knowing what it takes to land it, are always lower. We bridge that gap - everything else in our view is a solvable problem because this engages current/former employees in the recruiting process + helps companies discover more talent."

The summary is that we're fine with keeping it anonymous now and here we have to take a bit more of a disruptive approach. Airbnb and Uber were both illegal (As in literally breaking laws) and still scaled and ultimately succeeded because they believed in the fundamental benefit of their service to the world.

The Lobby is completely legal, just maybe against some company policies, but we feel the benefits far outweigh the cons of some random company policy, even for the company itself as described above.

Thank you! This is awesome feedback. We know that banks also want to diversify where they recruit people from. They're having trouble finding people from the non-Ivy schools, females, and also diverse backgrounds. We've heard that from people who handle recruiting there and it's an important initiative. We think that's an emerging trend in other industries like tech too, as you say!

I like this! We'll consider it :).

hello! firstly, thank you very much for the kind words on wanting to help win + the thoughtful response.

- To your points on challenging & controversy:

understand it's ambiguous, was trying to be concise. Basically the point is conventional wisdom is that in recruiting, companies pay, job seekers don't. And if you charge job seekers, certain people think you are preying on the vulnerable. We are continually tweaking our message to make sure people understand this is quite the opposite - giving the outsiders an advantage or at least a level playing field.

- To your thoughts on the model 1. It sounds like you described a perfect scenario. You were immature, but had projects and other things to show you were qualified. Still people wouldn't answer your emails or interview you. Hindsight is 20.20 and it sounds like today you have a successful job, but maybe it could've come much sooner if you would've landed some of those interviews. What's the price you can put on that?

2. It's easy to say finance, software, and others are fundamentally different industries and that's why one will work better than the other. That's probably true in some ways, but the core insight is the same - the best way to get a job is to figure out what they're looking for and despite what you're saying - that most definitely is not available online. You can google Glassdoor forums and chats, but they become outdated only a few months after, and most of those are not at the specific group or team-level, they're generic. I cannot think of a better way to get timely, accurate, and personalized information than by getting it from a human being who is / recently has been on the inside. can you?

I am convinced that your advice is amazing - we have to continually ask ourselves if we're working on the right thing, if we're the team to beat conventional wisdom, etc. The best way I know how to do that is to see the numbers grow and focus on our initial niche before expanding.

Thank you!

Yes! We are working on segmenting the calls but really up until a few months ago, it was still all MVP and the different use cases helped us realize they need to be segmented differently (and sometimes even priced) differently. For example, having someone tell you about their job can probably be done in 15m and at a lower cost than someone who goes through the trouble of prepping for a mock interview. Working on it!