Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#231

Post by JabavuAdams » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:08 AM UTC

vijucat wrote: post #37

mpeg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Do Google or Facebook engineers live in a magical world in which they need to know off the top of their heads the big-O complexity of every possible sort function ever mentioned in an academic paper? I see this argument used time and time again, but it makes no sense to me. Surely they can just search for it when they need it too :)

This is needed more for the people inside than outside. I used to be at a famous hedge fund, and then at banks like Goldman Sachs where this attitude was common : "We hire selectively; only 1 in 750 applications is given an offer". Now how does that make you feel to be an employee? It's an amazing feeling, isn't it? To know you're special, that you're a diamond in the dust. It makes it easier for the employer to then…

Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Me...

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#232

Post by JabavuAdams » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:21 AM UTC

beagle90 wrote: post #57

MichaelTieso wrote: post #25

I never really know what to do during negotiation time. During the first interview, I'm usually asked how much. I'm told that I should always try to push it back for the other person to make the first offer. However in matter how hard I try, they demand that I make the first offer. I don't want to aim too high or too low in fear that I'd lose out on the opportunity.

Always go for the highest they offer. E.g. If you apply for a job 25,000 - 35,000 go for 35k. My thinking behind this is that it shows you're confident in your ability. Remember a lot of companies are big enough to incur an extra 5k of salary in order to get the very best candidate. I'd say the above becomes more true the bigger the company gets... Small companies <10 employees this theory could well breakdown.

Not good advice. This is a noob mistake. Where did that 25-35k range come from? From the other side of the negotiation. So, they've just anchored you to think that 35k is high. What if they would go up to 50? You'd never discover this unless you start outside their starting range.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#233

Post by fayyazkl » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 4:29 AM UTC

megablast wrote: post #220

fayyazkl wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the arguments against the algorithmic type questions - i would add that in my ~16000 hours of professional programming, i have had to worry about O(n) to choosing Hash tables, quiet a lot of times. Although not too often (compared to factors mentioned already), but it depends upon the domain too. I worked in embedded for the most part where the liberty of using frameworks, libraries - is far scarce, so it mat…

> i have had to worry about O(n) to choosing Hash tables, quiet a lot of times. I know, I am constantly concerned about sorting that list of 100 items!

Really? may be you didn't have an actual example so had to get sarcastic about it. So let me put a real scenario here.

How about a gateway device receiving some minor 3-4 millions subscribers traffic and processing like 40-50Gigs per second. I suppose worrying about hashing those ips to access individual records is a waste of time, and a simple list should work? right?

The scenario is not as common as may be building a website. But it a whole industry and a whole bread of programmers exist who do this all day. You should go out more :)

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#234

Post by oinksoft » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 5:48 AM UTC

temuze wrote: post #196

oinksoft wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how the things you know well always happen to be the bare minimum of what you expect from others. Then you learn something else and hopefully realize that yourself of yesteryear still managed to write good, maintainable software, but that your current self would consider the old self a charlatan. Lists like these reflect your own experience. I care more if an engineer can quickly grasp the "big ideas": May…

Yeah, but low level systems stuff isn't anything that's going to change anytime soon. My operating systems professor had been teaching that class for years! If you write code, you should know what your code is running on. You should understand some of the layers of abstraction or at least be curious about them! Even if it's not related to your job, you shouldn't take the magic underneath for granted. I see a big corr…

Sure, but why TCP and not UDP? Why threads and not processes? Why a web server and not a mail server? Why ports instead of sockets? The list you made is a decent baseline for somebody doing web development, but a smart person programming in another domain could easily pick up any of these things.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#235

Post by hostess » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 5:53 AM UTC

vladgur wrote: post #85

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).

I tried Hired and got quite a few offers in this range:

120k-140k 0.10% to .20%

Not really competitive with Google/Apple/FB/Amzn or even a mid-size tech firm.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#236

Post by gammarator » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 5:54 AM 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.

Well, then you missed out on the date rape joke halfway through. Unnecessary additions to an otherwise good article.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#237

Post by trustfundbaby » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 5:58 AM UTC

peter303 wrote: post #55

Starry eye programmers from outside the Bay Area should be forced to watch the Office Space movie for an idea of what Silicon Valley is really like: a gindingly dull suburb.

... ironic since most of that movie was shot in Austin :)

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#238

Post by trustfundbaby » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 5:59 AM UTC

sturadnidge wrote: post #132

I built an app for tracking job applications... amazing how many people just do this on a spreadsheet (as per point 2.3 of the post), which is fine, but I needed an excuse to build something, so http://applyee.com

I was going to build an app for this too but I wound up just using trello for it, works really well.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#239

Post by dinkumthinkum » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 5:59 AM UTC

thedufer wrote: post #222

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your first bullet, naming functions and variables, I think that is important, sure but I think, and this may be blasphemy, that it is a little overblown. Many would make that seem like the most important thing but I think you can be a competent programmer and a valuable without being great at naming. For one, it is very subjective. You may think 10 compound words resulting in 100 character variable name, ala Java…

> Also, I'm not sure I think "technical debt" is a real thing. Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you not familiar with the term, or do you not believe it exists?

Oh, I'm familiar with the term. I tend to not think it is real.

Re: Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search

#240

Post by nbm » Thu, Mar 20, 2014, 6:19 AM UTC

hzay wrote: post #102

gailees wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who'd you go with?

FB

Give me a shout when you're in bootcamp (my unixname is 'nbm'), especially if you're interested in working in infra and want help finding out about and choosing between teams.