Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#81

Post by tptacek » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

mac1175 wrote: post #50

"Some places like Matasano, Stripe, Github and I’m sure many others are aware of this and are equally aware that it has the potential to harm their company a great deal." I actually had the pleasure interviewing with Matasano. I thought their process was fun and really enlightening in regards to what they do. Everyone I met during the process were really cool (and extremely smart).

Thank you! But: I'm sure we did some things wrong or sucky. If you can think of any, I'd love to hear them; you can reply here if you like. :)

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#82

Post by morgante » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

void-star wrote: post #34

This may very well have been an excellent piece. But, the author lost me no later than 2 sentences in with his immature and sexist "nerdy girl" analogy. I just didn't even bother to read the rest. Working in silicon valley myself, I already waste enough time on people who think this kind of immature male mindset is okay.

I don't think that was intended as a sexist remark at all. Rather, it was a pointed jest at the Hollywood trope of "nerdy girls"—basically making fun of Hollywood for being sexist.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeautifulAllAlong

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#83

Post by nilkn » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:08 PM UTC

baby wrote: post #18

> “Design the infrastructure for a link-shortener.” I'm wondering how to answer that? * Get a short and memorizable url. * When you enter an URL hash it, put it in a hash table and use the hash for the link. > “If I type https://google.com into my browser and press enter, what happens?” How would you guys answer this one? I'm not sure I've enough knowledge to do that. I'd say: * first TLS handshake thanks to RSA to s…

Can anyone cite a good source that provides a fairly detailed answer to the second question? I'm not looking for a hand-waving forum post but an actual answer aimed at someone who doesn't necessarily already know it.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#84

Post by ipince » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

gregors wrote: post #56

"sum of the numbers from 1 to N is O(N^2)" Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but no it isn't. it's O(N) if you have to traverse a list of numbers it's actually constant time if the numbers are sequential.

Note that "sum of the numbers from 1 to N" is not the same as "summing the numbers from 1 to N".

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#85

Post by vladgur » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:10 PM UTC

What this doesnt say is whether the salary was on par with BayArea market or London Market. He did go through the Developer Auction/Hired so that gave him some idea of what companies offer.

I remember when Buffer "open sourced" their salaries and revealed that they were below the market rates in the Bay area(for Buffer's bay area employees).

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#86

Post by MichaelGG » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

petenixey wrote: post #41

temuze wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most interviews don't focus enough on systems. I expect every software engineer to know: - How virtual memory works - How threads work - How TCP works - How ports work - How ethernet works - How DNS works - How a web server works. And so on. A lot of these things are more important than theory (but I think theory is important, too!).

This is purely anecdotal however I've been doing Rails dev (and prior to that Javascript, PHP and even Matlab) for 14 years and I have only a vague grasp how most of that list works. That's not because I'm lazy or scared or even disinterested. I've exhaustively learned everything about anything that what I do involves and how most of what it touches works as well. However the simple truth for me has been that I've ne…

Maybe you've been lucky? Being forced down the stack seems to happen either when you need more performance, or when stuff blows up.

I only drill into a framework or language when someone writes that they're an expert on it. Otherwise, learning a new framework or language might be bumpy but if they have skill then it shouldn't be a problem.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#87

Post by hzay » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:11 PM UTC

steven2012 wrote: post #30

How is your H1B still valid after you lost(?) your job and left the country? H1B is tied to an employer and a specific job, so I don't know how it's still active. Are you sure that your H1B hasn't expired yet? If you try to enter on an expired H1B, you might get banned from entering for 10 years (this happened to my friend 6 months ago) so make sure your immigration status is rock solid.

I have an unexpired H1B visa, but I left that job and the US in November, 2012. Now I've accepted another H1B job and my join date is in April, 2014. If you were counted against the h1b cap in the last 3 (or 6, I'm not sure) years, you will not be counted against the cap again, and you do not have to wait until october (when this year's H1B visas become valid) to enter the US and start your job.

Maybe the OP's situation is the same.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#88

Post by scottm01 » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:12 PM UTC

donretag wrote: post #22

"Flying out to interview with a single company is easy - they pay for the flights and hotel and you use them. Interviewing with 7 companies made for a surprisingly stressful round of negotiation before I’d even arrived, as I tried to spread the cost according to who could most afford it and who was getting the most time with me." When I last was searching for an out-of-state (albeit not California) job, every company…

When relocating from NYC to San Francisco a couple years ago I similarly tried to minimize the number of trips. I tried to be very thorough in phone screens to make sure that they were intersted in me and I was interested in them.

After the first 24 hour trip (leave at night east coast time, fly to SFO, drive south, interview all day, drive back to SFO and fly home) I knew that wasn't going to work (I certainly didn't perform as well on that interview as others).

My next trip was arranged by me with costs split as fairly as I could. I found companies were happy to be flexible and reimbursed me very promptly for their share, but as the article suggests it was a little out of the norms for them and probably harder to arrange then HR or their travel agent doing the "standard package".

I had two companies split the airfare, and others pay for a night hotel each. I didn't chase meal or transportation expenses, though nearly all of them offered to cover them (and generally lunch was part of an interview each day anyways).

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#89

Post by TylerE » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:14 PM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #19

mgkimsal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect when they search for it they're going to find their own published writings/blogs ;) I do think some people at FB/Google need to know this stuff cold, but even that isn't going to be 100% of their engineers.

Agreed. I think there's a tinge of arrogance to the claim that Google/FB/what have you need The Best(tm) while everyone else does not. The reality is that there are some jobs (a small minority) at these companies that require incredibly deep algorithmic knowledge - they really do do some complicated things. But the majority of jobs at TwitGooFace are your run of the mill programming jobs, where the requirement and th…

The thing is, that 0.1% would probably be better off just looking for a Math PhD. I suspect it is much easier to teach a mathematician C (Or Python/Haskell/OCaml/Java) than a programmer real math.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#90

Post by randomdata » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 5:16 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #72

doctorcroc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, but what you described is something that can be googled and quickly learned, whereas all the intangibles op listed should be second-nature.

I highly doubt that someone that does not know what binary search is, that cannot think for a minute and come up with a small implementation, is going to "google and quickly learn" algorithms and the related thinking. The issue isn't if you can write on simple binary search (considering such a search is a intro-to-programming task[1], that should be a given), but if you have an understanding of the topic in general.…

I don't think it is difficult as you make it sound. The most difficult part is finding the term "binary search", but even that is not very difficult. All you have to do is generalize your problem and state it to Google. Binary search will almost invariably come up in the results. It even works for algorithms that are far more obscure.