Why Does Fal Send Engineers Home on Weekends?

fal co-founders Burkay Gür and Gorkem Yurtseven say fal looks for agency, hunger, and humility in engineers. Agency means a person can act independently, take responsibility, and own decisions. Once that is there, the other traits follow. Customers and models change so fast that fal often wants engineers to make business decisions or work with customers and decide around them. At a large company such as Amazon or Coinbase, software engineers stick to software engineering. Agency is hard to test, and the best signal is having already worked with the person.

Hunger is the close cousin: people have to want to win and build a large company. A conversation plus a reverse sell surfaces it. fal tells candidates the job is a lot of work. People go home on weekends, and fal is still successful. Crunches still hit 60 hours and 80 hours, and the spikes filter some people out.

The same screen looks for humility. fal wants talent without the jerk factor: low ego, easy to work with, and friendly. Customers who have dealt with the team tend to like fal for that mix.