Hiree.com is DOWN!
My first internal tool that almost became a viral product (or maybe not)
I never learned to code, but I always wanted to build things on the internet. In college, WordPress was my best friend.
In the early 2010s, knowing how to build (and host) a website was a unique skill, especially if you were in business school. I used to build WordPress websites for friends, their family businesses and some interesting early clients like GoCarz.
This story is about the first ever tool I remember building for a real business use case (with help from a developer), it was an Uptime Monitor at Hiree - my first job after college.
This was some time in 2015, we used to run into issues where the main marketing site would sometimes go down while the logged in experiences were working fine.
The dev team had proper AWS and infra observability tools monitoring uptime, ranking systems, product usage and more. But those were built for engineers.
As a marketer, I wanted one very specific alert: tell me immediately when hiree.com is down, so I can pause ads before we burn money.
I had some experience with WordPress (using FTP, cPanel‑powered hosting, etc.) and had interned at Solutions Infini working on their new Cloud Telephony product - DialStreet.
At Hiree, we had an Exotel account for inbound sales-call routing so I started playing with the outbound dialer - I used Exotel’s default TTS engine to create a simple message: “Hiree.com is down.”
The idea was that if the website didn’t return a 200 response, Exotel would call me.
I tested my script and went to Raj, our senior-most engineering team member, he was the Architecture and Infra person. He helped me hook it up to an external cron hosted on my shared hosting server (for the WordPress sites) that would ping the Hiree website every five minutes and if the response was not HTTP 200, it would start calling a list of numbers and play “Hiree.com is down”.
Look, these guys came from years of experience in large tech (ex-Yahoos, ex-IBM, ex-Infosys) talking about the co-location, Auto-scaling EC2 Clusters, Sharding and the whatnots of tech that handled millions of users per day. They would still support and guide me in utilising utm parameters, writing the most basic INNER JOIN and UNION statements.
On a side note, I would like to appreciate how the whole team was always very supportive of my naivety and helped me learn new things.
In my early days, I had been learning SQL, Product Analytics and using/exploring a large number of SaaS tools but this was my first original idea (I thought so at the time) being deployed as a ~product~ tool.
My 22 year-old self was already excited about offering this tool to my startup friends - maybe YourStory could write a piece about this amazing internal tool. Slack was gaining popularity at the time. Don’t judge me, I was just a non-tech kid getting his first taste of building something meaningful or maybe just useful in the tech world.
Back to deployment, Raj and I were confident and hopeful that these calls won’t actually be needed since the website going down is not a common event.
Around 1AM one Thursday night, it finally happened.
Hiree.com was down.
The tool kicked in. Seven developers, two co-founders, and six people from the BI team, including me, started getting calls from an unknown number:
“Hiree.com is down... Hiree.com is down... Hiree.com is down...”
The team got on a conference call, started an investigation and reported on the WhatsApp group that they were looking into it. One team member called me and said something to the meaning of “How the F do we stop the calls while we are working on this” and I had no answer. The only workaround I could suggest was blocking the number.
Technically, the tool worked perfectly. Operationally, it was a disaster. Every five minutes, it reminded the exact people fixing the outage that the outage still existed.
For the next hour or so, they kept getting these calls - the tool cron was doing its job but also irritating the hell out of our developers.
Next morning, I got my first-hand experience of facing the end-user and real user feedback. They provided their feedback, I was forgiven but the tool was appreciated (I guess).
The script was improved to take a DTMF acknowledgement from the developers - Press 1 to acknowledge and stop these calls for the next 1 hour.
Why am I writing about this today?
Because I recently got another alert from my domain and uptime monitors: Hiree.com is down. Its name servers had changed.
Eleven years later, the same domain that once woke up half the company at 1AM has triggered another alert. This time, not because the site is down, but because the domain itself seems to have come loose.
The 5-letter domain we found on the GoDaddy Marketplace, paid a handsome amount for, when rebranding from myNoticePeriod.com - is back on the market.
Context: Quikr acquired Hiree in 2016, and I don’t know what happened to this domain recently - I just hope they didn’t forget to renew this million-dollar brandable domain.
I will maybe write about the rebranding and Hiree journey some other time but this one is a good full-circle moment today.
