Who Y Combinator Companies Want • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#421

Post by hox » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:11 AM UTC

throwaway456789 wrote: post #111

ScottBurson wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I read your post I missed the parenthetical in the first paragraph, and was inclined to agree with you. Then I looked again and saw "(late twenties)", and had to laugh. On the one hand, you're right, you can't learn everything. On the other, to be able to realistically claim that you can pick up new languages quickly, you should already know three or four different kinds of languages. If all you know i…

I am pigeonholed. Sure I know other languages: Shell Scripting, Perl, HTML/CSS/JS, Groovy, SQL, C#, etc, but 80 percent of the code I write is in Java. I'm at a Java shop and have golden handcuffs. It's Java or bust for me.

Don't doubt yourself. There are a lot of great companies hiring Java developers; you don't have to worry yourself about the standard YCombinator group.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#422

Post by eropple » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:14 AM UTC

mquander wrote: post #410

eropple wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're OK with spending two hours doing something before you get anything out of it? 'Cause I'll readily admit that there are probably companies out there that do such a test afterwards, but I've never seen one personally. Instead it's the gate to protect their precious engineers' time. Yours, though? Yours doesn't matter, and that rustles my jimmies real fierce. Look at the opportunity costs: what if you could spend…

I just spent the past month looking around for interesting new work after quitting my last position. Two of the ten or so smaller companies I've interviewed with so far had work-sample-ish tests as part of the hiring process: Keybase and AltspaceVR. Both of them had already made my short list of potentially ideal companies to work at, and I had ample time to ask them questions and chat before doing the work sample pr…

Yeah, I've never had that experience! I'm sure I could be flexible about that--after I've been sold on the gig in the first place. But I feel like that's maybe an inversion of what it's usually used for: to weed out the shitty applicants. Looking at my Github and my blog (both linked on any documentation a client or prospective employer would see) should be enough for that to not waste either of our time, but at many places The Process Shall Never Be Modified.

(Right now, I'm helping out a few days a week over at a fairly large Boston startup, and while they have a general work-sample test that they roll out, I never took it. I probably wouldn't have followed up past the initial phone call if a monkey dance was necessary to get in the door.)

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#423

Post by hawkice » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:26 AM UTC

tdaltonc wrote: post #399

lewisl9029 wrote: post #264

As a "Product Programmer" myself, I find it highly ironic that despite the fact that there is apparently more demand for product-focused developers than technical-focused ones, the interview process for most startups is overwhelmingly technical-focused. If you're looking for product-focused developers, please consider tuning your interview process to evaluate whether or not candidates can build great products, rather…

Maybe you only remember the super technical parts because the product-focused parts were effortless for you.

I've been in interviews where over half the questions were legit non-programming puzzles, and the rest were algorithms. Most interviews are heavy on tool-specific questions. I've had only two interviews where I've been asked to fix a bug in code and in those circumstances I wasn't able to actually run the code. Getting even remotely close to building something would be so supremely memorable that I would have a hard time believing I built an entire thing before I noticed.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#424

Post by henrikschroder » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:36 AM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #309

brianchu wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a CS student and most students I know dislike whiteboarding too (and by extension many, if not most, YC startup employees do too). But I'm pretty okay at them now, having had lots of practice. The key advantage for students I think is the ability to have sustained practice over the course of a month (e.g. > 4 onsites over the course of a month), which most students can afford since their schedules are flexible. A…

IF they have you write code, think twice about taking the job. That's an indicator of a junior engineer conducting an interview in a company that didn't care enough to work out a good process. Seriously. I've been working for startups and starting companies for 26 years, and for half that time I've been building teams. I stopped asking people to code a long time ago. If they can't code it will be obvious by their ans…

Seriously, there's a large number of applicants who apply for programming jobs, have had programming jobs in the past, can talk about their programming work, but are actually unable to write code.

Fizzbuzz is an absolutely necessary filter, or you will accidentally hire these people.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#425

Post by rhizome » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:36 AM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #387

engi_nerd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defense industry is strange . I've had three jobs in it. In every single interview, the most technical question that anyone ever asked me was, "What do you like to do on the weekends?" And all three jobs have been engineering positions.

My last two jobs (including my current one) have been at smaller defense firms. Both interviews involved some amount of coding (mostly a 'homework' project). Now, several years ago when I interviewed with a frickin' huge aerospace company who shall remain nameless, my experience was similar to yours. The interview was a panel-style discussion with the hiring manager and several engineers. They had to follow a script…

"I've never had the pleasure of working at a company where this was even attempted, would [present company] provide opportunities in this regard?"

