ABOUT THIS EPISODE
The first time Vivek ever flew internationally, he asked the flight attendant before takeoff, "This is going to San Francisco, right?" He was on his way to a 10-minute Y Combinator interview with PG, Sam, Jessica, Paul Buchheit, and Harj. His co-founder Hari couldn't come because his visa was denied. They got into YC, and started HackerRank which later became the template of how to hire engineering talent efficiently.
Vivek started the company in 2010 as Interview Street, a mock interview service. The idea came from his time interviewing engineers at Amazon, where he saw that resumes didn't say much about skill. HackerRank went on to create the online assessment which every engineer has grown to know and well, hate. Now, in what Vivek calls a "refounding moment," they're tearing it down and rebuilding it to match how the job of an engineer has changed in the era of AI.
Vivek walks through how tech interviews have always copied whoever the hottest company was. First it was Microsoft's "how many golf balls fit in a 747." Then Google's data structures and algorithms. Then Stripe's API integration rounds, which Maya had to grind through as a new grad in 2022. Now the job is orchestrating agents, so how do you tell a vibe coder from a real production engineer?
Vivek's answer is Chakra, HackerRank's agentic interviewer. Candidates work on real-world problems with whatever frontier model and harness they want, and Chakra watches the process. Vivek's take is that anyone can produce an output with AI, so the signal is in how you got there.
Chakra is now live and you can try it free at hackerrank.com/chakra.
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00:00 Meet Vivek, Founder of HackerRank
02:15 From counting Golf Balls in a 747 to LeetCode
05:55 Refounding HackerRank With Chakra
08:56 Process vs. Output and why partial credit matters
12:31 Who Adopted Online Assessments First
14:20 Why Hiring Is a Lagging Indicator
17:38 What Candidates Like About Chakra
18:20 How to Remove the Incentive to Cheat
22:44 The Three Ways People Cheat
26:59 Why Hiring Is a Hard Problem and Build-Your-Own Is Overrated
28:11 First Indian YC Company and a First International Flight
