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Who Y Combinator Companies Want

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Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#381

Post by steven2012 »

noarchy wrote: post #197
LordHumungous wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made the mistake in the past of overcommitting myself to interviewing with multiple companies at once. The time commitment wasn't the worst part, the real factor I didn't for see is that interviewing is stressful and mentally exhausting. On top of the interview itself, there's the hours of studying you have to put in. It's extremely hard to do while doing your full time job. Now I have a rule that I will intervi…

>On top of the interview itself, there's the hours of studying you have to put in. Yikes, are people really doing this, or feel like they must? If I'm interviewing, I expect to be asked about previous projects, maybe my Github portfolio, and so on. I also expect to be asked how I might approach a given problem within my area of work. I can't imagine studying that - I'm paid to do this stuff every day. So are we talki…

It sounds like you don't live in the Valley.

I interviewed for jobs recently, and I studied my ass off for 6+ weeks, every night doing different coding questions, and spending weekends learning new things and coding algorithms for 6-8 hrs a a day.

It paid off, I got multiple job offers, and am pretty happy with the end result.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#382

Post by cpitman »

ryandrake wrote: post #209
shimon wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is this not true in other professions? Why don't hospitals give preference to surgeons who like to dissect frogs in their spare time or build better scalpels on their garage workbench?

Doctors are already required to perform continuing education beyond their normal work duties (ie still meet their quotas). These requirements have actually been getting more and more onerous over the years. My mother works in primary care, and the house always has medical related magazines and journals all over the place.

So if you are in medicine, you are required to at least go through the motions of keeping up on things.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#383

Post by staunch »

throwaway456789 wrote: post #316
LordHumungous wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should work in finance.

Yes. You should if you want to make a lot of money...

If you only care about money.

BTW, making $400k in finance is not particularly high. Nor is it evidence that you're a great programmer. Finance companies have to pay huge premiums to attract and retain people.

Just about any programmer can make 2x working on Wall Street. Very few good programmers are willing to work for these finance companies. It doesn't seem like you've thought much about why that is.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#384

Post by marshray »

tinco wrote: post #222
throwaway456789 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who ever said I was interviewing for a job? I was commenting on the state of the industry as a whole. Read some of the comments (and the article). The article mentioned that one person who multiple companies thought was the best they have ever seen got rejected from the first company he interviews with because he didn' write tests. Hiring is so subjective. This comment in particular really illustrates the sad state o…

I'm not saying you're all talk, I said you signal you're all talk. If you don't have issues getting a job, why are you posting about the state of hiring here? It makes no sense. You've got replies trying to understand if there's ageism that's dragging you down, but you have a 400k job. edit: I am sorry I offended you. I really did not mean to say that you are all talk, I thought we were talking about how Java program…

Hmm, maybe these "signals" you're reading are not actually good predictors of either skill or marketability.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#385

Post by yoklov »

swalsh wrote: post #330
jcadam wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll use myself as an example -- I work as a programmer in the Defense industry. I've wanted out for years. So every so often I start sending out resumes and going on interviews. After wasting about half of my vacation time on (multiple) rounds of interviews with each prospective employer (that ultimately lead nowhere -- most often, a potential employer who inexplicably stops communicating with me), I give up. Then,…

"whiteboard hazing" there are two types of whiteboarding questions. The kind that's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask (i've had people ask me to develop some simple system... which I think is reasonable, because i'll do that as part of the job) but then there's the solve x algorithm questions. Which ultimately is an exercise in memorization. At this point I've just accepted that i'll have to do that.

Honestly neither are great ways to interview someone. The first is better, sure, but it doesn't actually tell you if they're a good programmer.

The only thing I've found that does work is asking them about problems they've encountered/solved before, and then maybe have them write out something from them on the board. This gives pretty decent insight into their problem solving process.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#386

Post by LordHumungous »

MCRed wrote: post #313
quanticle wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a "Valley" thing. It's a tech. company thing. I've never interviewed in the Bay Area, but pretty much every interview I've had has asked me to write algorithms on a whiteboard. >If someone has years of experience in their field and a strong portfolio Well, the problem is that quite a lot of programmers don't have portfolios outside of work. I certainly don't. I mean, I have a Github, true, but there's not re…

It's not a "Tech company thing" it's a "junior engineer who doesn't know how to interview" thing. It is an indicator of a low quality company. Seriously. This is my opinion after 25 years of interviews. Ask the candidate "Tell me about a project you're passionate about". Find out why. Get them to explain a hard problem they solved. Get them to teach it to you so you understand it. Find the candidate that can do that…

Why not do both?

