The founders

AbilityRating is built by its two co-founders, Mihai Kondort and George Ciobanu, as a project of the company grandefox.

Why AbilityRating

Hiring a developer often means several interviews run by different people: a technical round with one interviewer, a design discussion with another, sometimes a separate psychological interview. Often nothing is scored at all; where there is a score, it is not applied the same way to every candidate.

AI agents now write code faster than any person, so what matters more is the work around the code. AbilityRating helps in two ways. Every candidate for a position is measured the same way, by the same kind of problems and the same stated rule. And it measures the qualities that count in development work today, such as clarifying an unclear brief, catching a plausible mistake in a code review, deciding what not to build and directing an AI agent, rather than only the knowledge that traditional interviews test.

Mihai Kondort

More than 20 years of software engineering in Romania, the Netherlands and Ireland, at Eightpoint, ING Nederland in Amsterdam, Ingenico ePayments in Hoofddorp, AIB Bank in Dublin, IBM Global Services Romania, Ubisoft Romania and Teosim. The work spans desktop, web and native mobile applications as well as data warehousing and ETL for banking and payments.

Alongside the engineering, Mihai has worked on the hiring side: screening and interviewing developers, helping to decide whom to hire and helping to build a team of more than 15 Ab Initio developers at IBM. In technical lead roles, Mihai wrote training plans for graduates, ran code reviews, set technical direction and led a team of four developers.

The range of that engineering work, across many languages and stacks, is behind a design aim of AbilityRating: a developer’s language or stack should make no difference to the result. The early sittings check whether it does. More at mihaikondort.com.

George Ciobanu

A machine learning engineer in London with 18 years of work on data and models. The first eight years went into data warehouses and ETL pipelines, at IBM Romania and then at Betfair in Cluj-Napoca, as data engineer, senior data engineer and data architect.

George then moved into machine learning: a Master’s in Artificial Intelligence at Babeș-Bolyai University with first-class honours, then Zimilar, a fashion search engine based on deep learning that George co-founded. Since 2018 George has worked as a machine learning engineer in London, first at General Intelligence and now at Flo Health. More on LinkedIn.

How the work is checked

The founders’ own judgment is not enough evidence on its own. The problems will be reviewed by panels of practising developers; the method is being documented against the published standards for testing; see the evidence.