DeepSeek hires medal-winning undergrads, Kimi tests if you've touched the frontier
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-10-25
An unverified but credible account of hiring taste differences between DeepSeek and Kimi, sourced from chats with core team members:
- DeepSeek: hires many young undergrads, resume screening keyed on competition medals (supercomputing, ACM, ICPC). Interviews probe curiosity, passion and raw brainpower. Zero output in the first 2-3 months is acceptable; the bar is whether you reach full-employee level after 6-12 months of training. Prior experience training big models doesn't necessarily help.
- Kimi: hires to fill a specific slot and assumes you can handle it immediately. They check whether you've genuinely touched the frontier—knowing how models exploit test loopholes (like digging answers out of code repos), hands-on experiment experience, and keeping up with new model releases. Tough coding problems test how you organize tools; having built your own efficiency tools is a plus.
The author notes a key structural reason: DeepSeek simply has far more compute than Kimi—without cards, new hires have nothing to work on.
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