Show HN: Touvlo – Technical Interviewing for Hardware Engineers (By Humans)

Show HN: Touvlo – Technical Interviewing for Hardware Engineers (By Humans)(touvlo.co)

31 points by cporios 2 years ago | 29 comments

Hi HN! Touvlo is a platform where you can delegate your technical interviewing for hardware engineers to us, so that you can focus on building your product instead.

Our interviews test real-world engineering skills, largely via a collaborative CAD session through our in-browser platform. You can think of it as a pair-coding session between the interviewer and the interviewee, but for hardware. Interviews are conducted by real hardware engineers with industry experience (currently my co-founder, Danae). After each interview, you get a detailed score card, as well as full, timestamped recording of the interview.

There's no pricing page yet, but we charge 220$ per interview, with discounts for monthly packages for 10 interviews or more.

If you're a hardware/robotics startup, give us a try: we can help you hire better and save you time. Drop us an email (founders@touvlo.co), or sign up for a demo interview on https://touvlo.co. We offer a money-back guarantee and a free trial for our next few customers.

We're also applying to YC – we went from an idea to a product with users in 2 months.

We would highly appreciate any feedback.

cushychicken 2 years ago |

Do you say “hardware” to mean “mechanical engineering”? That’s kind of what it seems like from your description and screenshots. It’s probably worth making this a bit more descriptive - to some people “hardware” means PCBs and electronics. (I’m one of them!)

It’s an interesting idea and I like that you’ve stood up something minimal to test your product offering quickly.

What’s your elevator pitch for your value proposition?

How do you plan to scale this business beyond you and your co founder?

cporios 2 years ago | |

That’s a good point regarding hardware in the name. Eventually we’d like to do all hardware and more (e.g. architecture), but currently our expertise is in mechanical and robotics engineering.

Our pitch: We make recruiting easier, better and cheaper for the companies building the hardware of tomorrow, by letting them focus on their product rather than repetitive candidate skill assessments. Currently, senior engineers in small startups and scale ups spend a lot of their time interviewing, and they often don’t do it well (remote CAD sessions aren’t really a thing). We save them time and money.

We will scale this by hiring freelancer interview engineers. This has already been done in software, very successfully: karat.com. So we think it can work at least equally well in hardware.

cushychicken 2 years ago | | |

That’s an interesting thesis.

I know recruitment firms serve some of the phone screen purpose you’re proposing, but just with basic Q/A of resumes.

I think, if I were looking to hire you, I’d be wondering how alike your working style was to that of me and my team. I’d want to know how much I could trust your judgment in a candidate’s technical approach.

I’d also offer that you can’t really outsource the job of evaluating cultural fit - which is still really important in spite of all the baggage that term carries.

Aromasin 2 years ago | | |

I just want to reiterate the comment you're replying to; in mine and I safely assumed until now everyone else's mind, hardware means electronics/electrical. When I job hunt for a computer engineer role, I often use "hardware engineer" as a prompt and I've never seen it return a mech eng or robotics one. Hardware just seems the wrong word to use in your case.

neilv 2 years ago |

Interesting. What kind of customers do you serve? (Non-hardware companies that just want to spin a product but no idea how? Companies that need lots of hardware engineers but don't want to interrupt their current ones to interview?)

How are they thinking of hardware engineers? (Like an interchangeable commodity or one that can get a letter grade? Very transactional, maybe a gig?)

Will your customers do substantial additional interviewing after passing your technical interview, for qualities you don't or can't evaluate but companies should? Could your service be mainly a screening, before a company invests more significantly in interviewing with technical and other team members?

What is your answer to "Why did I spend 4 years in engineering school, and build my professional track record, yet have to keep doing these negging tests? Does this company not employ anyone who can get a sense of a fellow engineer's skill and professionalism just by talking with them? Did they read my resume? And now they're not even administering the test themselves?"

Can a particular job-seeker interview with you once, and get their report card sent to many employers over time? Who pays for each instance, and do they pay less if it's reused?

cporios 2 years ago | |

These are all great questions, thank you.

We don't want to serve non-hardware companies that are hiring their first hardware engineers. We want to serve companies of all sizes (including startups) that are building products that are so critical that they can't waste their senior engineers' time to do 10-20 technical interviews a week. These customers will care a lot about their hardware engineers.

Yes, our customers should do more interviewing for candidates that pass the Touvlo interview. We think that our service should be primarily a technical screening before the company invests more in additional interviewing, but you're free to use it for at any step of your recruiting process. There is also more to evaluate in a potential hire than technical skills (for example, cultural match).

> Why did I spend 4 years in engineering school, and build my professional track record, yet have to keep doing these negging tests? Does this company not employ anyone who can get a sense of a fellow engineer's skill and professionalism just by talking with them? Did they read my resume? And now they're not even administering the test themselves?

There's two parts to this: (1) On one hand, the interview should never feel like a negging test and the interview of a graduate should be completely different from the interview of a senior engineer with 5+ years of experience. And if you are extremely senior with an amazing professional track record, then perhaps no technical interviewing is necessary at all. (2) On the other hand, no one should feel offended for having to do a technical interview that matches their seniority and experience. It's outsourced to a third party company, because we can do it better and faster. Candidates will be happier, because they can interview outside business hours (incl. weekends) and have a positive experience. Also, the alternative in many cases is that the company won't bother interviewing the candidate at all, or worse, they might send a take-home test that takes hours to 100 candidates and then spend 0-3 minutes reviewing each.

