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Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

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Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#71

Post by caminante »

chris_wot wrote: post #70
caminante wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staying calm and speaking during confrontations is a learnable skill. I humbly recommend reading the book Crucial Conversations, if you haven't read it, then practicing the techniques. I tell my "underlings" to breathe (with their diaphragm), to take their time, and to carry their voice. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-S...

Yeah, but another valuable skill is knowing that if you are treated this badly in an interview that even if you really want the job, sometimes it's best to walk away.

Good point

...and that's in the book! ;-)

edit: I think the key is that there's a dominant technique, regardless of whether you're getting trolled.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#72

Post by Mendenhall »

chris_wot wrote: post #70
caminante wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staying calm and speaking during confrontations is a learnable skill. I humbly recommend reading the book Crucial Conversations, if you haven't read it, then practicing the techniques. I tell my "underlings" to breathe (with their diaphragm), to take their time, and to carry their voice. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-S...

Yeah, but another valuable skill is knowing that if you are treated this badly in an interview that even if you really want the job, sometimes it's best to walk away.

I would probably politely ask the person if they were acting like a clown as an interview technique or if they were in fact an clown. No need to bother with disrespectful people.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#73

Post by vacri »

therealgimli wrote: post #34
throwaway59511 wrote: post #18

Throwaway to share my experience with them: I applied in mid-2014 to a software eng position based on encouragement from a recruiter. I went to two onsites with five people in total, each of which passed me to the next round. They had me come in for a third onsite(!) to meet with CEO James Beriker and some head of engineering. I had admitted to being let go for underperformance to the position I held two jobs ago (wa…

there's an interviewing technique among senior execs to take on an aggressive, rude tone to interviewees to "see how they respond under pressure." One way to spot it is if they respond in a contrary way to everything and generally try to pick on you to find chinks in your armor. the first time I experienced it I was pretty shaken up. either that or the person you spoke with is just an asshole.

This always threw me in interviews. I've worked in retail, as a medical tech with patient interaction, as phone support, as teaching assistants... and I'm able to get a reasonable level of rapport going. So to go to an interview where we build up some rapport and then the interviewer just turns suddenly hostile, that really throws me, because people just don't do that in the real world. I know better by now because I'm aware of this stupid 'trick'.

It has to be the worst way of detecting "how does this person deal with stress?". It's so artificial.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#74

Post by shubhamjain »

qadevleadgrunt wrote: post #69
vthallam wrote: post #11

This was destined to happen i guess! SimplyHired has no USP, scrapers which can massively scrape jobs and SEO which gets users,that's about it. No clear direction and competing with Indeed, which has better tech must have been hard for them. Also, I wonder with $34 million in funding, why they didn't launch any products to cater the users/companies.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but the name rings a bell from a scraper company I worked at some 10 years ago (I left that company in 2008). Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XM…

> Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest))

If you don't mind, can you tell me the name of the software? I was very much into scraping business myself around 2008. One of things I failed to do was to scrape a site made in ASP.NET Webforms. I was looking for software that could emulate Javascript and I think can recall something of that sorts that I saw.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#75

Post by anexprogrammer »

mathattack wrote: post #54
bcantrill wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the deadwood at Sun actually became deadwood at Oracle; most of the folks who left Sun (disclosure: includes me) were the ones who were drawn to Sun first and foremost by its mission, and since leaving they have gone on to interesting things elsewhere. So while there are certainly companies that are red flags for me, Sun isn't one of them -- and I say this as someone who knows Sun's failings better…

The purchase was 6+ years ago, and the deadwood is still there?

Deadwood manages to stay, unnoticed by management, for decades. Most companies of a size has plenty, the body-shops (EDS etc) seem to consist of mainly deadwood.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#76

Post by hackinthebochs »

yeukhon wrote: post #32
lukasm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you say you were fired for underperformance? Why didn't you say it was a bad fit? Usually, that's the root cause.

Another reason I wouldn't not tell the truth is maybe the interviewer knows my ex-colleagues.

It's not about lying, but constructing a narrative that paints the facts in a favorable light. Just saying you were fired for underperforming gives you no room to construct a less negative narrative.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#77

Post by Pyxl101 »

yuhong wrote: post #51
eganist wrote: post #3

"part-acquisition" So in conclusion, someone bought up the scraps at rock-bottom prices just before a potential bankruptcy. Ouch. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise. They brought on a former Yahoo VP as CEO four years ago. As the article and one of the comments therein pointed out: it seems they didn't have much in the way of new technological or algorithmic advantages to build on and didn't have much in the way of…

Not that it is a good idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.

I would be more interested to see the opposite: limited salary and extremely generous stock options, vesting at each time period in the future at a price that's the company's current price projected forward with the average expected stock market returns, plus some discount. (So the company needs to grow greater than the market for the CEO's options to have value)

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#78

Post by toomuchtodo »

dctoedt wrote: post #41
therealgimli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's an interviewing technique among senior execs to take on an aggressive, rude tone to interviewees to "see how they respond under pressure." One way to spot it is if they respond in a contrary way to everything and generally try to pick on you to find chinks in your armor. the first time I experienced it I was pretty shaken up. either that or the person you spoke with is just an asshole.

> there's an interviewing technique among senior execs to take on an aggressive, rude tone to interviewees to "see how they respond under pressure." Sounds like wannabes trying to imitate Admiral Rickover's interview style for the Navy's nuclear-propulsion program [0]. Forty-plus years on I can still recite my interview with the Kindly Old Gentleman [sic] practically verbatim. [0] E.g., http://the-military-guide.com/…

Sidenote: Rickover is the reason we don't use Thorium reactors today. So sorry you had to interact with him.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#79

Post by doug1001 »

dctoedt wrote: post #41
therealgimli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's an interviewing technique among senior execs to take on an aggressive, rude tone to interviewees to "see how they respond under pressure." One way to spot it is if they respond in a contrary way to everything and generally try to pick on you to find chinks in your armor. the first time I experienced it I was pretty shaken up. either that or the person you spoke with is just an asshole.

> there's an interviewing technique among senior execs to take on an aggressive, rude tone to interviewees to "see how they respond under pressure." Sounds like wannabes trying to imitate Admiral Rickover's interview style for the Navy's nuclear-propulsion program [0]. Forty-plus years on I can still recite my interview with the Kindly Old Gentleman [sic] practically verbatim. [0] E.g., http://the-military-guide.com/…

i recall a chapter in Jimmy Carter's biography in which he summarises his interview with Admiral Rickover. According to President Carter (a Navy Lt at the time of the interview, i believe) during the interview, Adm Rickover asked him if, while he was a cadet at the Naval Academy, he had always done his best--that was literally the question. Carter's reply was something like "no sir, quite often but not always" In response, Rickover turns his chair around to signal the end of the interview.

Re: Simply Hired is shutting down June 26

#80

Post by EwanToo »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #77
yuhong wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it is a good idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.

I would be more interested to see the opposite: limited salary and extremely generous stock options, vesting at each time period in the future at a price that's the company's current price projected forward with the average expected stock market returns, plus some discount. (So the company needs to grow greater than the market for the CEO's options to have value)

That's the model of a lot of financial firms, it appears to lead to very short-term, high-risk strategies, and financial engineering to boost the share price at certain points in time
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