I agree. The company should have either published clear guidelines on how the project would be assessed or provided some feedback on what could have been done better. It's okay to fail an assignment, but it's not acceptable to waste someone's time without offering anything in return. There are many companies, including pop startups, that handle this well.
The problem in the story is not that the candidate was rejected but that the process is largely disrespectful by asking for a lot of unpaid time to implement some project without clear guidelines or giving valuable feedback.
The author wasted a significant amount of his own time, and the hiring manager’s time with all the questions, the proposal, etc.
Even after asking for all this clarity, he failed to do what was originally asked. If asking for all those details, you have to at least do the basics of what was asked.
He failed on multiple fronts here, and even wrote an entire blog post without realizing it. It seems like Kagi did the right thing by not hiring him, if we’re being brutally honest. If he would re-read the original ask with a fresh set of eyes, then look at his final product and all the communication, the feedback should go without saying. When someone misses the mark by that much, it’s takes a lot of effort to try and say it nicely to soften the blow, as a company would want to do. Multiply this by however many people applied, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
Now that he’s written this blog post, I wonder if he’ll have more trouble even getting past the first gate of hiring processes, as other companies won’t want to sign on to have a blog post trying to drag them through the mud over a rejection. That shows more questionable judgement.
> The author wasted a significant amount of his own time, and the hiring manager’s time with all the questions, the proposal, etc.
Maybe if the hiring manager didn't want their time wasted they shouldn't be using a stupid take-home prompt? Frankly everything I've seen here indicates that I would never work for Kagi and would actively encourage people to never work there.
Yes, I agree. You cannot implement arduous processes and then complain about how arduous they are.
A week long take home exam with no discussion after the fact is absolutely unbelievable. It's so disrespectful to the candidates time.
I don't care if the exam wasn't supposed to take a week, or if they get 1 million exams, or if their hiring manager only works 1 hour a day. If that's the case, then they shouldn't be doing this type of test. If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.
I don’t see where the hiring manager was unprofessional. He responded to the questions/proposal without giving the author an unfair advantage, and he responded to the message after getting rejection. The author wasn’t ghosted or ignored, and has closure, which is more than a lot of people get.
Had the hiring manager given detailed feedback, it would have ended up in the blog post, and then they would need to revamp their process, as anyone reading would get additional information they weren’t intended to have.
I’ve also seen situations like this where the person never stops responding and seems to try and turn a rejection into a long term mentorship opportunity. The author seems like they might have those tendencies and keeping to standard boilerplate responses helps avoid that. It’s not overly personal, but I don’t think I’d call it unprofessional. The author simply misunderstood the assignment at a foundational level and is trying to shift the blame for that onto the hiring manager… when that was exactly what they were testing for.
Generally agreed, but in the editor space that's where plugins come into play. The plugin story for Helix is a long one, but I think it's converging and bet it's coming within this year.
It's because a smaller screen with the same (high) resolution means higher pixel density and smaller pixel size. It's something noticeably more expensive to manufacture.
>It's because a smaller screen with the same (high) resolution means higher pixel density and smaller pixel size. It's something noticeably more expensive to manufacture.
That's a fair point but I don't think it applies at these scales. Even a 8K 32" has a very low pixel density compared to a cellphone screen for example.
Acer has a 16" portable 4K screen for around 600 USD which they presumably sell at a nice profit, 4 of them would make a 8K 32".
Anyway, pricing aside the main problem is that the products don't exist in the first place. A monitor that's simply 4x 27" 4k screens (available from 300 usd) combined would be perfect for a programmer, data analyst etc even if it isn't strictly "retina".
The manufacturers don't make monitors like this for one reason or another. I think it's a marketing/economic strategy more than anything else.
My pessimistic take is that LG and Samsung etc have tons of investments in old tech and want to keep selling old tech to consumers for as long as they can because that's where they get the highest margins.
A slightly less pessimistic take is that monitor makers don't believe that there is a market for really large screens because when you do a survey most people think 32" is "big" and anything larger is absurd.
The author "decided to archive all stuff related to this project due to people not being able to comprehend that publishing an open source project does not mean that a person is willing to spend their free time on the problems of others."
