Devskills (Now Alva Coding Tests) has Been Acquired. Here Is What It Means for the Platform.


Anton Fenske / @fenskexyz


Earlier this year, the folks from Alva Labs approached me to discuss something I wasn't expecting.


Alva Labs has been one of our first customers who have witnessed every single iteration of the DevSkills platform as it evolved.


So far, their core business has revolved around helping hiring teams assess candidates from personality and psychometric perspectives. However, to become an ultimate solution allowing hiring teams to ensure that every hiring decision is objective, they have felt the need to go beyond their current product offering.


And like us at DevSkills, they believe that the developer hiring field is where the conventional interview processes require significant refinement to improve the experience for everyone involved.


Long story short, they offered to join our efforts and for DevSkills to become part of Alva.


I realized this would mean changing gears for the business. However, given our alignment on the mission, there was only one crucial question to answer: what impact will this acquisition have on people who use DevSkills to make hiring decisions?


After considering a variety of outcomes, I concluded that this merger would be the right long-term decision for the platform.

What This Means for the Users

The Platform

We'll re-use 100% of our existing coding test library.


But the DevSkills web app will be affected. That is because our long-term view is to let hiring teams define what types of assessments they want to configure for each of their roles from a single place. So our first workstream will be integrating the two web apps.


While working on that, we'll keep the existing DevSkills web app running and ensure the same service level as before.

The Pricing

We'll work toward figuring out pricing that makes sense. Nevertheless, all customers will be able to use our coding test offering (both the existing solution and the new one integrated with Alva once it's live) until the end of their current billing period with no additional charges.

The Future

Bootstrapping DevSkills has been a unique and exciting opportunity to improve the quality of developer hiring out there (even at a small scale). And I can't wait to see what impact we will make in the upcoming years while being part of Alva's rocketship.


As for me, I'll be leading the developer hiring domain inside Alva. And I'm looking forward to continuing working with all our customers.


Stay tuned for updates.