> "You can’t return empties, so you can't free up the chassis required to move full containers out of the port. And because you're not pulling the containers out of the port, you're not able to return empties to the port. I did not know that this was the case before I went down there. We only discovered it during that three-hour boat ride."
It's interesting that he got this data by asking the owners of the many different companies involved (Ports / shipping / trucking).
Is this gridlock something that could be solved at-scale through short-term government intervention? That is, could the military provide "Free" storage in a boneyard out in the desert near LA for 6-24 months? Could permits and/or fees be waived to provide incentives? Should a new "Reef" be built by depositing 10k empty containers out in the Pacific (ick!)? The problem seems to be getting worse, and tipping points best avoided...
Seems like 1-off efforts to unlock the gridlock may be needed.
On one hand, this is a bunch of coordination problems, but on the other, it feels like a rational port acting alone could have said "We'll unload your ship only if you let us load it back up with empties" rather than letting unloaded ships to zoom on back to China for the next load.
Presumably there are complexities around this, but it sounds like they want ships to take back empties and the ships aren't because it's not worth the extra time and weight. A single actor, the port, should have the authority and incentive to demand it.
Working at a startup that focuses on automating the underwriting process for freight factoring has been an incredible insight during the supply chain crisis of 2021. Something that's also interesting is the data that companies like Flexport have to work with. Freight contracts and lending adjacent to these industries are a treasure trove of early indicators of economic ups and downs for the US economy.
"ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix the problem because shipping companies already want the ships to fill with empties, but can't because of other factors (see chart). Forcing ships to fill ships with even more empties presumably also makes things worse, by causing ships to occupy dock space.
It is more complicated than that. Who would the mandate apply to? Ships are are basically contractors and may not own all the containers. You can charge storage fees, and some places do.
Maybe those containers used to be full of "recyclable" materials?
It does seem that they people who have control over this situation don't have much on an incentive to improve it.
In particular fixing any piece of this loop would fix the others... eventually they just ran the port cranes longer and opened up the hours that trucks could go in/out. Is it "solved"? No, but the local pre-Xmas crisis is averted, which is basically peak for the year.
Great Interview, enjoyed this a lot. Interesting to think about different points of supply and the communication systems. I deal with this obfuscation on a daily basis.
I used to work for UPS and tried to understand Flexport business model, but could not find any value that Flexport bringing to the table. Can someone explain to me what value Flexport is bringing ?
I evaluated flexport along time ago when I used to do importing
Basically, if you want to buy goods from China, usually you do it by container load. You rent the container, get a 3pl ( a broker) to arrange the shipments and port
If you want to ship less than a 20 foot container load, e.g. a pallet, your goods are shared between multiple parties who also are shipping that container.
Flexport can handle those clients and also clients who want to ship full containers of goods overseas
Basically, modern online freight forwarding and logistics. That industry is still very manually driven with old tech (edi and xml) that aren't consistent across shipping ports
I would say it's kind of like the Uber eats for shipping containers... where takeout meals are pallets and Uber drivers are 40 foot containers, the hungry customer is the business buying the goods from the restaurant
UPS delivers the end product from a warehouse to the customer's house.
But first the company selling that product had to get thousands of units of the product from the manufacturing facility to its warehouse. Before that they had to get all of the components or raw materials for that product to the manufacturing facility. Many of those components would have been manufactured by a different company that had to get its own components and raw materials to its own facility, and on and on down the chain. And these could be huge quantities of materials that require heavy machinery to transport and a lot of coordination to make sure that's available at the right time. They can't just get dropped off at the front door like a UPS delivery.
As far as I understand it, Flexport is basically building the rails for all of the different logistics and freight companies involved in this kind of commercial shipping to talk to each other more efficiently. Apparently many of them are still using phone calls and fax machines to organize these kinds of deliveries.
Having a friend in an adjacent business, my understanding is that the Freight Forwarding & Brokerage business was very "hands on" and not as "customer" friendly as tracking consumer shipments. I think Flexport is (was?) suggesting that they could modernize that business. Or, I completely missed the target on that perspective.
Flexport posts a lot of "Flexport is hiring" ads on HN. Here are my anecdotal experiences.
