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Who Y Combinator Companies Want

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Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#131

Post by [deleted] »

s_kilk wrote: post #46
ryandrake wrote: post #8

> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…

>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?

[deleted]

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#132

Post by Kluny »

s_kilk wrote: post #46
ryandrake wrote: post #8

> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…

>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?

It's pretty third world out there.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#133

Post by vonmoltke »

ammon wrote: post #112
xiaoma wrote: post #65

So... I worked with over 50 engineers prepping for their first SF/Silicon Valley tech interviews. And I worked at Groupon, interviewed at a bunch of YC companies (including one where I took a job). In my experience pretty much nobody is taking Ben Horowitz's advice from The Hard Thing About Hard Things —hire based on strength instead of a perceived lack of weakness. Instead everyone seems to be looking for candidates…

Well, they sort of are, just not explicitly. The standard process is to have 2 to 5 interviewers, each asking their own question, and pass everyone who get at least one strong yes, and no strong noes. This ends up with a random factor, but ultimately favoring people at least one real strength. The interviewer who sees this strength will fight for them. We've seen people with high skill variance (great at one thing, b…

> no strong noes

This is the problem. It allows one interviewer with a pet peeve to torpedo an otherwise excellent hire. Where I work, whoever ends up on the wrong side of the majority needs to make a case good enough to convince the majority to switch. Being strongly in the minority is not good enough.

The culture of accepting high false negative rates leads to the "no weaknesses" hiring the GP was complaining about.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#134

Post by marme »

lackbeard wrote: post #22

This is interesting data. I liked what Joel Spolsky said a long time ago. Basically that companies should want two types of engineers. 1. You want a few who are experts in the company's tech stack. 2. The bar for everyone else is just that they're smart and they get things done. I guess the core problem is that we don't have a good objective measure of the latter. (Maybe an IQ test for smarts, if that wasn't politica…

IQ tests are not only politically incorrect they are illegal in the US. It is illegal discrimination to make hiring decisions based on IQ scores. You can only use a test that shows those with higher scores perform better at the job. A general IQ test can not be shown to do that. Basically you can not ask questions that test skills that would not be used in the job the candidate is applying for.

You must be able to defend the metric you use for hiring and that it is not discriminatory. If you give an IQ test that is unrelated to the job and say no one below 100 IQ will be hired you must prove that someone with 101 IQ can do the job but someone with 99 IQ can not properly do the job

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#135

Post by pauldelany »

vinceguidry wrote: post #62
ryandrake wrote: post #8

> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…

I found my current job through a recruiter, I think I will find all subsequent jobs through one as well for this reason. Applying for a position is fundamentally an act of sales, so it behooves you to either be a salesman yourself or to hire someone to do it for you. Otherwise you're throwing yourself at the mercy of people's deep-seated fears and prejudices.

True, but also consider that you're the product in this case, and the salesman (in many cases) doesn't care who he makes the sale to. It may be better to first research and shortlist companies that you want to target, and then find a recruiter who has them as a client? Never done that myself, so don't know how practical it might be.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#136

Post by TimPC »

chatmasta wrote: post #28
ryandrake wrote: post #8

> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…

It's not only the applicants who have limited time. The startup founders are also time constrained. You can't found a successful startup if you spend 10+ hours a week interviewing potential employees. I suspect much of the initial bias and "hard line" preferences are due to a startup's unwillingness to spend inordinate amounts of time interviewing candidates to find that one diamond in the rough. Imagine 4 of every 1…

Many successful people who've built and exited massive start-ups have suggested that it's worthwhile on the start-up side to spend 25% of your time on hiring when you're actually hiring as so you can easily get above 10 hrs a week given a full time role on this and have that be a good result. Optimizing to minimize the cost of hiring an early engineer is definitely solving the wrong problem, given the early engineers are almost as crucial to success as founders. Unfortunately, hit rate is also often the wrong variable from the company end: if you interview an academic programmer to confirm their product programming skills you generally get someone better with a larger skill set than if you focus in the category you want for the skills you want (early-stage you generally want breadth over depth for many roles). It clearly sucks for people on the receiving end of the low hit rate interview, but I'd caution start-ups against optimizing their process for the wrong things.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#137

Post by whatever_dude »

s_kilk wrote: post #46
ryandrake wrote: post #8

> "We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost." I suspect in addition to not having the "stomach" for an unlimited number of interviews, they don't have the vacation days to burn for them. Let's say you are working already and have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard). With these ridiculous all-day…

>> have 10 days a year vacation (pretty standard) Wait, what? Is it really this bad in the States?

Yes it is. In most companies it's common to start with 10 days and then increase by 5 days with every few years of experience. Some do more; starting with 15 days is generous.

But also remember it's business days. So 10 days = 2 weeks.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#139

Post by vonmoltke »

dmoy wrote: post #126
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. Imagine how mistaken that would sound if you substitute "startup founders" for "programmers." The reason you feel company filters are anything except random noise is personal bias. It's disheartening that your article notices that company pref…

How do you do a work-hire test for someone who already has a job, and is not allowed to work on another company's stuff?

> The problem you're working on can be fake

I'm assuming if it was a fake problem, it wouldn't be something the other company could actually use.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#140

Post by silverpikezero »

ammon wrote: post #85
throwaway456789 wrote: post #63

I'm an "enterprise" programmer because I write in Java... I'm also older than the average age of a start-up employee (late twenties). I've never written a line of Ruby, and I've never written object oriented JavaScript or used Node.js. However, I'm a really good programmer. I just happen to write the majority of my code in Java. If tomorrow we decided to use a new language, I could pick it up in a few days... I have…

Author here. Ageism is real, and we'll be analyzing it in a future post. But in this case I don't think it's ageism. I think it's big-company-ism. Startups define themselves in opposition to big companies, and take signs of big company culture as strong negatives (which may or may not be justified statistically, I honestly don't know). But there are great programmers at big companies in any case, and startups should…

Startups should realize that this is a thoroughly idiotic notion, and should abandon it ASAP. The one thing that large software companies do well is SHIP PRODUCTS. A good software engineer is someone who can ship a product, even if its ill-defined or not feature-complete. This is a virtue. Small companies, especially startups, have a horrible track record for shipping software that in any way resembles its product plan.

At my startup, candidates from large companies are immediately prioritized in the hiring queue. This strategy has always paid off; there is a high correlation between large company experience and good software engineering practices.

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