Reminds me of the puzzling: "If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct? A) 25% B) 50% C) 0% D) 25%"
That's really clever.
YC startups that are hiring
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#42hiring or not, this is a great way to browse YC startups
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in 2005 when I started Loopt I went all in with Windows Server, .NET, and SQL Server. I already knew the tooling[1]. No regrets. It never held us back - product issues did. Now I'm using it again, for the same reasons. I already know it, I'm pretty quick with it, it's predictable, and it works. I'm also old school and will probably deploy physical servers when the time comes. Look at StackOverflow - their whole…
I've shipped production code developed in Mono on OS X, deployed to both Windows and Linux. I don't think that should be a huge roadblock moving forward. MS itself is trying to foster this (for the benefit of selling more Azure services presumably) with the next version of ASP.net which will run on basically everything. Re the expense of doing it the MS way, Microsoft will gladly throw free/cheap software and service…
Also, if you are a YC company, you can get $500k in credits from Azure.
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in 2005 when I started Loopt I went all in with Windows Server, .NET, and SQL Server. I already knew the tooling[1]. No regrets. It never held us back - product issues did. Now I'm using it again, for the same reasons. I already know it, I'm pretty quick with it, it's predictable, and it works. I'm also old school and will probably deploy physical servers when the time comes. Look at StackOverflow - their whole…
> The tooling is expensive (Pro, Ultimate) or crippled (Express). Visual Studio Community 2013 (and 2015) are completely free and nearly fully featured. Gone are the days of Express being a super lightweight VS IDE. I used to buy Pro for side work but now I can get by with Community.
the Windows Server Licenses are the expensive part
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've shipped production code developed in Mono on OS X, deployed to both Windows and Linux. I don't think that should be a huge roadblock moving forward. MS itself is trying to foster this (for the benefit of selling more Azure services presumably) with the next version of ASP.net which will run on basically everything. Re the expense of doing it the MS way, Microsoft will gladly throw free/cheap software and service…
Also, if you are a YC company, you can get $500k in credits from Azure.
On which, you can run Linux.
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The tooling is expensive (Pro, Ultimate) or crippled (Express). Visual Studio Community 2013 (and 2015) are completely free and nearly fully featured. Gone are the days of Express being a super lightweight VS IDE. I used to buy Pro for side work but now I can get by with Community.
the Windows Server Licenses are the expensive part
If you're using a cloud hosting, such as AWS EC2, the added expense of Windows is around 30%. Nothing terribly expensive about that.
And you also get credits from Bizspak, that could be used to apply to offset AWS licensing.
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#47Not that it matters that much but I notice there's no .NET or C# on the "Technology Used" list. Is there really not a single YC company that uses the .NET stack? I'm not surprised that there's a strong bias toward open source technologies among these companies, but given how widely .NET used elsewhere in the enterprise world I find it pretty remarkable NONE of those companies decided to go with a MS stack.
Microsoft's technology stack doesn't seem to be popular with startups and young technology companies, but I don't think that's because of .net itself, but rather because of the barriers presented by the rest of the Microsoft stack. Probably a major driver is the various virtualization and cloud-driven technologies not fitting real well with Microsoft's server environment. Startups want scalable architectures that all…
>If Microsoft did offer something in that arena, I'd expect the licensing costs to be obnoxious.
Nope. First, both AWS and Azure offer Windows hosting. Second, licensing costs on AWS are around 30% markup on top of same Linux hardware. Hardly "obnoxious".
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
the Windows Server Licenses are the expensive part
If you're using a cloud hosting, such as AWS EC2, the added expense of Windows is around 30%. Nothing terribly expensive about that. And you also get credits from Bizspak, that could be used to apply to offset AWS licensing.
But god help you if you need SQL server beyond what express provides. (Web is OK but expensive, "standard" or enterprise? Now that hurts)
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep - for all their talk about how traditional interviewing is broken, if you go through their screening process, you'll discover that it devolves into the same old puzzles and algorithms questions you get in any other interview. The result being that a terrible software engineer who had spent some time memorizing the highlights of CLRS would do much better on a TripleByte interview than a good software engineer who…
I've been through the process and it wasn't careercup style puzzle questions. It was mostly practical things or things related to CS interests (programming a game) and they let you google documentation and use any tool you would normally use.
I have also done it. None of the things you mentioned predict success. In fact, very little aside from basic hygiene is likely to predict success, which is what renders these purportedly meritocratic hiring processes so out of touch with reality.
Re: YC startups that are hiring
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been through the process and it wasn't careercup style puzzle questions. It was mostly practical things or things related to CS interests (programming a game) and they let you google documentation and use any tool you would normally use.
I have also done it. None of the things you mentioned predict success. In fact, very little aside from basic hygiene is likely to predict success, which is what renders these purportedly meritocratic hiring processes so out of touch with reality.
How would you design an interview process ?