Nick signed up with us in early July. He's a pretty great engineer by every measure we have - but his resume doesn't immediately stick out, and he lives in a mid-sized town in the heartland, where most tech companies aren't looking.

We found him a job at Recall.ai, a YC-backed startup building infrastructure with meeting bots, less than a month later. We asked him if he'd be willing to talk with us a little about his experiences with Otherbranch.

This chat has been lightly edited for flow/clarity/typos, but not for content.

rachel [Otherbranch founder/CEO]: Hi Nick, and congratulations on the new job! Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

Could you tell everyone reading a little bit about yourself - what’s your background look like, and how were you feeling coming into your job search?

Nick [who just got a job]: Thanks, and of course :) I'm a software engineer with a Master's in Computer Science. I've worked at the past at smaller startupy companies and until recently have been doing a bootstrapped startup with my brother that unfortunately didn't find product-market fit. 

I started casually searching for a job around six months ago, and while I was never in a dire position financially, I definitely started to feel the pressure of slowly burning down my savings.

rachel: Yeah, that feeling of watching the savings go down is really stressful even if you’re not in any immediate danger. 

You say you’d been looking for six months - how had that been going? Were things going well and you just weren’t finding a good fit, or were you having trouble getting good interviews?

Nick: I’ll just level with you: it had been pretty fruitless, which I chalked up to a bad market. I saw multiple times people on Hacker News claiming it's the worst they'd seen since the dot com crash. I'm not sure how true that is, since I figured the AI hype train would have energized hiring but I'm not really keyed in enough to know. 

My main challenge was just getting interviews at all. More often than not it was just an instant rejection after submitting the resume. Next most common was getting a very brief call from the hiring person, them explaining how the hiring process at the company works, and then saying "we'll be in touch in a couple days." 3 days later the rejection rolls in. That happened quite a few times.

I honestly think I’m a pretty good developer, so it was extremely frustrating getting my resume tossed in the trash without getting to demonstrate my skills. My friend sent me this picture in a group chat the other day (he’s having difficulty finding a job as well). It’s pretty rude, but I think it captures the feeling:

rachel: as a person who went to a no-name school in Florida, I am offended, good sir!

But yeah, I think a lot of people feel that way, and “worst since the dot com crash” is pretty reasonable. Or at least the worst since 2008, and a far cry from the 2010s. You’re definitely not the only person who’s had trouble getting interviews in the last year or two.

Were you getting any feedback from these short calls?

Nick: No. I probably should have asked, but the calls were so short that I figure it wasn’t anything I did. It was legitimately "what's your salary expectation? Ok. First you'll talk to <developer> then <manager> then the CEO, how does that sound? Ok, we'll be in touch"

rachel: Yeah, so not technical at all.

Nick: I did get pretty far into an interview once, I think basically the final round, and thought I did really well. I had a nice technical and non-technical chat with the lead developer and I felt like we hit it off really well, and I thought I was going to get it, then was unceremoniously rejected. I asked for feedback and was ghosted.

rachel: That’s way worse! Like at least with the calls you’ve only invested a few minutes and don’t have your hopes up.

Nick: Yeah, it sucked. Although the company seemed pretty out there. I talked to the founder and the very first thing he said was "this job is hard. we don't do tests or any process really, we just push to prod. We don't have much runway so the company could shut down soon, and if you're not performing I might fire you quickly. If this doesn't scare you off then let's continue the interview"

rachel: Well at least they were upfront about it. I feel like I’d kind of appreciate that - during my last job search I had a recruiter insist to me that no one had ever been a bad fit for their eight-plus-year-old, 150-person company. Which, uh-huh, sure.

Nick: Yeah it was honestly kind of refreshing, I liked the dude.

rachel: So how did you end up finding Otherbranch?

Nick: I saw a post on hackernews that blew up. I read a few of the pages and I really do like the concept. I've always thought that if I can just get myself in front of a developer then I usually do quite well in the interviews-- it's just getting past the gauntlet of non-technical people that's the challenge, since (no offense to them) they essentially do a keyword match on your resume and if you don't have their predefined keywords, too bad.

"How many years of JSON experience do you have?"

rachel: “Yes, I see you haven’t explicitly listed HTML, so you might not be a fit for this role.”

Nick: I know someone on hackernews was kind of making fun of the memes on your site but this one did draw me in since it's so true

rachel: I saw that comment! I actually thought about taking that off the page after it, but I figured there was always going to be someone who just hates fun :)

Nick: Honestly I didn't really know what to expect but I just put in my stuff and hit send since I figured it couldn't hurt.

rachel: Yeah, I was going to ask about that - what were you expecting?

Nick: I was actually expecting to never hear back hah

rachel: Well, you didn’t list your JSON experience…

Nick: I have 10+ years of JSON experience in industry and at scale

I consider myself a JSON engineer

rachel: So obviously we did get back to you with a couple jobs (I think a few days later?). What was the process like from there?

Nick: Well, I thought I’d be a good fit for one of them since they were looking for a generalist with low-level experience, so I scheduled an interview with Basil [one of our interviewers].