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#426

Post by sytelus » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:36 AM 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…

Work-hire test works for positions that requires failry narrow skill sets. You need iOS 2D game developer or nodejs to MongoDB plumber or single page JS app developer? Sure it would work beautifully. However most companies are not looking for such very narrow skill sets. Companies look for people who are generalists at heart and can be specialized in given area with little ramp up on demand . One week you might write build script and other week debugging Rails and yet another week fixing javascript in UX. When doing these tasks, it's not expected that you already know all these tools and platforms. You will have some ramp up time of 1 day to a week. But the key is that you should be able to move around stack, across projects and get shit done given reasonable ramp up times.

Also a lot of experienced programmers are generalists as well. You might have been C++ system guy in your past life, worked on JavaScript couple of years back and now working on Hadoop backend. You may not remember all the nitty gritty details of past platforms and tools but you can ramp up on demand.

So this 2 hour work-hire test that narrowly focuses on specific tools and platform won't work for vast majority of programmers who haven't branded themselves in to one narrow area. Also remember that a lot of programmers at places like Google, FB and Microsoft work in highly proprietory environment with their own internal build system, platforms and tools. They are likely not familiar with everything that's latest and in fashion. However they are very smart people, can change gear easily and, most importantly, ramp up on demand very quickly.

Yet another big issue is that work-hire test usually fail to measure hardcore computer science problem solving abilities. Sure, you are good at fixing some iOS bugs but can you figure out how to do driving directions on maps or may be scale email system to 100 million users? Now I do agree that lot of jobs don't require hard core CS but many do. And for a startup, it's usually impossible to tell if your future 6 month down the line will hing on having someone with hard core CS skills.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#427

Post by Bahamut » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #309

brianchu wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a CS student and most students I know dislike whiteboarding too (and by extension many, if not most, YC startup employees do too). But I'm pretty okay at them now, having had lots of practice. The key advantage for students I think is the ability to have sustained practice over the course of a month (e.g. > 4 onsites over the course of a month), which most students can afford since their schedules are flexible. A…

IF they have you write code, think twice about taking the job. That's an indicator of a junior engineer conducting an interview in a company that didn't care enough to work out a good process. Seriously. I've been working for startups and starting companies for 26 years, and for half that time I've been building teams. I stopped asking people to code a long time ago. If they can't code it will be obvious by their ans…

While it may be possible to tell competance easily this way, one thing I found difficult to tell without live coding is someone's ability for architecting components. One recent hire at work is competant at coding, but for a senior engineer, weak on designing API for a UI service to generate components, as well as weak on unit testing (which in this instance, turns out to be somewhat linked).

How would you screen such a person out?

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#428

Post by throwaway456789 » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:40 AM UTC

buckbova wrote: post #370

throwaway456789 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plead see previous comment about my compensation. I don't think a company would pay someone that much unless they were really good.

I don't expect any job actually programming pays more than that, even if you are literally doing 1 1/2 jobs (60 hrs/wk). Only way to get that kind of pay and work for someone else is as an executive and a higher up VP/CTO/CIO etc. Keep that job and don't spend all that money in one place. You might be one of those folks who can retire while they are (relatively) young.

That's actually the plan... And then maybe join a SV start up because money doesn't matter anymore...

Going to be tough to do as an enterprise Java developer though. =P.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#429

Post by tim333 » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:41 AM UTC

aaalll wrote: post #369

gotchange wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding as part of the interview process is a reasonable request to ask from the applicant and I'm having hard time to understand your objection to this step.

Not really you don't get to see surgeons operate when applying to a position. There is a lack of trust why this whiteboard stuff happens to be honest I pass about 60% of the white interviews that i did.

They have other checks surgeons can operate. Basically an apprentice system where the expert watches the student and doesn't pass them till competent. You don't get to do it by bs'ing in an interview.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#430

Post by pkteison » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 2:44 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #80

L_Rahman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.ht…

What's probably happening here is there are company-selected vacation days being left out of the number. You get to choose 10, but another 10 are picked by the company.

I worked as a programmer at a big boring company which did this - 10 days of company holidays, 10 days of you-get-to-choose. It's a month off total, but you only have control over 2 weeks, so it's presented as 10 vacation days.