[HN Gopher] Show HN: Touvlo - Technical Interviewing for Hardwar...
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Show HN: Touvlo - Technical Interviewing for Hardware Engineers (By
Humans)
Hi HN! Touvlo is a platform where you can delegate your technical
interviewing for hardware engineers to us, so that you can focus on
building your product instead. Our interviews test real-world
engineering skills, largely via a collaborative CAD session through
our in-browser platform. You can think of it as a pair-coding
session between the interviewer and the interviewee, but for
hardware. Interviews are conducted by real hardware engineers with
industry experience (currently my co-founder, Danae). After each
interview, you get a detailed score card, as well as full,
timestamped recording of the interview. There's no pricing page
yet, but we charge 220$ per interview, with discounts for monthly
packages for 10 interviews or more. If you're a hardware/robotics
startup, give us a try: we can help you hire better and save you
time. Drop us an email (founders@touvlo.co), or sign up for a demo
interview on https://touvlo.co. We offer a money-back guarantee and
a free trial for our next few customers. We're also applying to YC
- we went from an idea to a product with users in 2 months. We
would highly appreciate any feedback.
Author : cporios
Score : 23 points
Date : 2024-05-06 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (touvlo.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (touvlo.co)
| cushychicken wrote:
| Do you say "hardware" to mean "mechanical engineering"? That's
| kind of what it seems like from your description and screenshots.
| It's probably worth making this a bit more descriptive - to some
| people "hardware" means PCBs and electronics. (I'm one of them!)
|
| It's an interesting idea and I like that you've stood up
| something minimal to test your product offering quickly.
|
| What's your elevator pitch for your value proposition?
|
| How do you plan to scale this business beyond you and your co
| founder?
| cporios wrote:
| That's a good point regarding hardware in the name. Eventually
| we'd like to do all hardware and more (e.g. architecture), but
| currently our expertise is in mechanical and robotics
| engineering.
|
| Our pitch: We make recruiting easier, better and cheaper for
| the companies building the hardware of tomorrow, by letting
| them focus on their product rather than repetitive candidate
| skill assessments. Currently, senior engineers in small
| startups and scale ups spend a lot of their time interviewing,
| and they often don't do it well (remote CAD sessions aren't
| really a thing). We save them time and money.
|
| We will scale this by hiring freelancer interview engineers.
| This has already been done in software, very successfully:
| karat.com. So we think it can work at least equally well in
| hardware.
| cushychicken wrote:
| That's an interesting thesis.
|
| I know recruitment firms serve some of the phone screen
| purpose you're proposing, but just with basic Q/A of resumes.
|
| I think, if I were looking to hire you, I'd be wondering how
| alike your working style was to that of me and my team. I'd
| want to know how much I could trust your judgment in a
| candidate's technical approach.
|
| I'd also offer that you can't really outsource the job of
| evaluating cultural fit - which is still really important in
| spite of all the baggage that term carries.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Huh, that's an interesting idea. But as an engineer at a small
| automation integrator, who never has time between busy projects
| for important-but-not-urgent tasks like interviewing new hires,
| it seems I should be in your target market, but I can't imagine
| delegating a critical decision like this to a third party.
|
| Who is your ideal customer? I'm imagining either a nontechnical
| solo founder (with a really good, high value idea that he'll
| explain after you sign an NDA) looking to hire a first
| engineer/technical cofounder to actually build it...and all the
| problems that come from that. Or I'm imagining a big corp with an
| HR department that's at odds with the engineering department,
| always denying their hand-picked candidates and sending them
| unqualified candidates, but I'm fortunate to have never
| experienced that kind of environment.
|
| Maybe we're not in your target market in that we expect to need
| to do training, and don't expect our best long-term candidates to
| be able to hit the ground running at full speed. We've hired
| senior engineers with zero experience in our Autodesk Inventor
| CAD suite, as well as fresh grads with little experience
| whatsoever? Our "HR Department" is really just two people (our
| CEO and accountant), so there's no "must know how to lay out a
| robot cell" to validate in an assessment.
|
| Or maybe we're not in your target market because already have an
| engineering department with something like a century of combined
| experience who are totally capable of sorting out a good
| candidate from someone blowing BS.
|
| Or maybe we're not in your target market because we are just an
| ordinary small business, we have negligible turnover (it's been 6
| years since someone moved to a different company), and only
| moderate growth rates (only hired 3 engineers in the past 6
| years), it's just not that big of a time sink. I suppose a
| hardware startup with meteoric growth rates would need to spend a
| lot more time hiring engineers.
