Summary :
- A startup founder claimed he routinely fires engineers within weeks for lack of coding skills.
- Reddit users criticized the post, blaming flawed hiring processes, not just candidate quality.
- The post sparked debate on AI over-reliance, outdated college curricula, and startup culture.
- Some startups are redesigning hiring models with mentorship and trial tasks to reduce early exits.
- Case study: One startup improved retention by reshaping its recruitment into a collaborative, empathetic process.
In a moment of late-night honesty on Reddit, an anonymous Indian startup founder posted a confession:
“I end up firing engineers within 19 days of joining. They just can’t code.”
The post quickly went viral—not for its content alone, but for what it revealed. The founder, frustrated by a string of bad hires, blamed the talent pool. He said he had offered generous salaries, only to find new engineers relying on Excel, ChatGPT, or incapable of solving even basic problems.
But the internet wasn’t convinced.
Within hours, dozens of responses poured in, not defending poor performance—but questioning the system. Was it fair to blame freshers for failure when hiring, onboarding, and training were deeply flawed?
“If your job interviews don’t weed out the unqualified, maybe your interviews are the problem,” one user wrote.
It wasn’t just a clapback. It was a callout—to the startup world’s often rushed, transactional approach to human capital.
A Broken Bridge Between Campus and Code
India’s tech industry is no stranger to headlines about talent gaps. Engineering graduates often emerge from college with strong theory, weak application, and limited exposure to production-level software systems.
But the Reddit post sparked a deeper conversation: Is the problem really a lack of skill—or the absence of systems that nurture them?
Multiple engineers on the thread shared stories of:
- Being hired for backend roles but assigned front-end UI tasks with no training.
- Facing unrealistic expectations during the first week of joining.
- Being let go before completing onboarding formalities.
Others raised concerns about over-reliance on AI tools like ChatGPT during coding tests, which can mask true ability, especially in remote or take-home assessments.
Meanwhile, hiring managers from other startups weighed in, admitting they too were struggling—with signal-to-noise ratios in applicants, resume inflation, and skill assessments that failed to reflect real-world tasks.
“There’s a gap between what colleges teach, what tests ask, and what jobs demand,” said Sneha Pillai, an HR consultant based in Pune.
“And nobody seems to be bridging it.”
Rewriting Recruitment: A Case for Empathy
At CodeNest, a Bangalore-based fintech startup, founder Anuj Malhotra had a similar problem. “We were hiring fast and firing faster,” he said. “It wasn’t sustainable.”
Instead of blaming graduates, they slowed down. CodeNest introduced a three-step hiring model:
- A collaborative coding challenge, with a senior dev observing problem-solving—not just correctness.
- A paid trial week, where candidates shadowed team members and tackled small tasks.
- Structured onboarding, with mentorship and feedback loops for the first 30 days.
The result? Of 10 engineers hired in the last quarter, 8 remain, and 3 have already been promoted to critical feature teams.
One of them, Sandeep Mishra, 23, recalls failing his first two interviews. “At CodeNest, they didn’t ask me to build an app in 20 minutes. They asked me how I think. That gave me space.”
