Why FDE Circle exists.
Founder's Note
I didn't build FDE Circle because I had a clever idea for a startup. I built it because I kept watching the same thing happen: a company hires a great engineer, puts them in front of a customer's broken production system, and watches them freeze. Not because they're not smart. Because nothing in their career ever asked them to operate this way before.
The interview loop that got them hired didn't test for any of this. It tested whether they could invert a binary tree on a whiteboard, or ship a polished side project over a free weekend. Neither one tells you whether someone can walk into a mess they didn't create, with a customer waiting and no clean spec, and actually fix it.
So I stopped trying to fix the interview and built the thing that should have existed instead: real systems, broken the way real systems actually break, graded on whether you fixed them, not on how well you talked about fixing them.
I don't think this is a nice-to-have. I think it's the only honest way to tell whether someone can do this job, and I'd rather bet the company on evidence than on how someone performs in a room.
— Mohammad Y. Ahmed, Co-Founder, FDE Circle
Founder's Note
My side of this is less about the code and more about what happens before anyone touches it. I've spent my career in business analysis and solutioning, sitting across the table from a customer while a technical team works out the fix behind me. I've watched engineers solve the right problem and still lose the room, because nobody translated it into terms the customer's business actually cared about.
That gets written off as a soft skill, something you either have or you don't. I don't buy that. It's a skill like any other. You can be tested on it, and almost nobody is, because the standard interview never asks a candidate to run a discovery conversation, defend a plan under real pushback, or hand off a fix to someone who wasn't in the room for the fix itself.
That's the half of FDE Circle I pushed hardest for. The technical fix is one part of the job. Finding out what the customer actually needs, holding a plan together when someone pushes back on it, and writing the handoff so a business sponsor can act on it without a translator — that's graded here with the same rigor as the code, not treated as a bonus round.
Skip that half and you've just built a harder LeetCode. The whole point of this platform is testing the job as it's actually done, not the part of it that happens to be easy to grade.
— Jaspal Thadani, Co-Founder, FDE Circle