481–490 of 552 posts
I guess the ideal place for the technically motivated is in large companies like Google/Microsoft or in open source. Should we get a masters and find something more suited to our interests? I'm not sure what the answer actually is.
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…
Most of the better interviewers work to understand how the candidate thinks and their aptitude to learn new things. Those can tell you a lot about how successful they will be in a job. And folks have shown that take home projects can show you what they can get done.
I found it interesting to compare the company's interviewer training at Google and at IBM. IBM is focused on finding highly qualified people compatible with their values, Google was more interested in finding people who were not intimidated by "impossible" questions. Both have their strengths.
Why, though? Is it because a candidate would be too interested in other things than focusing on mundane web development? Passionate about programming doesn't square well with passionate about ML, because the latter is not so much about programming?
> "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…
Maybe the issue is too risky to employ somebody? In my country a lot of laws protect employees, so it might be difficult to get rid of bad hires (although in the first 6 months I think it is easy, as they count as probation period).
Something seems amiss here.
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"I've never had the pleasure of working at a company where this was even attempted, would [present company] provide opportunities in this regard?"
Exactly. If you can't think of a canned answer for that question, there is approximately 0 chance you can navigate the workplace politics of a large defense contractor.
And yes, I'm already in the exact scenario you say I shouldn't be able to handle.
> "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'll use myself as an example -- I work as a programmer in the Defense industry. I've wanted out for years. So every so often I start sending out resumes and going on interviews. After wasting about half of my vacation time on (multiple) rounds of interviews with each prospective employer (that ultimately lead nowhere -- most often, a potential employer who inexplicably stops communicating with me), I give up. Then,…
I once interviewed with Amazon and after flying out and doing the interview I'm told that they liked me but I wasn't a fit for the team and could interview with another team without a delay and they'd even help me figure out the team to interview with. But why would I waste my time again taking days off to fly out and either not pass the interview or interview with the "wrong team" again?
When I interviewed at Microsoft it was a pretty positive experience aside from one person and while I certainly wasn't upset about not getting the position I was told they had 100 people interviewing in person for a single position (supposedly almost 1,000 applications). Great odds for Microsoft but for me taking 3 days off work to do it? Great experience but I'm not sure I'd do it again so easily.
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Author here. Ageism is real, and we'll be analyzing it in a future post. But in this case I don't think it's ageism. I think it's big-company-ism. Startups define themselves in opposition to big companies, and take signs of big company culture as strong negatives (which may or may not be justified statistically, I honestly don't know). But there are great programmers at big companies in any case, and startups should…
Startups should realize that this is a thoroughly idiotic notion, and should abandon it ASAP. The one thing that large software companies do well is SHIP PRODUCTS. A good software engineer is someone who can ship a product, even if its ill-defined or not feature-complete. This is a virtue. Small companies, especially startups, have a horrible track record for shipping software that in any way resembles its product pl…
Definitely aware of several hot startups that don't seem to value this at all. Well it's a tradeoff that they are hopefully consciously making.
The requirements may be different in the later-stage companies. But most of the startups never get there. So looking at recruiting goals on a per-company basis from a VC pool will generate a bias towards the skills needed for the cool demo. What Lugg needs are people such as the article suggests. What Uber needs at its current scale is quite different. Uber will hire far more people than Lugg, but it's weighted the same in this model.
This 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 randomnes…
> This 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 randomn…