I was contacted by a very sharp recruiter from within the company a year ago. She said they weren't actually looking for backend developers (senior or not). Why she contacted me given my senior backend developer resume is beyond me. I told her I had a previous lengthy, and ultimately confusing and unpleasant experience with Flexport hiring. She had no information about the interview process I had been through a year prior, and in fact she could not find any record of the process. Her explanation was that they had a lot of turnover in HR, and they had no records. That's very strange for a company that seems built to manage information and logistics (hiring/onboarding is human logistics).
That original interview experience was... interesting. I went through the usual HR type introductory interviews, and then I went through several rounds of coding interviews. Finally, I had a chat with the older gentleman who was in charge of all of their IT. From the very first moment, he seemed utterly disinterested in the call. He would not look into the camera - never made eye contact... asked questions as if reading from index cards, but registered no recognition of any responses. To me it was obvious that he either did not like me (from before we said hello) or was already determined not to hire me. That's fine, but I could have done without the awkard call. Then, two weeks later, they told me "No thanks" with no information as to why.
They were solving several problems related to shipping, one of which was managing customs. These must be complex problems. But the demos that I saw, at least 2 years ago, were very limited. And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems.
Since I'm an outsider, my perspective could be inaccurate or imagined. But to me it seems like another scenario of gathering funding but not actually having a solution. Perhaps it's a mere exposure scenario, but it seems they advertise jobs on the front page of HN more than other companies. Why do that on HN if they aren't looking for devs or if they are operating with 95% non technical staff? (this was the number provided to me by the internal recruiter)
In 2015 I was laid off from a startup that unfortunately shut down.
During my search I was intro'ed by their VC to the CTO. The CTO told me they were hiring for my exact, kind of niche role. I was pretty pumped as I hadn't really lost a job before and wanted to get something new quickly.
I met the CTO at a coffee shop, he kept asking me a bunch of questions that were clearly more being asked with the intention of picking my brain about a project versus interview questions. I asked him what was up and he said they hired someone for the role the week before, but that he wanted to pick my brain so he kept our time on calendar.
I had taken BART into the city, pushed back a different interview and taken time out of my day so a CTO with a ton of funding could exploit my labor for zero compensation.
I said something along the lines of, "um, okay I need to focus on my job search, good luck." and got up to leave. He then kind of did this act as if I was being kind of a dick for not helping him.
Luckily a Director of Engineering I'd worked with at a past company was sitting two tables away and I said hi and he said he had overheard what happened and I ended up interviewing at his company.
Still, to this day, seeing all of those "Flexport is hiring!" posts has always made me wonder how much of their interview process is just wasting the time of potential employees. They seem like they have a fairly noble mission, which is why I interviewed in the first place. But man, that whole situation still feels really gross to me.
Thank you for sharing your (poor) recruiting and interviewing process. I'm a hiring manager in our company, and I tell anyone (and everyone) that while a positive experience that results in a hire is shared locally, a poor experience when we don't hire is shared far and wide. I don't understand why companies put their worst interpersonal people in front of candidates; it should be the other way around. An unsuccessful candidate should leave wanting to work with you more than when they applied! There are some really good processes out there: respectful of your time & energy, transparent in expectations and timelines. My hope is that globalization and remote work forces everyone to up their game, because if it's poor for senior developers, imagine what it's like for people who aren't in such demand.
I recall in an interview Peterson saying their hiring process to look for "insecure overachievers", maybe they have a way of screening for that? I never really understood what that looked like in practice.
>And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems.
This is an established business play for VC backed startups.
A SAAS is always two things, the product, and sales. You absolutely must have sales, because no matter how good the product is, you don't have a business if nobody buys it. So the product is optional.
The pitch is "We're the completely automated solution for X", but internally everything is done by hand. You then try to find some customers. If you don't get product-market fit, you shut down without having to spend anything on engineering. But if you do get product-market fit, great! Time to build out the actual automation. During the gap, it doesn't matter how bad your unit economics are, you can just use infinite VC money to hire thousands of people while promising the board you'll eventually lay them all off. You will experience hypergrowth during this period because you can underbid everyone else thanks to your endless spigot of money.
Look at the careers page: https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/ Lots and lots and lots of openings for account managers and client solutions associates. I guarantee you these people spend 8 hours a copy and pasting stuff from one form to another, or on the phone reading the contents of text boxes to someone who enters that text into their own green screen terminal.
I’ve been curious why they are constantly advertising on HN, it doesn’t seem logical to need that many posts.
