This was a great point: "There’s more demand for product-focused programmers than there is for programmers focused on hard technical problems." A very talented programmer from Dropbox once told me that if I wanted to attract top engineering talent, I needed to be able to show the engineer "a problem that no one else has solved yet." This totally changed the way I wrote my job descriptions and conducted interviews. Led to great outcomes, too.
Who Y Combinator Companies Want
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Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#32When it comes to hiring, I think that the team is more important than the individual. As the beginning of the piece stated, it's not so much about individual characteristics as it is culture/process fit. I think the main takeaway for applicants is not to take interview rejection personally. Even if you do everything "right", you still might not be what they're looking for.
Ultimately, I don't think that individual programming ability matters that much. It's extremely rare for the technical talents of one person to turn a company around. Some people can inspire others and turn dysfunctional groups into great teams, and there's never enough of that. But said great teams are ephemeral, like sports dynasties. All a company can do is try to avoid toxic employees and hope that the magic happens.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#33"I remember the first time I interviewed for a front-end programming position and got asked how to do something in JavaScript on a white board. The specifics are vague, but it’s crystal clear how stupid it made me feel and how little it had to do with the actual job."
...
> "The only reliable gauge I’ve found for future programmer success is looking at real code they’ve written, talking through bigger picture issues, and, if all that is swell, trying them out for size."
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3071-why-we-dont-hire-program...
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#34"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)?
Not at a YC company, but yeah my guess would be that it's hard to get the trend followers on board with other stuff. I've anecdotally seen myself a lot of candidates (esp at the recent-university/recent-MS level) who've taken some ML courses cause it's trendy and sounds interesting but (a) don't have a serious enough interest in it or knowledge of how to apply it well enough to be a good fit on our ML teams and (b) a…
Author of the post. I think that this is exactly right. I don't know what motivated the companies to put that policy in place (they just told us that they had this preference). But I can speculate. There is an epidemic of interest in ML. Four out of 5 college grads we speak to list it as an interest. I think that interest has grown to the point where it's no longer any kind of signal about technical strength, and perhaps a signal that the candidates will not be flexible about what they work on.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#35This reminds of psychological study about superstition. They studied fishing habits of South American Indian tribes; the tribes that fished in lakes, had consistent and reasonable rules about when/where to go fishing. However, the tribes that fished in the ocean, where you cannot predict the catch, had rather random and superstitious rules about when/where to go. This is due to our brains seeing patterns in randomness.
Also, it's perhaps understandable why companies don't want to reveal their preference. If you do it, you open yourself to being gamed. I think it's also better to have unreasonable requirements (looking to give genius programmers some boring product work) than be sorry. Again this happens in absence of actual test (other than wait and see) of who is a good candidate. Females do the same thing when mating.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#36> "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.
I ask for five weeks/year, even if it means I have to forgo some pay. I have yet to be told no.
I don't think you've ever experienced the passive aggressiveness that comes with using "unlimited" vacation time.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#37So, random.
Also the company interviewing the first candidate, couldn't they just told him that they wanted testing?
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#38> "Second, companies dislike programmers with enterprise backgrounds. Our data shows that companies are less likely to hire programmers coming from Java or C# backgrounds." This I totally understand. Enterprise software is systematically horrible in almost every way: terrible UI/UX, insane degrees of over engineering, high footprint, high cost, and usually at least two to three generations behind on every technologic…
> usually at least two to three generations behind on every technological trend
It's easy to refactor (or completely rewrite) for whatever the hot new fad is when you're dealing with small codebases (It has nothing to do with "pointy haired bosses" - believe it or not a lot of us [enterprise developers] care more about actually getting stuff done then bragging to our friends how we're playing with whatever is hip this week.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Was just having this conversation -- is there any precedent for offering different teams and/or differing levels of tenure different vacation packages? My husband used to work at Groupon and said it was really challenging to give all entry-level sales people unlimited vacation because they tended to abuse it. However, unlimited vacation may work well for more tenured positions or even for different types of teams (engineering / design?) We thought this might be too tricky to administrate / unfair, but it does seem that it can be a useful and underabused perk for some and a disaster for others.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#40"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)?
Because ML/AI are feature enablers. They make a good product better, but they won't make a product successful. It's a signal that people are more interested in solving technical problems than solving business/product problems.
Also, a large percentage of ML/AI projects are scams. And even the people who aren't scammers tend to massively underestimate the amount of work required to make something good. It doesn't surprise me at all that interest in these technologies could be a red flag on multiple levels.
Sure there are plenty of great startups built with these technologies, but both also tend to be the 'and then a miracle occurs' of the tech industry.