Lauren Tan
Software engineer, and the creator of hiring-without-whiteboards — the 51.8k-star list of companies that interview with take-home exercises and pairing instead of CS-trivia questions. Publishes as poteto on GitHub and writes at no.lol.
Affiliation as stated on the GitHub profile, read 2026-08-28: software engineer at Cursor and on the React compiler core team. The personal site's bio is older and still says Facebook, with engineering manager at Netflix before that; both are self-reported and the two disagree on the current employer, so the profile date is what fixes it here.
The publisher with nothing to sell
Every curriculum in this spoke came from someone with a commercial layer beside the free artifact — nir-diamant, kamran-ahmed, hao-hoang, dair-ai. The exceptions so far were mito753 and mohammed-q-hussain, and this is the third: a markdown file under MIT, no course, no newsletter, no paid tier, and a day job unrelated to hiring. Whatever the list is for, it is not lead generation.
That is not incidental to how it should be read. The economics that shape a study plan — the free repository pulling traffic toward a paid product — do not apply here, and neither does the corresponding suspicion. What replaces it is advocacy: an argument about how interviews should work, published by someone who cares about the outcome and audits nothing.
Connections
- creator of hiring-without-whiteboards
- contrast with kamran-ahmed, nir-diamant, hao-hoang — self-publishers with a commercial layer beside the free repository
- alongside mito753 and mohammed-q-hussain — the other publishers here with nothing attached to sell
Related
hiring-without-whiteboards · work-sample-assessment · interview-preparation