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As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.
I hate Pearons' My Lab & Mastering products. It was a nightmare using the mastering chemistry and having a similar experience with Physics currently. I felt that $80 for just the software is over priced because they want you pay another $50 for the e-coursebook. It's not that horrible of a software on itself but for that price, i think it's bad. It takes a lot of effort to put in the symbols and stuff, its very picky…
E: This is to say nothing of the professors, underpaid teachers, and unpaid TAs who have to put up with this crap too.
Having used TopHat in a couple classes circa 2014-2015, the product is pretty bad. It's main use case is, honestly, attendance. Two anecdotes stick out. The university subsidizes the cost down to $5. Through some technical error, TopHat applied a full discount. One month later, they noticed their mistake and retroactively charged each student $5. I think I'm the only one who complained to their support enough to get…
Roughly the same time frame for me. Get attendance with TopHat. Inevitably, it would fail at least one day a week in some way. Responses for questions were always hit and miss on whether your submission was recorded. Thankfully, the professor revealed at the end that he wouldn't focus so much on correctness and more so on participation.
If it's still anything like that, I wouldn't wish that upon anyone. Frantically making pacts with the devil every day hoping that your answers get accepted is rough for an 8AM class.
As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.
They had him and a bunch of other come in on the same day, and write a 16 page exam.
From what I understand, my friend didn't like the atmosphere and was already overqualified so he accepted another position.
But this left a bad taste in my mouth about their hiring practices - but then again, if they are continuing with this, it probably means that it works for them.
As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.
A friend of mine was selected for a Support Role (that too, a temp one). They had him and a bunch of other come in on the same day, and write a 16 page exam. From what I understand, my friend didn't like the atmosphere and was already overqualified so he accepted another position. But this left a bad taste in my mouth about their hiring practices - but then again, if they are continuing with this, it probably means t…
As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.
what are some of the other more interesting companies/startups in Toronto?
As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.
The one time I reached out to them though, I called it off before we could move forward because I got a promotion, raise and change of role (all of which I was specifically looking for).
I don't know much about the culture - but my understanding is that they've got good compensation & a reasonable work life balance. (EDIT: wow, reading the other comments here, my understanding may have been WAY off)
Actually taking on the textbook publishing industry would be a really big deal IMO. I could imagine a few really interesting disruptions there. Tablet versions of all textbooks via a "netflix" type model?
Maybe like $250/year for access at the university level rather than $600 for that one totally esoteric 30 page title on the mating habits of the African fruit fly.
Students save over the cost of all books, and the edge-titles get brought up.
Maybe that's a bit too Pollyanna an idea. I'm sure there would be an amazing volume-market if you did it at the high-school level.
One digital subscription account, all textbooks. No defacing, no lugging heavy books, access anywhere, always up to date.
If pages and sections were PDF exportable with low-impact DRM it really could be revolutionary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went through the interview process with them several years ago (when they were still called Top Hat Monocle). I basically got very positive feedback from the interview process, until I had to interview with the CEO. Apparently the reason given by the CEO for torpedoing me was that I didn't have enough projects on my Github account so I didn't "love the web" enough. Take from that what you will about their attitude…
Seriously? Not every project can be in a public repo, are all their projects on open repos? Some of us host our own or use different sites because we've been using git longer than github. Also, love the "web". It's called the Internet, are you a tech CEO or not? I love how critical they are because you didn't conform to their specific idea of how coders share their code and communicate. Someone can be pro open source…
But, in general, I think you should consider the other side of the argument. The "problem" is that people without public profiles are competing with people with. And if you're looking at candidates and someone has code online that looks promising after a brief examination, I think it's reasonable to take that into account.
It's not that the other person is lazy or "doesn't love the web".
As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.
I'm the founder/CEO of Top Hat I'd love to hear about your experience and what we can do better - my email is mike at tophat dot com Hiring engineers is one of the most important things we need to get right, so I'd hate to think we're doing such a bad job at it. Really sorry that you've had a bad experience with us
First and foremost, don't arbitrarily block Linux users for web interfaces. McGraw Hill does, or did in the past and so do others. I spent hours contacting their useless support and playing politics with the college to get this changed, to no avail. At first, I could simply change my useragent and sneak in, with everything working well enough. When they 'smartened up' (or whatever) a bit, they effectively kept me out thereafter. This was a very nasty and persistent problem for me and one I won't forget.
Also, I never once found McGraw Hill software helpful. It seemed a cheap, shameful way to employ 'professors' otherwise too inept and uncreative to manage their own coursework and classes. At the undergraduate level, many colleges are becoming odious rackets (by my observations). McGraw Hill et al are indispensable allies here. Be different, be effective, be honest about education. Real education isn't a gravy train.
As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.
what are some of the other more interesting companies/startups in Toronto?
There really are not that many tech companies in Toronto (and that are hiring unless you have 5+ yrs of experience).
Either 1. you have very very early stage startups (that expect you to work for free till they get funded),
2. funded startups that have a short runaway and expect you to work like crazy till they get to the next round of funding (during an interview with a fintech startup - it was mentioned that they expected me to work for ~12+ hrs / day but I'd still get paid for only 8 hrs. But when they scaled up, I'd be "rewarded" for my hustle, grit and commitment".
3. Big companies (Google, Mozilla, etc.) who are looking for quite a lot of devs but seem to be insanely picky about hiring them.
To add to this, there seem to be a lot of devs than jobs (or that companies can go for long without hiring for those open roles).