Viewing profile — elq

We try very hard to NOT ask questions that have only one correct answer, and my team only interviews/hires senior people. So my approach to interviewing might be different than som…

The interviewers in these loops are generally quite introverted themselves, I know I certainly am. I believe we are sensitive to people who are the same and cut them slack. My goal…

I can't really explain it. It was a puzzle to all of the interviewers. The only reasonable hypothesis I have where I assume the candidate was honest is that the quality of the code…

Oddly enough, people lie, unknown references can be bullshit. The cost of hiring someone who is incompetent is high. High enough that companies generally make several attempts at f…

indeed! Yet, in the interview I'm thinking of, he didn't even get this far. poorly specified questions are very important to ask IMHO :)

>I have plenty of open source code, if they cannot figure how good I am looking at... I've interviewed several people with lots of code on github and what looks like lots of accept…

Have you actually contacted customer support for Shopping Express? I have, twice and both times my issues were resolved very much to my satisfaction quickly. Further, customer supp…

You keep saying that Netflix is saving money. Please provide a reference for this.

I do machine learning, I don't particularly care about object layout - almost everything I deal with is just arrays of floats, doubles, or longs. I'm also not bothered by GC issues…

In my experience, PGO is something that relatively few C/C++ programmers know about or at least use... roughly the same percentage of java programmers know how JIT works. But all j…

Well... A lot of hotspots potential comes from runtime profiling, this is not necessarily the same as having an optimizing compiler generating code at compile time.

One good reason to use a VM - JIT's can generate very very fast code. Hotspot has gotten so good that there are several cases where numeric java code I've written is faster than re…

counterpoint http://xkcd.com/1064/ And I think you're missing the point of the post...

I work at netflix. zuul is used by the netflix API. It's not a cache. It's a request router. EVCache is used internally for ephemeral systems data - things that would frequently go…

no. Netflix uses aws for serving html, and other relatively low bandwidth content. But media bits are not served from aws.

I'm reminded of Viva from Starbridge which was supposed to make FPGA "programs" easier to build and debug - using large generic blocks. I have no idea what happened to them, but I …

I have a very different experience. I've had my fastmail account for ~5 years and get 20 new pieces of spam in my inbox daily, while on my gmail account, that I've used for ~10 yea…

Engineers are expected to take responsibility for themselves. They are, after all, "fully formed adults" (in Patty's parlance). And honestly it's not that hard to figure out which …

re: friends - I think people are just put off by Patty's "we manage the company like a sports team, not a family" philosophy.

I've been at Netflix for close to 6 years. Working there, IMHO, is no more demanding than any other company. There are no bonus', the salary is just raised - the average pay for en…

There are no regular firings at Netflix. If a manager is really happy with all of their team, there is no pressure to rank everyone and can the lower n%. This alone suggests that i…

> Netflix could port the DRM if they wanted to I'm pretty sure the DRM used in the Netflix silverlight player is Microsoft's "PlayReady", so no... Netflix can't port it if they wan…

Gilbert Strang made a great series of lectures on the big ideas of calculus sans most of the computation - http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE9407EA64E2C318

Math. math. math. Linear algebra. Bayesian statistics. MUST know these inside out, upside down. Vector calculus. Convex optimization. A boatload of machine learning literature. The…

They were apparently trying to understand performance issues with adblock, so they can fix them... // TODO(mpcomplete): remove the extension-related histograms after we collect // …