Mistake-proof
hiring.
Vetting that looks past the coding test.
Most hiring checks whether an engineer can write code. We also check whether their code holds up: tested, easy to change and ready for the day traffic triples. The idea comes from Poka-Yoke, a manufacturing principle about designing processes so mistakes are hard to make.
What Is Poka-Yoke?
Pronounced: POH-kah YOH-kay
Japanese for "Mistake-Proofing"
Poka-Yoke comes from lean manufacturing at Toyota. The idea is to design a process so errors are either hard to make or caught right away.
In software, that means code with guardrails built in: types, tests, validation and monitoring that catch mistakes before your users do.
Prevention
Design the process so the common mistakes are hard to make.
Detection
Spot problems early, while they are still cheap to fix.
Resilience
Add safeguards so one failure doesn't take everything down.
The Founder's Dilemma
If your team keeps fixing the same kinds of bugs, the problem is usually who writes the code, not the stack.
The Problem
Chasing the same bugs twice
Fixes don't stick, and every sprint loses time to the same issues.
The founder becomes the debugger
Your week goes to yesterday's production issues instead of the roadmap.
Preventable hotfixes steal roadmap time
Every hour spent on an avoidable outage is an hour not spent on the product.
Our Solution
Fix the cause
Engineers who ask why a bug happened, not just where, and fix it at the source.
Write maintainable code
Developers who write tests, document decisions and leave code easier to change than they found it.
Plan for growth
Systems sized for the traffic you expect next year, with load tests to prove it.
Reliability should be the engineer's job, not the founder's.
How we test for it
Three parts of our assessment look specifically for engineers who prevent problems.
Refactoring Assessment
Working in real code
Candidates get a messy codebase that works and have to improve it without breaking anything. We look at how they think about structure, not how fast they solve puzzles.
Code refactoring challenges
Architectural pattern recognition
Scalability design decisions
Technical debt awareness
Incident Drill
Staying calm in an outage
We hand candidates a simulated production outage and watch how they work through it: what they check first, how they keep others updated, and how they stop it from happening again.
Real-time production issue handling
Decision-making under uncertainty
Keeping the team updated
Recovery and mitigation planning
Stakeholder Translation
Explaining trade-offs
Candidates explain a technical problem to a non-technical founder. We check that they can lay out the options and their costs in plain language.
Plain-language problem explanation
Business impact communication
Roadmap alignment thinking
Non-technical stakeholder clarity
Vetted before you meet them
Every candidate has been through our full process, so the interview is about fit rather than basic skills.
Ready for launch day
Engineers who load-test, monitor and plan for the traffic spike before it arrives.
More time on the product
Fewer production fires means more time for what your customers actually see.