HackerMeter

Thousands of ridiculously talented developers won’t get the jobs they deserve this year, and hundreds of companies won’t be able to hire the coders they need.

It’s not because the Ruby-writing rock stars don’t want to work, or that the jobs aren’t out there. Instead, co-founders Lucas Baker and Frost Li say the tech industry’s aristocratic hiring practices are the problem — and Hackermeter is the solution.

“Unless you’re from Stanford or MIT with a 3.9 GPA, It doesn’t matter how good you are, your resume is probably going to get tossed,” Baker laments.

Hackermeter levels the playing field for all developers by taking the emphasis off where they went to school or what their GPA was, and instead focusing on what matters: How well they can code.

Here’s how it works: Developers test their skills by completing code challenges, which are graded and given Hackermeter scores based on three factors — how long it took to complete the challenge, how well the code performed, and overall degree of difficulty.

“It’s one click, one standard,” Baker says.

It’s kind of like a Klout score, but a Hackermeter score is worth more than social media bragging rights. Because everyone has access to the same challenges, Hackermeter rankings are extremely fair, accurate, and consistent — not to mention practical.

Hackermeter also makes it easy for companies to find employees with specialized skill sets that oftentimes fall through the cracks of current recruiting techniques.

“A lot of times developers don’t perform well during general challenges, even though they have a unique skill set that a particular employer needs,” Baker says. “Unfortunately, there’s no way for these coders to rise to the top when applying for these positions using the current methods.”

Once again, Hackermeter to the rescue.

“We can reach into the niches and catch the people that might fall out of the typical algorithmic pipeline,” Baker says.

That’s precisely what happened to one of Li’s uber talented friends, who fell through the cracks while applying at one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies.

“This guy got rejected by Twitter because they put him through the general pipeline,” Baker says. “He was already a great developer. He had 10 apps in the App Store, all of which were quite popular, but they just didn’t test the right set of skills.”

It all worked out, though — Baker says the Twitter reject went on to become “the first mobile developer at a startup that recently sold to Facebook for a lot of money” — but not every coder with superhuman skills is so lucky. Lucky for them, this is precisely what Hackermeter hopes to change.

Employers can search for potential employees by their score, or demonstrated proficiencies in Ruby, Python, Java, C++, and/or C. And thanks to the unique playback feature, they can see how candidates write code, line by line, in real time.

“Think about how much code an employer sees before hiring someone,” Baker says, noting even Google’s notoriously thorough trials equate to about 7 Hackermeter challenges.

This means recruiters won’t have to guess what “proficient in Java” means on a resume; they can see it — and make unbiased hiring decisions based on performance, instead of pedigree.

Ironically, Baker and Li are members of the super-educated, high-scoring elite that Hackermeter is trying to disarm. Baker had a perfect score on his SATs and graduated within the top 5% of his engineering class at Stanford. Meanwhile, Li has dominated programming competitions for more than a decade, first in her native Taiwan, and later as part of the University of Michigan’s award-winning ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, which won the regional championship and finished 13th at the World Finals.

The two met while interning at Apple, where they spent their lunch hours discussing algorithms in the cafeteria.

“We talked about a lot of nerdy stuff that summer,” Baker recalls. They went their separate ways in the fall — Baker made his way to Square, while Li went to Twitter — but have been swapping algorithmic and coding quizzes ever since.

They came up with the idea for Hackermeter last March, while hanging out in Baker’s kitchen.

The soon-to-be co-founders were complaining about current hiring practices at their respective workplaces when the idea struck them. The conversation went something like this:

Baker: “Hiring sucks at Square!”

Li: “Hiring sucks at Twitter!”

(Eureka moment)

Both: “The Y Combinator application deadline is in three weeks!!!”

“We put together a prototype and we got in, and then we threw away the prototype and started coding for real in May,” Baker says.

Hackermeter launched on TechCrunch in August, and had 4,500 coders sign up and complete 150,000 challenges within the first week. They currently have 15 companies on board, with 30 more on the waitlist.

It doesn’t cost anything for developers to take challenges or get matched with employers, but employers pay a headhunting fee for every Hackermeter-facilitated hire ($10,000-$20,000).

The company aims to become the go-to source for hiring new Electrical Engineering and Computer Science grads, and Baker says facilitating 25% of EECS new hires would generate $200-million in annual revenue. What’s more, he says the national market for hiring new software engineers is worth $2-billion.