>>Ruby or Javascript. (The C# pass rate is actually much lower than the Java pass rate, but the C# numbers are not yet significant by themselves.)<<
This makes me sad. I do not know who the caricature here is, the Enterprise programmer or the YC companies.
Who Y Combinator Companies Want
71–80 of 552 posts
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#72I'm an "enterprise" programmer because I write in Java... I'm also older than the average age of a start-up employee (late twenties). I've never written a line of Ruby, and I've never written object oriented JavaScript or used Node.js. 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…
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Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#73For a blog article under a data subdomain, there's surprisingly few numbers and quantitative analysis, which is disappointing. And one matrix of survey data as the only visualization. I get that startups do not want to reveal their competitive advantage, but there has to be some give-and-take. Taking an analysis on blind faith alone is frustrating.
It is not what you know, but how you tell the story :) Human condition never changes, we are just emotional creatures and perception is reality. It is true in recruitment process, all these new fixes to recruiting are a different versions of that.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found the detail level close to perfect. It explains a lot of my feelings towards the recruitment process.
That's confirmation bias, which is dangerous especially since a lot of people in this thread seem to have similar sentiment. Quantitive data would confirm if the patterns are stereotypes or not.
Well you could also read it as a rare look into what goes on on the other side of the table, couldn't you?
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#75> "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…
Edit: What I really meant.. 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.
I guess I've not seen that many westerns, but I really was not aware that the stomach was a gendered organ.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#76I'd really like to know what it is about a resume or in an interview that makes someone seem like more of a 'product programmer'.
Is it the particular things they have worked on at other jobs, i.e. their experience, or is it the way they talk about what they want to build?
I'd be really interested to hear how I can make myself sound like more of a product programmer.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#77"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)?
I wanted to ask the same question. Harj, is it people with ML/AI interests without experience? Does this also include PHDs? On that note, are Academic Programmers Comp Sci PHDs or from other fields?
Author of the post. We did not distinguish by experience level in the question that we asked about tech / product. But experience is VERY helpful in a job search, so an experienced ML/AI person would almost certainly have more interest than a product person fresh out of school. We've not seen much weight given to CS PhDs. Someone fresh out of a CS PhD program is viewed much like someone out of a BS program. Industry experience is a big help.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Out of curiosity, on the taxonomy of programmers, is that supposed to be mostly exclusive, or can they overlap?
Not the author, but I know about ontologies generally. Non-overlapping is great, but rarely possible because whatever you're trying to organize might not divide up that way. Next best is eigenvectors. You would find the "pure types" of programer such that each real programer would a linear composition of the pure types. This is really handy for doing statistics. But you might run in to trouble if programmers don't have interaction free types. Beyond that you can use more elaborate interaction models, but those are more of an art then a science. They require a lot of domain expertise to design.
Hope that helps.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#79> "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…
I'm down to 2 days out of my 10. I used to take a day if they had a big "tech screening" over the phone but now I'm adamant about doing them after hours.
>Almost no one passes all their programming interviews
But there is always someone who will, and many companies are more than happy to pass on all candidates until the find someone who days. I was super happy that my interviewer yesterday said we were skipping the whiteboard section.
Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want
#80Earlier 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.
> 10 days paid time off is the de-facto standard for just about every company based in this country.
Not to mention that tech industry firms are reputed to be more generous than what is otherwise common, that sounds really low even outside of the tech industry; its lower than any company I've seen, and lower than what most sources I've seen indicate is common. [0]
[0] e.g., http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm and http://www.salary.com/time-off-paid-time-off-from-work/