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#387

Post by jcadam »

engi_nerd wrote: post #349
jcadam wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll use myself as an example -- I work as a programmer in the Defense industry. I've wanted out for years. So every so often I start sending out resumes and going on interviews. After wasting about half of my vacation time on (multiple) rounds of interviews with each prospective employer (that ultimately lead nowhere -- most often, a potential employer who inexplicably stops communicating with me), I give up. Then,…

The defense industry is strange . I've had three jobs in it. In every single interview, the most technical question that anyone ever asked me was, "What do you like to do on the weekends?" And all three jobs have been engineering positions.

My last two jobs (including my current one) have been at smaller defense firms. Both interviews involved some amount of coding (mostly a 'homework' project).

Now, several years ago when I interviewed with a frickin' huge aerospace company who shall remain nameless, my experience was similar to yours. The interview was a panel-style discussion with the hiring manager and several engineers. They had to follow a script given to them by HR and ask every candidate exactly the same questions in exactly the same way. It was.... surreal. At one point I was asked something along the lines of (my memory is a bit hazy here) "Describe a time when workplace diversity significantly contributed to the accomplishment of a challenging project."

"Oookay. Uh... Well.... Uh... So... Hmm...," and so on and so forth.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#388

Post by hoorayimhelping »

alexwebb2 wrote: post #88
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…

Hiring manager here, and after many interviews with enterprise programmers, I do find myself putting more and more of them into the "no" pile right off the bat. The problem is that those candidates, in my experience, tend to throw up way more red flags than others - their code is extremely verbose, they rattle off factory patterns like they're reading a textbook without any inkling what sort of problems they're actua…

>Enterprise programmers usually leave me with the impression that they're heavily indoctrinated into one specific mode of thought, and that they would struggle to break out of it.

That's been my impression as well, both coming from the enterprise and interviewing people from that domain. The most deleterious thing I've noticed is a lot of them, like GP, are convinced they're really good programmers and the reason they can't break out of the Enterprise is because startups are biased against some arbitrary and unimportant part of their identity (like their age), not their actual abilities and attitude. I say this as a guy who's likely half a decade older than a guy in his late 20s who thinks he's too old to work at a startup.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#389

Post by engi_nerd »

jcadam wrote: post #387
engi_nerd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defense industry is strange . I've had three jobs in it. In every single interview, the most technical question that anyone ever asked me was, "What do you like to do on the weekends?" And all three jobs have been engineering positions.

My last two jobs (including my current one) have been at smaller defense firms. Both interviews involved some amount of coding (mostly a 'homework' project). Now, several years ago when I interviewed with a frickin' huge aerospace company who shall remain nameless, my experience was similar to yours. The interview was a panel-style discussion with the hiring manager and several engineers. They had to follow a script…

Ah, yes. I had a bit of a strange experience when interviewing for my current job (at a large, hyphenated aerospace company...probably the same one you interviewed with). Because I knew the hiring manager already, and he knew I could do the job. So it was very much a "Well, tell me what has happened" and "When can you start" kind of interview.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#390

Post by engi_nerd »

meowface wrote: post #375
engi_nerd wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defense industry is strange . I've had three jobs in it. In every single interview, the most technical question that anyone ever asked me was, "What do you like to do on the weekends?" And all three jobs have been engineering positions.

I've only interviewed at one, but yes, it was the exact same for me. They asked me about school projects and times I acted like a "leader". No technical questions whatsoever, other than asking stuff like what programming languages I liked. I left feeling very confused, but after I received the offer, I realized it was basically a grunt work position, despite what the original job listing said.

The DoD are the biggest offenders in my past. They were the "what do you do for fun on the weekends" people. Turns out they are hiring engineers and telling them they will be doing actual engineering, then putting them to work as project managers and job estimators.
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