Indian founder skips technical interview, hires techie who later generated $60,000 in revenue
An Indian founder shared that he hired the first developer for his company on a seven-day paid trial basis instead of conducting a technical interview.
A startup founder shared how he hired the first developer for his company without any technical interview. The Indian entrepreneur’s X post claimed that this decision turned out to be right eight months later when the techie helped reel in $60,000 in revenue.

“Just hired my first developer without asking a single DSA question. No formal interview, no ‘reverse this binary tree’ nonsense. Just said: ‘Here's 7 days, paid probation. Build this real client feature. If it's good, you're hired. If not, no hard feelings’,” Kartikey Singh wrote on X.
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“He's still with us 8 months later helping scale to $60k revenue. Sometimes the best hiring process is just... letting people prove they can actually do the job. DSA questions don't build apps. People do,” the founder continued.
How did social media react?
An individual posted, “Exactly. The hardest problems are invisible. People who can solve them show up when you let them work.” Another commented, “That’s really cool, especially since it’s paid. It's way more realistic. I'm definitely going to do this with my company someday.”
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A third expressed, “This is awesome considering I have turned down two clients this week for trying to send me an AI generated list of questions that contradict their requirements/spec. One was too lazy to delete the boilerplate sections where he was supposed to add sensitive data manually. The other wants me to screenshot private GitHub PRs and explain what is happening in them. They all want me to limit my summary response to less than 700 words while describing technologies like Docker, Hosting Migrations, Replit IDE, CI/CD pipelines, several portfolio projects and finally an approach plan for their project. Phew!”
A fourth wrote, “I've used this exact hiring method for years (to hire contractors). It beats all typical interview-based hiring - it is faster, produces better results, and is way easier for all parties.”
(Disclaimer: This report is based on user-generated content from social media. HT.com has not independently verified the claims and does not endorse them.)
ABOUT THE AUTHORTrisha SenguptaTrisha Sengupta is a Chief Content Producer at Hindustan Times with over six years of digital newsroom experience. Specialising in high-engagement storytelling, she blends viral trends with traditional journalism to cover the intersection of technology, finance, and human emotion. Her reporting spans real estate and personal finance struggles in hubs like Bengaluru and Gurgaon, the NRI experience, and corporate shifts like tech layoffs. Trisha also frequently tracks global figures and writes human interest stories. Offline, Trisha is an avid reader, history enthusiast and solo traveler. She balances her journalism career with family life while actively integrating AI tools into her modern storytelling approach.Read More

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