Currently a job-seeker can not get their report card sent to multiple employers, however this is a good idea to consider after getting to a certain scale. At that point, we would essentially become the standard in hardware technical interviewing. Figuring out a fair payment model would be one of the challenges.

spapas82 2 years ago |

Touvlo in greek means brick but it also means metaphorically a very bad student.

cporios 2 years ago | |

We’re both greek, it’s meant in a joking way :) What do you think of the name?

stratosgear 2 years ago | | |

Greek here. I would NOT want to associate in any way with a site named Touvlo, even if it is used in a joking manner. Too offensive! For a non native speaker, ignorance is bliss. But once they found out what Touvlo really means, i still bet they would feel cheated, and/or embarrassed. Therefore in both cases, it's a no go. Just my 2 cents.

p-a_58213 2 years ago | | |

Recalling certain candidates that I have interviewed over the years, I'd say it is spot on!

pcranaway 2 years ago | | |

the second I read it I knew it was Greek I have actually thought of using the name for an app before years ago, but it never happened as I thought it's... a bit rude? not sure if this applies when exposing your app to a mostly non-greek audience though

iancmceachern 2 years ago |

This is an interesting idea, the one challenge is this is really only a small part of the interview. This covers the CAD skills part, but where is the industry specific knowledge part, communication skills, presentation skills. I can't emphasize enough a "hardware" engineer that has 10 years of experience designing surgical robotics and one that has spent 10 years designing catheters or sunglasses may be wildly different in their suitability for a given role. Both use Solidworks, onshape, etc to design hardware, but these things are not the same. How do you address this challenge?

cporios 2 years ago | |

We don't want to replace all interviewing. We won't test for culture fit, or presentation skills (although we can test for some industry-specific knowledge and communication skills). You can think of it as technical screening stage.

iancmceachern 2 years ago | | |

That's what I was hoping to dig into. If I'm at a surgical robotics company interviewing for a hardware engineer to design a robot arm, I'm going to give a completely different technical portion of the interview than if I were at a catheter company doing the same, or at a sunglasses company, or dialysis, etc. You could perhaps handle it by having "vertical" specific interview templates. Just thinking through the challenges to adopting this in my workflow. I wish you all the best!

Animats 2 years ago |

It looks like they are simulating a solid modeling program, one that looks vaguely like SolidWorks or Autodesk Inventor/Fusion, but with a worse user interface.[1]

[1] https://touvlo.co/images/feature-three.png

rossng 2 years ago | |

Onshape is a pretty popular CAD package! We use it for robot hardware (moving away from Fusion).

cporios 2 years ago | | |

This is onshape indeed, but we run a collaborative VNC (soon-to-be RDP) session through the browser. We can run anything that runs on Windows (so everything).

cporios 2 years ago | |

Hi! We’re not simulating anything, we run a collaborative VNC (soon-to-be RDP) session through the browser. We can run anything that runs on Windows.

staticfloat 2 years ago |

Just a small piece of feedback, it looks like there's a small typo on the last paragraph of the page:

> Interviews can be scheduled (and rescheduled) interviews around the clock, 7 days a week.

I believe the second `interviews` should be omitted.

cporios 2 years ago | |

Thank you!

buescher 2 years ago |

Looks like a CAD operator's interview, not an engineering interview. I guess the basic DFM question is marginally engineering.

Danaemp 2 years ago | |

Good point! We do our best not to test any skills that would be tested in a CAD certification. Our questions and rubric don’t emphasize style for eg or comfort in a software. The collaborative CAD portion is a section where more complex engineering questions are answered, through a platform and in a way where they’re usually solved in the workplace. We view this as analogous to the coding portion of a software engineering interview.

buescher 2 years ago | | |

You should show an interview example with engineering questions then. The questions in your example interview are technician-level. Checking a mechanical drawing for consistency is not an engineering task - the job that does that is "design checker". Design checkers typically have associate's degrees in drafting or CAD operation. The DFM question is arguably engineering but it could be even better answered by a machinist.

Engineering questions do not have to be complex, but they are different in kind.

LeifCarrotson 2 years ago |

Huh, that's an interesting idea. But as an engineer at a small automation integrator, who never has time between busy projects for important-but-not-urgent tasks like interviewing new hires, it seems I should be in your target market, but I can't imagine delegating a critical decision like this to a third party.

Who is your ideal customer? I'm imagining either a nontechnical solo founder (with a really good, high value idea that he'll explain after you sign an NDA) looking to hire a first engineer/technical cofounder to actually build it...and all the problems that come from that. Or I'm imagining a big corp with an HR department that's at odds with the engineering department, always denying their hand-picked candidates and sending them unqualified candidates, but I'm fortunate to have never experienced that kind of environment.

Maybe we're not in your target market in that we expect to need to do training, and don't expect our best long-term candidates to be able to hit the ground running at full speed. We've hired senior engineers with zero experience in our Autodesk Inventor CAD suite, as well as fresh grads with little experience whatsoever? Our "HR Department" is really just two people (our CEO and accountant), so there's no "must know how to lay out a robot cell" to validate in an assessment.

Or maybe we're not in your target market because already have an engineering department with something like a century of combined experience who are totally capable of sorting out a good candidate from someone blowing BS.

Or maybe we're not in your target market because we are just an ordinary small business, we have negligible turnover (it's been 6 years since someone moved to a different company), and only moderate growth rates (only hired 3 engineers in the past 6 years), it's just not that big of a time sink. I suppose a hardware startup with meteoric growth rates would need to spend a lot more time hiring engineers.

One question: You write "We can use any CAD software you prefer." Any? Really? Seems you need a short list here. If you're providing the license, having seats of Inventor, Solidworks, Catia, Creo, NX, Fusion, etc. on hand for occasional interviews sounds really expensive. And an experienced designer who can effectively every one of those is really rare and also expensive. I would call Altium/Cadence/Kicad "hardware design CAD packages", but those are completely different skillsets and I wouldn't expect a typical ME to know how to use them well.