We’ve been hiring engineers in Indore since 2008. The market in 2026 looks nothing like the market in 2008, and our hiring loop has had to keep up. Here’s what changed — and what we stopped caring about along the way.
What we used to test for
For years the bar was data structures, algorithms, and clean code on a whiteboard. It worked. Senior candidates in 2010 were rare enough that you could afford to interview eight to hire one. The pipeline rewarded depth.
What we test for now
The market moved. Senior engineers in 2026 either have ten years of GitHub history we can read in an afternoon, or they don’t — and a one-hour whiteboard test won’t tell us either way. So we changed the loop. We pair-program on a real bug from a real repo. We ask candidates to explain a system they’ve shipped. We let them push back on our architecture and we watch how they argue.
What we stopped caring about
College tier. Years of experience as a raw number. Whether they can quote definitions. The signal-to-noise on those filters was always low — at this point, it’s zero.
What started mattering
Clarity in writing. Ability to read a codebase they’ve never seen and ship a small change in under an hour. Willingness to say “I don’t know yet, let me look.” Calm. The non-technical filters are doing more work in 2026 than the technical ones — partly because the technical floor is much higher across the board.
The hire we still regret missing
One. A senior engineer who failed our 2014 algorithm test because she didn’t write recursion the way the rubric wanted. She joined a competitor and is now a tech lead at a company we admire. We retired that test the year after. Better late than never.