Is the hiring process bad? Is the turn over that high? The constant advertising gives a bad impression. If they are just expanding at a good clip, it seems there are better ways.
I have to say Flexport was a extremely poor hiring experience that I went through. I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say I was just unlucky. Each technical interview was very condescending with no communication or feedback from the interviewer. The interviewer in my first screen even made a mistake on their own code, clearly lacking basic syntax knowledge of the language we were using, despite expecting perfect syntax answer to a basic algo question. The interviewer just struck me as very junior in their skillset, and made me a bit concerned about the hiring process overall. The other interviewer was very happy to tell me that Flexport only hires the best engineers, to be honest, it was difficult for me to keep a straight face when he said that. Now I know what hiring for a 10x rock star engineer looks like, lmao
> From the very first moment, he seemed utterly disinterested in the call. He would not look into the camera - never made eye contact... asked questions as if reading from index cards, but registered no recognition of any responses. To me it was obvious that he either did not like me (from before we said hello) or was already determined not to hire me.
Interviewed with three different logistics companies last year and the experience got less and less friendly as I made my way up the chain in each of them. All frowning at me in a "well, I don't know about that" kind of way before we even spoke. Maybe they all had gas, I have no idea what was going on.
On a abstract level a lot of problems are business process problems and can be modeled in that way , it doesn't mean one company working one one type of problem should have excellence in another, hiring problems are very very different from freight logistics.
I don't know anything about Flexport, I know about hiring tech that perhaps helps you to understand what goes behind such processes.
Hiring tech usually can be grouped in 4/5 buckets. Applicant Tracking Systems(ATS) /Workflow tools, Sourcing, Screening / Selection , Offer / Negotiation and Finally on-boarding. In each category depending on type of hire(Full Time/Contract), departments/skills(tech/sales/finance etc), and geographic locations(U.S./Europe/Mexico etc) you could end needing dozens of tools.
It is not unusual for a startup not have tools to manage their workflows yet, the hiring processes evolve a lot in early stage companies, they insource/outsource and shift all the time, each dept or new VP brings theirs own ideas with little standardization etc. Few startups invest in an ATS ( not just buy actually put effort to deploy) at < 500-1,000 head count. It takes a long time for all this to settle down for any growing company.
Workflow tools like ATSes are systems of records designed for compliance and to help the recruiter not the candidate. That means most recruiters have little incentive to update the records of a rejected candidate into the system, they are only measured by offers made/ joined etc, once you are rejected a typical recruiter will loose interest fast, few would even let you know that properly, even fewer would know why you were rejected and update the system ( if it exists at all) .
Hiring managers are also guilty, post an interview rarely do they give comments( to the recruiter after the interview) even if they do, it is even less likely that those can be be shared to a candidate.
Also finally even for companies working on solving hiring problems, it is not easy to solve their own hiring process issues. It is rare for one company to be building all the tools needed by a company to hire. i.e. HackerRank/Codility may build great coding tools, but they still need to use ATS or sourcing tools in their hiring processes, and that can mean their processes are also not perfect and have similar problems.
Also had a bad experience with their hiring (product role). In my case HR seemed very with it but everything after was awful. CTO particularly seemed disinterested and not sure why he was in the interview. Sr product person was a bad interviewer focused on getting 'the answer' to a Flexport specific case about freight forwarding / drayage that needed lots of domain specific knowledge to solve to her satisfaction. Culture at that time (~2016) seemed really sad. Nobody super excited about the space, their job ("we mostly just go home at night - we don't regularly socialize") or tech. All they seemed to be excited about was infinite TAM / equity appreciation and Ryan (and his dog(s)).
Wealth taxes are different from income taxes and are controversial. Other contries have tried wealth taxes and later reneged. Just because you believe they are great doesn't mean anyone who disagrees is "spewing BS".
Please don't post flamebait like this to HN, or take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents generally. Despite how intense they usually get, they're boring and not what this site is for.
[+] [-] devnulll|4 years ago|reply
It's interesting that he got this data by asking the owners of the many different companies involved (Ports / shipping / trucking).
Is this gridlock something that could be solved at-scale through short-term government intervention? That is, could the military provide "Free" storage in a boneyard out in the desert near LA for 6-24 months? Could permits and/or fees be waived to provide incentives? Should a new "Reef" be built by depositing 10k empty containers out in the Pacific (ick!)? The problem seems to be getting worse, and tipping points best avoided...
