61–70 of 552 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?
Yup. 10 days paid time off is the de-facto standard for just about every company based in this country. Some people negotiate additional PTO as part of their compensation package but I don't need to tell HN that engineers are notoriously bad at doing this.
> "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…
However, I'm a really good programmer. I just happen to write the majority of my code in Java. If tomorrow we decided to use a new language, I could pick it up in a few days... I have a feeling the "enterprise" thing is just veiled age-ism. Anyone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but at this point, it's literally impossible to learn every new technology. And anyone whose worth their salt should be able to learn a new environment and programming language without too much trouble.
I have a feeling that the enterprise thing is just a way for these employers to screen out the older, more experienced programmers.
This will probably get this throwaway banned, but Michael O'Church (who I am not) writes a lot about this on his blog. I tend to agree with him.
"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)?
My experience is that programmers I've worked with who strongly identified as being interested in ML tended to be prone to wanting to build very complex ML-based systems when much simpler (albeit less sexy) solutions would suffice. Certainly this is a generalization, but I've seen it enough times to be wary.
In my experience pretty much nobody is taking Ben Horowitz's advice from The Hard Thing About Hard Things—hire based on strength instead of a perceived lack of weakness. Instead everyone seems to be looking for candidates who fill out all the boxes and have zero thumbs down in interviews. That coupled with extreme risk aversion means long interview cycles, and huge amounts of wasted time for some of the most talented employees and founders on the planet.
> "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…
Until my current gig, I was never once allowed vacation time.
> "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…
Poor choice of words on my part. Take it in this context: "Person X doesn't have a stomach for hard engineering problem Y".
"Doesn't have the stomach for" now can be interpreted as a synonym for:
* Is not capable of
* Is not smart enough for
* Is not hard working enough for (!)
In the current environment I definitely shouldn't have brought up gender.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?
Yup. 10 days paid time off is the de-facto standard for just about every company based in this country. Some people negotiate additional PTO as part of their compensation package but I don't need to tell HN that engineers are notoriously bad at doing this.
> "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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patently false. Just because you get hired every time you have experience with a companys tech stack doesn't mean a lot of us has to jump through a lot of hoops without knowing why. Me? I have wondered if I should make job applications a hobby regardless if I want a new job right there or not. (oh, btw: I have had good work, without time between since 2007, when I had a few weeks between two jobs. I'm just so tired o…
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Basically it went like this: registered with recruiting agency - got a call a few days later asking if I would like a plane ticket - met up with the company next time I crossed the mountains anyway, told them I knew next to nothing about Java, was told that I looked smart and as long as I picked it up within the next 6 months they would be happy. So I started after my summer holiday and was fixing bugs within the first week.
At that place everone including our designer could code because they made sure to make it easy to get started. Since then I try to do the same.
Edit: this is also the only time recruiting agencies hasn't been a complete and utter waste of my time.