technical-interviews
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Mohit Bhende and the value of one more chance
Twelve colleges turned him down. Years later, the Karat co-founder helped make the second-chance interview part of the hiring process. His career runs through a literary magazine, Xbox, and a very well-used Honda.
Vivek Ravisankar
Vivek Ravisankar is the co-founder and CEO of HackerRank, the technical hiring platform he started in 2012 after leaving a developer job at Amazon. Frustrated by the hours engineers lost to unstructured interviews, he and co-founder Hari Karunanidhi built a way to measure programming skill directly. After several pivots and three tries at Y Combinator, HackerRank grew into a platform used by thousands of companies and millions of developers. Ravisankar's stated mission is to build a meritocracy in hiring, where a developer's skills matter more than their school, geography, or resume brands.
Sophie Novati
Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented software engineers break into top-tier tech companies. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who rose to staff engineer at Facebook and Nextdoor, she founded Formation in 2019 after recognizing that talented engineers from non-traditional backgrounds were being systematically excluded from elite tech roles. Formation pairs adaptive AI-driven learning with mentorship from senior engineers, and its graduates have landed roles at Meta, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Dropbox, with an average first-year compensation increase of over $100,000. The company has raised $9 million in funding and Novati credits a 2am chess game with Mark Zuckerberg as one early spark for thinking about business models.
Aline Lerner
Aline Lerner is the founder and CEO of interviewing.io, an anonymous technical interview platform that has hosted over 100,000 practice sessions and helped engineers get hired at companies like Facebook, Uber, Dropbox, and Lyft. A former MIT engineer who spent years as a professional cook before returning to tech, she ran hiring at Udacity, launched her own recruiting firm, and discovered through data that resume typos predicted candidate quality better than Ivy League credentials. Her data-driven writing on the dysfunction of technical hiring has been read by millions and featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company (which named her one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2018). In January 2025, she co-authored Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, the official sequel to the seminal CtCI book, co-written with Gayle Laakmann McDowell.