[The interview] was tough. I whipped through the programming section which I was pretty happy about, and then we got into the technical discussion. It's not for the faint of heart, the questions go pretty deep and even though I felt like I knew the majority of the stuff, some of the discussion got me thinking "yeah, hmm.." about stuff I hadn't considered before. Like alternative implementation strategies for [a data structure from our algorithms section] after I described one way. I did enjoy it, I kinda like getting into the weeds about that kind of thing.

rachel: Yeah, it’s supposed to be pretty hard. I feel like I actually put that in feedback a lot for people we end up turning down but not by much. Something like “look we’re tuned to the needs of pretty picky startups, but most places aren’t this tough”.

You passed our interview, and we introduced you to a couple of companies. What then?

Nick: I ended up being really pleased with the companies I talked to. Recall has an extremely talented team and [another company who’s asked us not to name them publicly] seemed to as well. I'm not just blowing smoke about the Recall team either, they're some of the best I've worked with.

I talked directly to the lead developer (who also does hiring stuff I think since the team is small). We scheduled a proper interview then, and that was pretty much it. I didn't really skip ahead in the interview process compared to any other hiring pipeline, though, I don't think. [Editor’s note: Recall nearly always interviews candidates we refer them, but doesn’t abbreviate their process; other companies do abbreviate but are pickier about referrals - it varies by company.]

I finished the first round with [the other company] and was moving on to do a work-trial wherein I would work a week and then do a presentation to the company, and then they'd give their decision. Before I got to that, I had accepted the offer at Recall.

I think I'm going to fit in pretty well at Recall, it's a very dynamic team where I think all the engineers here have the capability to solve any problem you throw at them. That's the type of person I like working with, kind of an oldskool hacker mentality. I especially like pairing with people and just letting the tips and tricks osmosis into me, and that's very much the case here

rachel: “Old-school hacker” is definitely a type I’m always on the lookout for. 

You’ve been onboarding there for the past week - working on anything cool you can share?

Nick: Their main product is to a large degree implemented in Rust and handles real time video processing at a pretty huge scale. They’re really interesting problems.

rachel: Yeah, the real-time high-data-volume processing is a totally different beast from your “can you make postgres do the thing” MVP for sure

Nick: Even better when it's sqlite

rachel: I can’t throw stones on that, our early-stage scrappy back-end is an Airtable with a bunch of ugly Javascript written by yours truly

Nick: if it works it works

rachel: it mostly works.

So to wrap up here - I expect a lot of people who are on the fence about signing up with us are going to be the ones reading this interview. What would you say to someone who’s looking for a job and isn’t sure about working with us?

Nick: I went in with no expectations after months of floundering and in very short order ended up with a job that I'm actually excited about. Kind of a miracle from heaven to be honest. I can't promise that anyone else will get the same outcome but you might as well try. 

Not to get too into the philosophical weeds, but something I feel is that it's really hard to find in this day and age is someone who's going to take the mask down and be human with you. Maybe it's a byproduct of how small Otherbranch is right now, but the whole thing (the memes on the site, the submission form being an airtable link, the blog posts not afraid to mention suicide, the emails directly from you and not mailgun) is very *human*, and that's what I enjoyed about it the most.

The opposite effect is what's portrayed by the fake-smiling Anne Hathaway pic: the idea that I'm not speaking to an actual person but just a smiling machine that's "proceeding with another candidate at this time." Here's a small story, I applied at Anthropic a while back, and their thing automatically sent me a programming exercise to be administered by some site automatically. It was divided into five phases, each adding onto the previous. After I had gotten to the 4th or 5th phase, there was an error in their requirements; like, the text said to implement some behavior, but the automated tests failed when you conformed to those requirements. Test cases ran every time you submitted your code, but there was a bug in the HTML or JS of the site, and on some of the failing test cases it wouldn't show you what input or output was produced, so it just showed a red X with no explanation. So these two things combined caused me to become frustratingly stuck at that phase. The test automatically submitted, said someone will be back to me, and then a day later I got the rejection from a no-reply email.

Like from start to finish, there wasn't a single human involved in the process that could understand any nuance about the thing, and it's so ironic because the word "anthropic" means "involving or concerning the existence of human life." It was almost cosmically funny to me.

But yeah, this was the exact opposite of that, and it was a massive breath of fresh air.

rachel: One of the inspirations for me in starting a company was feeling like VC growth demands had left something valuable on the table. But the other big inspiration was that I felt like there was this middle ground between two extremes: traditional recruiters that do everything as human judgement, and testing companies that do everything as statistics. I felt like you could have the rigor of good testing while still focusing on the human experience in the way the better traditional recruiters try to. I'm glad we did that, at least for you.

What about companies that might want to work with us? They often have questions about what it looks like from the candidate side - which I think you answered - but sometimes they’re also not sure how we are at finding good people. What would you say to them, in terms of our interview’s difficulty or quality?

Nick: The interview is solid. Very tough but not unfair. I do think the humanness plays into it as well, because while it is a fixed format, the interviewer has to have the nuance/background skills to recognize talent. Basil clearly does, judging from his detailed feedback. From the company perspective, you're going to get candidates that are thoroughly vetted by a proper senior engineer.

rachel: Yeah, kind of the same thing there: be rigorous with the statistics, but use human experts who know where to probe and do followups as an input.

That’s everything I wanted to go over - anything else you want to say, feedback, concerns, anything else?

Nick: Not much else to say, I really liked it. I do hope that you can keep the same spirit as you grow and scale up, and that it's sustainable.

rachel: Me too! Fingers crossed - thanks again for talking with us, and good luck with the new job!