|
| One question: You write "We can use any CAD software you prefer."
| Any? Really? Seems you need a short list here. If you're
| providing the license, having seats of Inventor, Solidworks,
| Catia, Creo, NX, Fusion, etc. on hand for occasional interviews
| sounds really expensive. And an experienced designer who can
| effectively every one of those is really rare and also expensive.
| I would call Altium/Cadence/Kicad "hardware design CAD packages",
| but those are completely different skillsets and I wouldn't
| expect a typical ME to know how to use them well.
| cporios wrote:
| You're absolutely our target market! You're not delegating the
| decision, you're delegating the interviewing. We don't make a
| decision, we give you a video and scorecard of a one hour
| technical interview. You can integrate our interviews at any
| stage in your pipeline (e.g instead of a phone screen), and do
| more interviewing for those that do well. Please note that this
| is common in software, see karat.com.
|
| Yes, we can use any CAD software (or at least, we will
| seriously consider it). We're a new company and following the
| YC advice of doing things that don't scale. If that means
| buying 5 different software licenses for our first 5 customers,
| then we'll do that.
| neilv wrote:
| Interesting. What kind of customers do you serve? (Non-hardware
| companies that just want to spin a product but no idea how?
| Companies that need lots of hardware engineers but don't want to
| interrupt their current ones to interview?)
|
| How are they thinking of hardware engineers? (Like an
| interchangeable commodity or one that can get a letter grade?
| Very transactional, maybe a gig?)
|
| Will your customers do substantial additional interviewing after
| passing your technical interview, for qualities you don't or
| can't evaluate but companies should? Could your service be mainly
| a screening, before a company invests more significantly in
| interviewing with technical and other team members?
|
| What is your answer to "Why did I spend 4 years in engineering
| school, and build my professional track record, yet have to keep
| doing these negging tests? Does this company not employ anyone
| who can get a sense of a fellow engineer's skill and
| professionalism just by talking with them? Did they read my
| resume? And now they're not even administering the test
| themselves?"
|
| Can a particular job-seeker interview with you once, and get
| their report card sent to many employers over time? Who pays for
| each instance, and do they pay less if it's reused?
| staticfloat wrote:
| Just a small piece of feedback, it looks like there's a small
| typo on the last paragraph of the page:
|
| > Interviews can be scheduled (and rescheduled) interviews around
| the clock, 7 days a week.
|
| I believe the second `interviews` should be omitted.
| cporios wrote:
| Thank you!
| spapas82 wrote:
| Touvlo in greek means brick but it also means metaphorically a
| very bad student.
| cporios wrote:
| We're both greek, it's meant in a joking way :) What do you
| think of the name?
| pcranaway wrote:
| the second I read it I knew it was Greek I have actually
| thought of using the name for an app before years ago, but it
| never happened as I thought it's... a bit rude? not sure if
| this applies when exposing your app to a mostly non-greek
| audience though
| p-a_58213 wrote:
| Recalling certain candidates that I have interviewed over the
| years, I'd say it is spot on!
| stratosgear wrote:
| Greek here. I would NOT want to associate in any way with a
| site named Touvlo, even if it is used in a joking manner. Too
| offensive! For a non native speaker, ignorance is bliss. But
| once they found out what Touvlo really means, i still bet
| they would feel cheated, and/or embarrassed. Therefore in
| both cases, it's a no go. Just my 2 cents.
| cporios wrote:
| Thank you, this is good feedback. We're both native greek
| speakers, and we meant it in a lighthearted way, but you're
| right that not everyone will see it this way.
| spapas82 wrote:
| I would also agree with the grandfather comment. The name
| is a little too offensive when used in a professional
| environment...
| Animats wrote:
| It looks like they are simulating a solid modeling program, one
| that looks vaguely like SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor/Fusion,
| but with a worse user interface.[1]
|
| [1] https://touvlo.co/images/feature-three.png
| rossng wrote:
| Onshape is a pretty popular CAD package! We use it for robot
| hardware (moving away from Fusion).
| cporios wrote:
| This is onshape indeed, but we run a collaborative VNC (soon-
| to-be RDP) session through the browser. We can run anything
| that runs on Windows (so everything).
| cporios wrote:
| Hi! We're not simulating anything, we run a collaborative VNC
| (soon-to-be RDP) session through the browser. We can run
| anything that runs on Windows.
| buescher wrote:
| Looks like a CAD operator's interview, not an engineering
| interview. I guess the basic DFM question is marginally
| engineering.
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(page generated 2024-05-06 23:02 UTC)