Pinterest Acquires Coding Challenge Site Hackermeter Right Out Of The Gate, Will Shut It Down

If you were looking forward to boasting about your Hackermeter score as a means of getting your next coding gig, you’re gonna have to make new plans: the two-month old startup has been acquired by Pinterest, and will be shut down.

The premise behind Hackermeter was a fairly simple one: they didn’t think the classic résumé was good enough for hiring coders, so they set out to replace it. You’d prove your chops through a series of coding tests (from a fibonacci sequence generator to some lightweight cryptography), with each challenge being graded based on you and your code’s efficiency.

Potential employers could playback your code keystroke-by-keystroke (partly to see how your code spills out of your brain, and partly as a small barrier to copy/pasting challenge solutions from elsewhere), as well as create challenges of their own.

Hackermeter’s launch was met with its fair share of criticism, with most naysayers pointing out that similar ideas had been tested many a time before by companies like HackerRank, CodeEval, and a host of others — and yet, the good ol’ résumé lived on.

Both Pinterest and Hackermeter’s founders declined to share the terms (we’re still digging, regardless, and will update this post if we hear specifics), but it’s safe to say it wasn’t a massive one. The product was just two months old, its team still small, and, beyond the funds that came with their stint in Y-Combinator’s Winter 2013 class, they hadn’t raised much money. According to their AngelList profile, they were in the middle of trying to raise $750k. Add in the fact that Pinterest already plans on closing it down, and this is quite clearly meant primarily to be a talent acquisition.

The company’s co-founders, Lucas Baker and Frost Li, will both join Pinterest as engineers.

Hackermeter matches developers with companies through code challenge portfolios.

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Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they find interesting. The site has experienced rapid growth in recent months.

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