11–20 of 56 posts
I've seen quite a bit of 'discrimination' against enterprise devs by startups over the past ten years as a recruiter (and JUG president for 15 years), and the data in this piece regarding Java/C# devs failing more interviews than counterparts is at least a little surprising. I generally attributed the discrimination to be more about dev culture than tech skills, whereas the enterprise dev maybe with a few years at a…
Slightly surprised -- and a little diappointed -- to see "academic programmer" as the least desirable archetype. Also, not sure these archetypes do a great job of capturing the process-oriented/results-oriented divide that shows up in the opening anecdote (and which I agree is quite real).
From my perspective, there is an impedance mismatch between the triplebyte process (heads-down algorithm nerd) and the findings that they are presenting here (product-focused, culturally well rounded hacker, been around the block a few times and has experience in other startups).
The other factor is that enterprise programmers tend to prefer places with a lot of process in place. They want to see a well defined pipeline with tests and approvals and gates and so on. Pushing untested code to production isn't even in their mental space, but sometimes you just gotta do it at a startup when you got a press hit and your traffic just doubled. Basically, they tend to slow things down by demanding doing things right.
Now, for the first problem, that's just wrong -- just because you were in an enterprise doesn't mean you are bad or you are willing to deal with bad people. It's just a cognitive bias.
For the second problem, those people are right, there should be good process and it will be better in the long term. But in the short term it feels like they are slowing things down, because startups generally don't have the luxury of investing more time now for a bigger payoff later, or at least they don't think they do.
I've seen quite a bit of 'discrimination' against enterprise devs by startups over the past ten years as a recruiter (and JUG president for 15 years), and the data in this piece regarding Java/C# devs failing more interviews than counterparts is at least a little surprising. I generally attributed the discrimination to be more about dev culture than tech skills, whereas the enterprise dev maybe with a few years at a…
I'm afraid I'm getting stereotyped as an enterprise dev against my will. I've been on interviews where that was certainly the vibe I got. No matter how much I stress that I'm interviewing while I have a job for the purpose of getting away from that culture, I can't shake that opinion it seems. Trust me I would gladly program in anything other than corporate Java if given a chance. I think I've got the worst of both w…
A couple of things that jump out to me. Up front, I've been a little hard on Triplebyte in some threads here, but this article is great, and I think their heads are in the right place and motivated to solve one of the biggest problems we have in the corporate world (and I'm telling you this as an "enterprise" manager, so it is an issue across the board). Also that's one of my best run-on sentences, maybe ever. > I do…
--- Very true.
I've seen quite a bit of 'discrimination' against enterprise devs by startups over the past ten years as a recruiter (and JUG president for 15 years), and the data in this piece regarding Java/C# devs failing more interviews than counterparts is at least a little surprising. I generally attributed the discrimination to be more about dev culture than tech skills, whereas the enterprise dev maybe with a few years at a…
I've been a happy engineer with a YC company for close to three years now. I have led various teams and contributed to many aspect of the overall product during my tenure. I have also interviewed more than twenty people and I can assure you, there is no one size fit all when it comes to finding candidates that succeed.
I also tried TripleByte a year ago, I figured it would be fun to see how they do things.
I got to the interview section after doing well on the online quizz however failed to go beyond that.
From my experience I can assure you that TripleByte has its own set of standards and values that may not match with you or the company you want to work with. They are overly interested in putting labels and pigeon holing candidates into specific categories that overlooks the fact that every individual is different.
YC is a big family with varied products, teams, and problems. There are no one size fit all formula or set of labels for ideal candidates or ideal company.
Your best route for success is to do the work yourself, find the company that interests you, directly connect with them and see how it goes.
Also if someone can explain to me what is trial and error programmer, or a child prodigy I would be grateful? Can a child prodigy be also an enterprise programmer? Is there any overlap between product programmers, pragmatic programmers?
It's often the other programmers at startups judging the other programmers. Based on my personal experience, the best kind of programmer is the one that gets along well with others.
Slightly surprised -- and a little diappointed -- to see "academic programmer" as the least desirable archetype. Also, not sure these archetypes do a great job of capturing the process-oriented/results-oriented divide that shows up in the opening anecdote (and which I agree is quite real).