Who Y Combinator Companies Want • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#211

Post by _delirium » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:23 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #110

scarmig wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience in the Bay Area, jobs fall into one of three categories: 1) No paid vacation at all 2) 15-25 days of vacation a year 3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2.

2) 15-25 days of vacation a year Really? 25 days is 5 weeks; I feel like the standard for PTO is 10-15 days, and often it's 10 days, but you get bumped up to 15 after you work at a place for a year or two. 3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2. Is that really true? I have very limited first-hand experience; only two of my employers have offered unlimited vacation. For one of them, it was a…

One place I know of that, in an odd way, gives 25 is Intel, at least if you stay a while. You start at 15 days, get bumped to 20 after some years, and then every 7 years you get an 8-week sabbatical on top of that. That adds effectively another ~5.7 days/year, but taken as a bloc.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#212

Post by LordHumungous » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:24 PM UTC

ammon wrote: post #44

chatmasta wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is definitely true. 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. But this fact does nothing to help the good programmers who look bad on paper who everyone is ignoring. This is precisely the problem that we're trying to fix with Triplebyte. We want to make actual technical evaluatio…

>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.

Uh are you sure about that? Google's experience seems to be that academic achievement is not a good predictor. And they know a thing or two about hiring.

http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top...

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#213

Post by ctstover » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:24 PM UTC

api wrote: post #16

> "Second, companies dislike programmers with enterprise backgrounds. Our data shows that companies are less likely to hire programmers coming from Java or C# backgrounds." This I totally understand. Enterprise software is systematically horrible in almost every way: terrible UI/UX, insane degrees of over engineering, high footprint, high cost, and usually at least two to three generations behind on every technologic…

Why would this get down-voted? It's spot on. I know it hurts when it hits close to home folks, I know.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#214

Post by xacaxulu » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:25 PM UTC

shimon wrote: post #166

throwaway456789 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why that was a prerequisite. I program for 60 hours a week. So what if I don't want to do it on the weekends too.

Unfortunately, tinkering in your off-hours is a key way for programmers to keep their skills current. The industry changes rapidly and the skills that were most marketable over the past 10 years are not the same as those that will be most marketable over the next 10. If you're not changing jobs constantly, the rate of tech change at your workplace is unlikely to be enough to keep your skills marketable. So you need t…

I find my singleness/childlessness to be a MAJOR strategic advantage in the modern workplace. Because I can travel more and take on clients outside of the HQ area, I provide a value that other people can't. Still moved into management, but I can also stay on top of new technologies and remain agile.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#215

Post by eropple » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:25 PM UTC

cgh wrote: post #195

eropple wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Before I went into independent consulting, five weeks was a non-negotiable point for me. And I largely went into consulting specifically to take more time off. Life's too short.

That's why I went into consulting as well: six weeks off a year was priceless to me. But I've recently accepted a permanent role again, with less time off than I've had in years, simply because of the huge salary. It's a little humbling to realize that I had a price, after all.

Six weeks? Next year I'm taking twelve. ;) Maybe more. I've always wanted to aimlessly travel a little.

Taking a perm role for a big salary isn't a bad thing, either. That money can be turned into more time off (as long as you don't die first, but that's the gamble, right?). I'd personally rather take it up front while I'm young, but the other way around does work too.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#216

Post by cableshaft » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:26 PM UTC

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…

How does that jive with the statistic in the article that engineers that have worked at companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon pass interviews 30% more of the time. These are all very big companies.

If startups are so opposed to big companies, shouldn't having these on your resume be seen as being negative?

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#217

Post by Fiahil » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:27 PM UTC

taurath wrote: post #184

Fiahil wrote: post #109

> Almost no one passes all their programming interviews. This is true because of randomness in many interview processes (even great people are bad at some things, and an interviewer focusing on this can yield a blocking no). Reading this is somewhat reassuring. I've been over some interviews lately and I had some trouble getting past the tech phone screen. One particular rejection was very frustrating, because I've s…

Not completely random, but by my estimation being self-taught fully 40-60% of engineering organizations (trending higher as they get bigger) care much more deeply about academic CS than they do about whether you're able to ship a product. Those companies are looking for people who fit a mold (a generalized interface) so they can scale their teams out. Startups and smaller companies tend to value people who are flexib…

I agree, I've been far more successful with startups than with bigger organizations. The irony is, I have a Master's degree in software engineering, but I never gave (until now) too much attention to these common O(n) sorting problems. In practice, I would end up using whatever standard library's default sort function and it would be perfectly okay for most use cases.

I wish tech screens didn't rely so much on these exercises; I have limited brain space and I don't like to archive more important stuff.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#218

Post by pcmaffey » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:27 PM UTC

Are you analyzing performance / satisfaction after getting hired? Would be interesting to see distribution across types.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#219

Post by eropple » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:28 PM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #56

dagw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is to my boss "unlimited" might mean 15 days and to me it might mean 4 month. If we come in with wildly different ideas about what is OK, we're both going to end up very unhappy.

Or you could have a straightforward discussion with him/her about your expectations. The real issue with unlimited PTO is that many people are so conflict-adverse (except on the internet) that they cannot initiate basic conversations about how much vacation time they think is reasonable. And instead of taking responsibility for communicating their expectations like adults, they stew in resentment against their employ…

Why are you positioning this like it's the employee's fault? I've had a gig with "unlimited" vacation time where my boss was very quietly stewing that he thought I was taking too much time. Never said anything to me until two weeks before I left.

It is in all cases management's job to set these expectations, and their fault when they're not understood on both ends of things. That's why they're management. (And why "unlimited" policies are stupid.)

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#220

Post by eldavido » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 8:29 PM UTC

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…

I've written a lot of code in both Ruby and C#. Like a parent, I love both of them for completely different reasons.

From a pure language standpoint, Java and C# are _really_ well-designed tools. I call them "Cathedral Languages" after esr's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" -- both were designed by highly-qualified teams of experts who had the privilege of spending years designing them, after already spending collectively many lifetimes doing language design. For examples of what I'm talking about, look at C#'s implementation of generics. Look at the quality of .NET or Java's multi-generational mark-and-sweep garage collector implementations. Ruby has a lot of warts. It's slow. MRI/REE are children's toys compared to the CLR or JVM. Ruby's implementation of coroutines (blocks vs. procs vs. lambdas) is a huge mess, its concurrency story is terrible, it has nothing like .NET's async/await...I could go on, but I feel the point is made.

However...

It's easy, when using .NET and Java, since they're such "batteries-included" languages, to get into the mindset that "I'll never need another tool", which is _manifestly_ untrue. I am a committed polyglot programmer and I am appalled how frequently I encounter "cultural ignorance" within the big enterprise language communities. So I think the issue is more cultural (O'Church writes about this), one of trying to avoid "Java Shop Politics", with the associated ManagerFactorySingletonImpls, needing to write about 100 lines to get a single thing done, etc. The problem is the cultural baggage that many enterprise developers bring with them, not the language itself.

In my current project, I'm doing small-program development in .NET for a Windows LOB project. It's pretty refreshing. I get all the benefits of UNIX-style systems design, i.e.. small composable program elements, services, Git (TFS? are you kidding me?), proper CI/CD, and command-line automation, alongside the maturity of not having to deal with breaking changes on point releases of OSS libs, a thoroughly-documented, consistent BCL (.NET Framework 4.5), high-quality runtime, and generally less "hipster" culture. I'd highly recommend it.