Seems like 1-off efforts to unlock the gridlock may be needed.
[+] [-] tobessebot|4 years ago|reply
Interesting podcasts for more background:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-25/the-white...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gene-seroka-on-the-log...
[+] [-] lkbm|4 years ago|reply
Presumably there are complexities around this, but it sounds like they want ships to take back empties and the ships aren't because it's not worth the extra time and weight. A single actor, the port, should have the authority and incentive to demand it.
Curious why that isn't the case.
[+] [-] 71a54xd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konschubert|4 years ago|reply
And it seems that root cause is ships bring more containers than they take with them.
So maybe, part of the solution could be a mandate of ships to take an amount of empties?
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
No, that's not the root cause. The root cause seems to be a combination of cascading events that causes a deathspiral: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
"ships bring more containers than they take with them" is a symptom, not a cause. Mandating "ships to take an amount of empties" doesn't really fix the problem because shipping companies already want the ships to fill with empties, but can't because of other factors (see chart). Forcing ships to fill ships with even more empties presumably also makes things worse, by causing ships to occupy dock space.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kurthr|4 years ago|reply
It does seem that they people who have control over this situation don't have much on an incentive to improve it.
In particular fixing any piece of this loop would fix the others... eventually they just ran the port cranes longer and opened up the hours that trucks could go in/out. Is it "solved"? No, but the local pre-Xmas crisis is averted, which is basically peak for the year.
[+] [-] danvoell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newprint|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swaggyBoatswain|4 years ago|reply
Basically, if you want to buy goods from China, usually you do it by container load. You rent the container, get a 3pl ( a broker) to arrange the shipments and port
If you want to ship less than a 20 foot container load, e.g. a pallet, your goods are shared between multiple parties who also are shipping that container.
Flexport can handle those clients and also clients who want to ship full containers of goods overseas
Basically, modern online freight forwarding and logistics. That industry is still very manually driven with old tech (edi and xml) that aren't consistent across shipping ports
I would say it's kind of like the Uber eats for shipping containers... where takeout meals are pallets and Uber drivers are 40 foot containers, the hungry customer is the business buying the goods from the restaurant
[+] [-] cactus2093|4 years ago|reply
UPS delivers the end product from a warehouse to the customer's house.
But first the company selling that product had to get thousands of units of the product from the manufacturing facility to its warehouse. Before that they had to get all of the components or raw materials for that product to the manufacturing facility. Many of those components would have been manufactured by a different company that had to get its own components and raw materials to its own facility, and on and on down the chain. And these could be huge quantities of materials that require heavy machinery to transport and a lot of coordination to make sure that's available at the right time. They can't just get dropped off at the front door like a UPS delivery.
As far as I understand it, Flexport is basically building the rails for all of the different logistics and freight companies involved in this kind of commercial shipping to talk to each other more efficiently. Apparently many of them are still using phone calls and fax machines to organize these kinds of deliveries.
[+] [-] ericcholis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blunte|4 years ago|reply
That original interview experience was... interesting. I went through the usual HR type introductory interviews, and then I went through several rounds of coding interviews. Finally, I had a chat with the older gentleman who was in charge of all of their IT. From the very first moment, he seemed utterly disinterested in the call. He would not look into the camera - never made eye contact... asked questions as if reading from index cards, but registered no recognition of any responses. To me it was obvious that he either did not like me (from before we said hello) or was already determined not to hire me. That's fine, but I could have done without the awkard call. Then, two weeks later, they told me "No thanks" with no information as to why.
They were solving several problems related to shipping, one of which was managing customs. These must be complex problems. But the demos that I saw, at least 2 years ago, were very limited. And when I spoke to the recruiter a year ago, she told me that much of their activities were performed by humans instead of automated systems.
Since I'm an outsider, my perspective could be inaccurate or imagined. But to me it seems like another scenario of gathering funding but not actually having a solution. Perhaps it's a mere exposure scenario, but it seems they advertise jobs on the front page of HN more than other companies. Why do that on HN if they aren't looking for devs or if they are operating with 95% non technical staff? (this was the number provided to me by the internal recruiter)
[+] [-] ryguytilidie|4 years ago|reply
In 2015 I was laid off from a startup that unfortunately shut down.
During my search I was intro'ed by their VC to the CTO. The CTO told me they were hiring for my exact, kind of niche role. I was pretty pumped as I hadn't really lost a job before and wanted to get something new quickly.
