Who Y Combinator Companies Want • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#121

Post by theworstshill » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:24 PM UTC

throwaway456789 wrote: post #63

I'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…

Anybody who expects you to know every new technology is a fool. The most important thing is being able to teach yourself the new technology and figure out its kinks.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#122

Post by lackbeard » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:24 PM UTC

ammon wrote: post #34

majormajor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

I'd be curious to hear about the inverse. Have you found there are skills/disciplines that companies are highly interested in but no candidates are?

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#123

Post by UK-AL » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:25 PM UTC

api wrote: post #16

> "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…

So you would not hire someone of a Microsoft or Google background?

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#124

Post by pjungwir » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:26 PM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #56

dagw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is to my boss "unlimited" might mean 15 days and to me it might mean 4 month. If we come in with wildly different ideas about what is OK, we're both going to end up very unhappy.

Or you could have a straightforward discussion with him/her about your expectations. The real issue with unlimited PTO is that many people are so conflict-adverse (except on the internet) that they cannot initiate basic conversations about how much vacation time they think is reasonable. And instead of taking responsibility for communicating their expectations like adults, they stew in resentment against their employ…

I agree you and your manager should talk and agree on what number of days is reasonable. That's why you should have a number and not "unlimited".

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#125

Post by toomuchtodo » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #120

toomuchtodo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. Before I went into independent consulting, five weeks was a non-negotiable point for me. And I largely went into consulting specifically to take more time off. Life's too short.

Exactly. EXACTLY!

I'm not going to lay on my death bed and wish I had another couple lines of code committed.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#126

Post by dmoy » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #104

ammon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely true. The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. But this fact does nothing to help the good programmers who look bad on paper who everyone is ignoring. This is precisely the problem that we're trying to fix with Triplebyte. We want to make actual technical evaluatio…

The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. Imagine how mistaken that would sound if you substitute "startup founders" for "programmers." The reason you feel company filters are anything except random noise is personal bias. It's disheartening that your article notices that company pref…

How do you do a work-hire test for someone who already has a job, and is not allowed to work on another company's stuff?

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#127

Post by lackbeard » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:29 PM UTC

random_coder wrote: post #114

jenshoop wrote: post #31

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. Le…

Care to explain a little? Did your friend mean that talented engineers like working on novel problems and companies facing hard problems are thus more attractive?

I read jenshoop to mean: when recruiting, describe in some technical depth, the difficult, unique problems your company is solving to build its product(s).

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#128

Post by jlarocco » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:29 PM UTC

s_kilk wrote: post #46

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…

>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?

I don't know about Silicon Valley, but in Colorado it's almost never that bad for software jobs.

In 12 years I don't recall any jobs with fewer than 15 days. My current job is "unlimited", and I took nearly 25 days one year.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#129

Post by pjungwir » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:29 PM UTC

jenshoop wrote: post #39

metamet wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (en…

If it's possible to abuse it then it's not really unlimited. Why not just decide what is appropriate and put it in the contract, so everyone agrees how much vacation they can take?

Also there's no reason everyone has to receive the same amount. Indeed that would be very unusual.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#130

Post by tstock55 » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 7:30 PM UTC

lackbeard wrote: post #22

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 politica…

I accepted an offer at IBM a few months ago and had to take an IQ tests of sorts. It was mostly focused around pattern recognition with some algebra problems thrown in. At best it seemed only tangentially related to programming ability.. I'm not sure that attempting to measure whether a candidate is "smart" or not is a good hiring strategy.

A good analogy for this type of interviewing is like trying to judge how good someone is at basketball by measuring how tall they are. Is it related? Sure. But it certainly doesn't give you the whole picture and might not be a useful information at all. Watching them play a few games would be a better strategy.

Fortunately there a quite a few startups working on this problem. Lytmus is one in particular that I think looks very promising.