Why we changed our hiring process at Hyperswitch

Identifying high potential talent

The Beatles are probably one of the greatest bands to have ever existed and they have produced timeless albums for almost a decade. A lot has been said about each of the band members John, Paul, Ringo, and George but there’s very little coverage on their manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin. These guys were instrumental in channeling the raw talent and energy that the Beatles radiated. Perhaps there’s a lot to learn from how these guys decided to work with the Beatles even while they were just a very small band in Liverpool.

Brian was running his family’s music store when we heard of the Beatles for the very first time from a customer requesting their music. He followed them for a while at their local performances and really seemed to like what he describes as their “presence”. This is how he describes his first meeting with the band:

“….like they were fresh and they were honest and they had what I thought was a sort of presence and this is a terrible word, a vague star quality…”

Initially, even the band’s producer wasn’t particularly captivated by their sound since it diverged significantly from what he was accustomed to. However, he notes that what ultimately persuaded him to produce their music was their charisma and attitude, rather than solely their skill level at the time.

While knowledge and skills can be taught, it can be really hard to change traits like curiosity or passion for building stuff. It might seem fuzzy but I’ve come to realize that it’s ultimately these characteristics that differentiate good developers from the great ones. This became even more apparent for our team during Hacktoberfest. We asked ourselves some fundamental questions: What actually gets measured in an interview? Do resumes really matter? It set off a series of events that made us completely redesign our hiring process.

What we learnt from Hacktoberfest

Hacktoberfest was a wild experience. We got the opportunity to work with 70+ new contributors from across 7 countries . We had created a pool of 110+ issues, closed 110+ PRs and gained 3k+ stars over the course of the month. The energy and enthusiasm were nothing like we had ever seen before. Given that our project requires significant payments domain knowledge, we were pleasantly surprised to see participation at this scale. In fact, this momentum continued even after Hacktoberfest was over. It’s super satisfying to interact with a developer from the other side of the globe asking the right questions, speaking your language and really understanding the essence of what you are building.

That’s when it clicked. Why don’t we redesign our entire hiring process to fully leverage the open-source nature of our project? While we might come from diverse cultural backgrounds, open source presents a unique opportunity to communicate through code. And our code is open for you to see! We wanted to make sure that the process gives each applicant a clear picture of what it is like to work at Hyperswitch, what problems are we solving and what exactly does it feel like to collaborate with our team!

What we look for in a developer

That is why we want to spend more time understanding what you can do rather than who you are. Are you a fresher or have very few years of experience? Are you completely new to Rust? Are you overwhelmed by all the payment domain buzzwords? You do not have to worry because we have designed the process to be fair for everyone across levels.

“Even a billion dollars of capital cannot compete with a project having a soul.” – Vitalik Buterin

Ultimately, we believe that payments should be a basic utility like water or air. This is important because the payment ecosystem is full of closed systems and walled gardens. It is also extremely diverse (as it should be). In order to enable this diversity, payments need a trusted unifier like Linux. The road to commoditize payments will not be easy and we are looking for engineers that can make it happen. If this vision resonates with you, consider applying for Hyperswitch and we’d love to work with you!