I met the CTO at a coffee shop, he kept asking me a bunch of questions that were clearly more being asked with the intention of picking my brain about a project versus interview questions. I asked him what was up and he said they hired someone for the role the week before, but that he wanted to pick my brain so he kept our time on calendar.
I had taken BART into the city, pushed back a different interview and taken time out of my day so a CTO with a ton of funding could exploit my labor for zero compensation.
I said something along the lines of, "um, okay I need to focus on my job search, good luck." and got up to leave. He then kind of did this act as if I was being kind of a dick for not helping him.
Luckily a Director of Engineering I'd worked with at a past company was sitting two tables away and I said hi and he said he had overheard what happened and I ended up interviewing at his company.
Still, to this day, seeing all of those "Flexport is hiring!" posts has always made me wonder how much of their interview process is just wasting the time of potential employees. They seem like they have a fairly noble mission, which is why I interviewed in the first place. But man, that whole situation still feels really gross to me.
[+] [-] skeeter2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcy|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjUs7o-TnjY&t=1365s
[+] [-] sbierwagen|4 years ago|reply
This is an established business play for VC backed startups.
A SAAS is always two things, the product, and sales. You absolutely must have sales, because no matter how good the product is, you don't have a business if nobody buys it. So the product is optional.
The pitch is "We're the completely automated solution for X", but internally everything is done by hand. You then try to find some customers. If you don't get product-market fit, you shut down without having to spend anything on engineering. But if you do get product-market fit, great! Time to build out the actual automation. During the gap, it doesn't matter how bad your unit economics are, you can just use infinite VC money to hire thousands of people while promising the board you'll eventually lay them all off. You will experience hypergrowth during this period because you can underbid everyone else thanks to your endless spigot of money.
Look at the careers page: https://www.flexport.com/careers/jobs/ Lots and lots and lots of openings for account managers and client solutions associates. I guarantee you these people spend 8 hours a copy and pasting stuff from one form to another, or on the phone reading the contents of text boxes to someone who enters that text into their own green screen terminal.
[+] [-] mint2|4 years ago|reply
Is the hiring process bad? Is the turn over that high? The constant advertising gives a bad impression. If they are just expanding at a good clip, it seems there are better ways.
[+] [-] dijka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gopher_space|4 years ago|reply
Interviewed with three different logistics companies last year and the experience got less and less friendly as I made my way up the chain in each of them. All frowning at me in a "well, I don't know about that" kind of way before we even spoke. Maybe they all had gas, I have no idea what was going on.
[+] [-] manquer|4 years ago|reply
I don't know anything about Flexport, I know about hiring tech that perhaps helps you to understand what goes behind such processes.
Hiring tech usually can be grouped in 4/5 buckets. Applicant Tracking Systems(ATS) /Workflow tools, Sourcing, Screening / Selection , Offer / Negotiation and Finally on-boarding. In each category depending on type of hire(Full Time/Contract), departments/skills(tech/sales/finance etc), and geographic locations(U.S./Europe/Mexico etc) you could end needing dozens of tools.
It is not unusual for a startup not have tools to manage their workflows yet, the hiring processes evolve a lot in early stage companies, they insource/outsource and shift all the time, each dept or new VP brings theirs own ideas with little standardization etc. Few startups invest in an ATS ( not just buy actually put effort to deploy) at < 500-1,000 head count. It takes a long time for all this to settle down for any growing company.
Workflow tools like ATSes are systems of records designed for compliance and to help the recruiter not the candidate. That means most recruiters have little incentive to update the records of a rejected candidate into the system, they are only measured by offers made/ joined etc, once you are rejected a typical recruiter will loose interest fast, few would even let you know that properly, even fewer would know why you were rejected and update the system ( if it exists at all) .
Hiring managers are also guilty, post an interview rarely do they give comments( to the recruiter after the interview) even if they do, it is even less likely that those can be be shared to a candidate.
Also finally even for companies working on solving hiring problems, it is not easy to solve their own hiring process issues. It is rare for one company to be building all the tools needed by a company to hire. i.e. HackerRank/Codility may build great coding tools, but they still need to use ATS or sourcing tools in their hiring processes, and that can mean their processes are also not perfect and have similar problems.
[+] [-] oldskewlcool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bilal_io|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] umvi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] nickff|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]