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Who Y Combinator Companies Want

data.triplebyte.com

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Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#21

Post by buro9 » 

    The “Product Programmer” and “Technical Programmer” profiles are identical,
    except one is motivated by product design, and the other by solving hard
    programming problems.
This is great.

I've struggled with trying to define the difference between the great systems engineers I meet and the engineers who make great products (sometimes at the expense of all elegance under the hood).

This sums it up nicely... it's where the focus is. I'm surrounded by engineers focusing on systems programming, but I don't think of myself as similar to them, I've always been end user obsessed and customer focused. It's nice to see this difference acknowledged.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#22

Post by lackbeard »

This is interesting data.

I liked what Joel Spolsky said a long time ago. Basically that companies should want two types of engineers. 1. You want a few who are experts in the company's tech stack. 2. The bar for everyone else is just that they're smart and they get things done.

I guess the core problem is that we don't have a good objective measure of the latter. (Maybe an IQ test for smarts, if that wasn't political incorrect, but I don't know how you'd show definitively that you "get things done" in an interview.)

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#23

Post by ammon »

tdaltonc wrote: post #4

I like the ontology of programmers. Are there any other efforts to do this? Anything data driven or externally validated? Given what a big role personas and demo/psycho-graphics play in marketing, I'm surprised that I haven't heard more about then in the context of hiring and managing.

Yeah (author of the blog post here), I think it's a powerful idea. I don't know of any other public attempts to do this (most ideas about hiring stay locked up inside companies). I'd love to hear any ideas you have. Email me at ammon@triplebyte.com

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#24

Post by jonathankoren »

cogware wrote: post #3

"Two large YC companies (both with machine learning teams) have told us that they consider interest in ML a negative signal." I wonder why this is? Since ML/AI are currently "hot" those programmers may be trend followers? Or maybe interest in ML is correlated with being a junior programmer (those that are more senior specialized when ML/AI were not so cool and consequently are in different domains)?

They think ML people aren't interested in infrastructure. That's not entirely true. Many people with actual production ML experience understand and want to work on the data infrastructure because it's all to easy for someone that's not going to build products on top of it to fuck it up.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#25

Post by metamet »

draw_down wrote: post #18
ryandrake wrote: post #8

> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…

A good example of why working at a place with such restrictive PTO is a trap. But, around here we like to have philosophical discussions about how unlimited vacation time is the real trap. I dunno, guys. It seems to work pretty well for me.

Or just start off with a proper number of days. Two weeks seems so short, especially if you get sick. 15 days total seems about right.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#26

Post by swalsh »

Former C# programmer here, in my most recent job hunt I rewrote my resume. I talked more about the value I provided for my company/customer (what the code did) rather than how I wrote the code. I'd say my results improved significantly in terms of getting my foot in the door.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#27

Post by jonathankoren »

"The types of programmers that each company looks for often have little to do with what the company needs or does. Rather, they reflect company culture and the backgrounds of the founders. "

THIS. In other words, the good ol' boy system still exists, only under the moniker of "meritocracy."

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#28

Post by chatmasta »

ryandrake wrote: post #8

> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…

It's not only the applicants who have limited time. The startup founders are also time constrained. You can't found a successful startup if you spend 10+ hours a week interviewing potential employees.

I suspect much of the initial bias and "hard line" preferences are due to a startup's unwillingness to spend inordinate amounts of time interviewing candidates to find that one diamond in the rough.

Imagine 4 of every 10 "academic programmer" candidates are a good fit, and 6 of 10 "product programmer" candidates are a good fit. Why waste time interviewing 10 academic programmers, for a max hit rate of 40%, when you could focus solely on product programmers and get a max hit rate of 60%?

This data certainly suggests that different founders have their own biases and preferences for what makes a "good programmer." Most of them probably realize they are pigeonholing and could be wrong, but they're willing to risk that for more efficient interviewing and a high hit rate.

Stick with what you know if it's "good enough." Optimally, as a founder you can already identify multiple potential early hires just from your own network. If you have the right background and connections, you can hire your first couple employees without doing a single interview.

Time is money. Interviews take time and cost money.

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