The cost of getting a job today

A Head of Engineering in a startup describes how hiring has become harder not just because of skills but because of logistics and hidden costs. Once a baseline of competence is met, behavioral fit, communication and willingness to work matter more than marginal technical chops. Expecting candidates to use paid LLMs for take-home coding challenges creates a new, job-seeking-specific expense at precisely the worst financial moment for many applicants. Company accounts are a liability and reimbursements are messy, so the current norm risks excluding good engineers for reasons unrelated to ability.

Rather than pretend the problem doesn’t exist, the hiring process can be changed to minimize candidate cost: move paid-AI challenges to later stages after a substantive conversation, shrink tasks so they run on free tiers, run live pairing sessions with the AI on the company’s machine and account, and place less emphasis on polished code while prioritizing architecture, trade-offs and reasoning. Each choice has trade-offs - stressful live interviews, less surface area from smaller challenges - but intentionally reducing financial barriers preserves access to talent and reveals the qualities that matter most in small teams. Recruiters and hiring managers are urged to consider how their process might be filtering out capable people.