521–530 of 552 posts
Former C# programmer here, in my most recent job hunt I rewrote my resume. I talked more about the value I provided for my company/customer (what the code did) rather than how I wrote the code. I'd say my results improved significantly in terms of getting my foot in the door.
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I personally would be hard-pressed to answer that question. If they mean diversity by gender and ethnicity...well, for some reason I always find myself in teams largely of white males. Not through any selection process of my own, it's just that is how it works out.
What about teams where some of the white males solve problems or think differently from others? How about foreign language proficiency helping with suppliers? Not all diversity involves overt differences. Sometimes it's as simple as one guy's test-driven mentality shipping something on 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…
Imagine going on a date and after the fourth time being like "I still don't know if I like you, need more tests". I tend to get impatient with companies who ask for yet another round of interviews because I think either they like me or they don't. 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 mo…
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We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines, despite repeated requests not to. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban anyone as long as there is reason to believe that they'll follow the rules in the future.
benihana made good points IMO. A couple PG-13 words doesn't warrant a ban.
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I've made the mistake in the past of overcommitting myself to interviewing with multiple companies at once. The time commitment wasn't the worst part, the real factor I didn't for see is that interviewing is stressful and mentally exhausting. On top of the interview itself, there's the hours of studying you have to put in. It's extremely hard to do while doing your full time job. Now I have a rule that I will intervi…
>On top of the interview itself, there's the hours of studying you have to put in. Yikes, are people really doing this, or feel like they must? If I'm interviewing, I expect to be asked about previous projects, maybe my Github portfolio, and so on. I also expect to be asked how I might approach a given problem within my area of work. I can't imagine studying that - I'm paid to do this stuff every day. So are we talki…
Problem is there is such a wide variety of questions its hard to be prepared across the board ...
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…
As a founder, being in YC is probably great.
As an engineering employee, it doesn't seem all that compelling to work for a YC company compared to a non-yc company. None of the benefits of being a YC founder seemingly apply to an employee of a YC company.
This feels like serious echo-chamber nonsense that has little applicability outside the world of startups (and more likely YC startups).
Glassdoor just listed the top companies to work for. https://www.glassdoor.com/Best-Places-to-Work-LST_KQ0,19.htm
Airbnb (YC company). First job i found on their careers page (note, required a lot of clicking...):
https://www.airbnb.com/careers/departments/position/90884
Back-end, Front-end, Full Stack and Machine Learning engineers.
Strong proficiency in any of: C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby-on-Rails
Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale web application
Rigor in A/B testing, test coverage, and other web best practices
Back End: We write lots of micro-services, primarily with Java 8. Our APIs are RESTful and use the minimal Dropwizard framework, and we take advantage of Kafka, Spark, Hadoop for processing volumes of data.
And Zillow (not I skipped Facebook,Google, and Linkedin, and went to Zillow as it's the first Seattle based company listed).
http://www.zillow.com/jobs/openings?j=oXn70fwb
Strong experience with Java, Objective-C or C++
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Hiring manager here, and after many interviews with enterprise programmers, I do find myself putting more and more of them into the "no" pile right off the bat. The problem is that those candidates, in my experience, tend to throw up way more red flags than others - their code is extremely verbose, they rattle off factory patterns like they're reading a textbook without any inkling what sort of problems they're actua…
It's funny you say that. I can't name one factory pattern off the top of my head... Never needed to learn one. I should clarify -- I'm in my late twenties, and I've spent my entire career (10 years) writing Java code. I don't understand how that negatively hiring managers against me.
Patterns (and Anti-patterns) are an extremely useful part of software development, specifically because they help engineers be more efficient at solving problems with code.
Factory, funny enough, is the name of a design pattern.
And for good measure, DRY Violation is a good anti-pattern to pick up (though I suspect you know that already even if you can't name it).
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…
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…
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When you figure out how you can memorize your way through Google's interview process, please give me some advice. I study algorithms constantly out of interest, and still only managed to do well enough that they gave me another try a week later. Do I think algorithm questions predict how well you do on a job? No. However I certainly don't think they are just memorization unless you mean memorizing run time of various…
Careercup.com If you can ace Algorithms 101 exam, you can get hired. It is a measure of intelligence and ability to learn (and for older folks, free time to refresh) but it doesn't have much to do with job performance.
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We asked about visa sponsorship. We did not ask about salary. The general pattern with visa sponsorship was that small companies don't want do it, out of concern about the success rate (only 30% of H1B applications last year won the lottery). Some large companies will sponsor visas, but they set a higher bar (they have to be really excited to take on the extra work). The exception is larger companies with teams outsi…
Doesn't this imply that a branch development office, in a country with friendlier immigration policies, should be a high priority for almost every US-based startup? I assume most startups want to grow their engineering headcount (there are exceptions, of course). The pickier/more-focused you are about what kinds of engineers you want to hire, the more you have to gain from casting a wider net geographically. But if y…
At larger scale, it makes a LOT of sense and is done regularly.
Some times, it can be a hiring DISadvantage, as candidates run away from jobs where they need to wake up in the early hours for a conference call and also need to jump on conference calls at 11pm.
I do this currently, we have a dev team in the Ukraine. It is worth it price-wise, but the cost not accounted for is my personal time, i'm often on conference calls during kids' bedtime story telling.