Aline Lerner

Although it might not make you happy, doing a startup might give you something to do, way beyond what you could find in a typical job. Aline Lerner, the founder of Interviewing.io shares her experience.

On the Indie Hackers Podcast, Aline Lerner tells Courtland she wanted to be among the best at whatever she did, and she knew she would never be a great programmer because she did not love the craft enough. She did not quit engineering right away. She moonlighted as a recruiter after watching agencies fill roles at her company and learning what contingency recruiters were paid, about 15 to 20 percent of a first-year salary. She tried making hires for friends' startups. One of them, TrialPay, gave her the title head of technical recruiting even though she had never been a recruiter. She says hiring looked easy until she was inside it.

If you see an opportunity and: • You don't want to do what you're doing for the rest of your life • You want to be the best at what you do • You want to be passionate about what you do

Aline Lerner tells the Indie Hackers Podcast that she quit cooking after about three years, at 25, with no plan and no money. A college tutoring business had paid her and a friend about 50 dollars an hour, and she had spent it. An MIT program then called MEET, which she remembers as Middle East Education through Technology, sent her to Jerusalem to teach programming to Israeli and Palestinian high school students. She had no money, and the summer came with a stipend and a place to live. Teaching pulled her back into programming, because explaining the work made her understand it and love it again. After that summer she spent five years at ClickTime, building time-and-expense tracking.

The hiring process of a cook is effective and fair. They set up a station for you to work for the restaurant for a day, feed you afterward, and give you an offer if they were satisfied with your work.

Aline Lerner tells Courtland on the Indie Hackers Podcast that she does not know if she is happy, but she is happier than she was before Interviewing.io. In about four years the company reached multiple millions of dollars in yearly revenue. She says a founder can be tactically miserable, from a revenue drop or people leaving, and still be too busy to be existentially miserable. If the work feels like it matters, she will trade day-to-day stress for the feeling of having no purpose. This is the first job, she says, where she feels she is doing what she is supposed to be doing.

Aline Lerner tells Courtland on the Indie Hackers Podcast that founding is often miserable, long stretches of boredom broken by moments of terror, but it fits her. She has always had trouble with authority and with doing work that did not make sense to her. At Interviewing.io the mistakes are at least her own, and she has some control over her destiny. She also does not want only one kind of task. A founder, she says, faces cross-functional problems, many of them new, including boring ones. After four years she had about a dozen full-time people plus contractors, and she still liked the range of problems.

Many companies use antiquated hiring processes that do not align with market forces. Even though developers are in high demand, many candidates are being forced to do unpaid 2-week coding challenges or are turned away because they do not look good on paper.

Developers and companies both need a streamlined hiring process.