Who Y Combinator Companies Want • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#471

Post by johncolanduoni » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:09 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #466

johncolanduoni wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There is more scientific evidence that IQ predicts job performance than for most of the more qualitative criterions that employers use in practice. The source of the illegality of using IQ tests is not legislative (intelligence is not a protected class[1]).…

Reading the Wikipedia link on Griggs it seems to have been about requiring a high school diploma for jobs that didn't need that as a way of keeping blacks out. That seems a different matter to wanting to hire intelligent people to programme?

Yes, that's precisely my point. Griggs (and some later ruling and legislation along the same lines) established when an employer can use a test to evaluate applicants that indirectly discriminates against a protected class. From the article:

> The Supreme Court ruled that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, if such tests disparately impact ethnic minority groups, businesses must demonstrate that such tests are "reasonably related" to the job for which the test is required.

For programmers (as well as many other jobs), IQ (within a certain range) could be borne out as being reasonably related. GP was claiming that it is illegal to administer IQ tests during interviews in the US, which is not true.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#472

Post by kevinschumacher » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:15 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #12

cogware wrote: post #3

"Two large YC companies (both with machine learning teams) have told us that they consider interest in ML a negative signal." I wonder why this is? Since ML/AI are currently "hot" those programmers may be trend followers? Or maybe interest in ML is correlated with being a junior programmer (those that are more senior specialized when ML/AI were not so cool and consequently are in different domains)?

Not at a YC company, but yeah my guess would be that it's hard to get the trend followers on board with other stuff. I've anecdotally seen myself a lot of candidates (esp at the recent-university/recent-MS level) who've taken some ML courses cause it's trendy and sounds interesting but (a) don't have a serious enough interest in it or knowledge of how to apply it well enough to be a good fit on our ML teams and (b) a…

Totally agree with this.

Many candidates I see that have a "strong interest" in machine learning have no idea wtf machine learning really entails; they are listing it as an interest because it is a buzzword and "sounds hard". Most of them have just used scikit-learn once or twice, and have no idea about statistics.

(also not at a YC company)

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#473

Post by Joof » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:21 AM UTC

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…

Valve calls this "beaten wife syndrome" and apparently it often goes away after a while (if not, they fire the new hire).

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#474

Post by imh » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:23 AM UTC

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…

If you're really concerned and want to change that, I had great success with one of those books of practice interview questions. It sounds cheesy, but (obvious in retrospect) simply practicing the reasoning patterns tested in that kind of interview helped me do well in them.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#475

Post by datashovel » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:29 AM UTC

I think the recruiting problem in technology in general is that programmers don't meet and interact with enough different types of programmers in work settings, so they really don't know what they want or what they should be looking for.

I'd suggest everyone start doing this instead:

For anyone who meets basic criteria / filters, hire them at least part time, and put them to work. If they don't make the cut 3 months later (based on some objective criteria) let them go. Then after you've done all your recruiting like this maybe 1-2 years later evaluate what your team consists of.

It's not even a question in my mind. I'm not 99% sure. I'm 100% confident the team will not look like the recruiting team originally envisioned it would look before they started hiring.

EDIT: And I'm 100% confident those teams will consist of an overall better quality of engineer, and putting out higher quality products, than they would've ended up with if they stuck with trying to find what they believe to be the right "culture fit" or some concept of what a "prototypical engineer" is / should be.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#476

Post by Rotten194 » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:45 AM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #425

jcadam wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"I've never had the pleasure of working at a company where this was even attempted, would [present company] provide opportunities in this regard?"

Exactly. If you can't think of a canned answer for that question, there is approximately 0 chance you can navigate the workplace politics of a large defense contractor.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#477

Post by patio11 » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:45 AM UTC

throwaway456789 wrote: post #200

tinco wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sorry to be crude, but it just signals that you're all talk. You say you're a great programmer, and could learn to program in Ruby in a few days, yet in 10 years you've never done it, even though you are apparently applying for jobs that are interested in that skill. If you can't even bother with learning the language that's requested in the advert in a few days, why should a hiring manager be interested in you?…

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 slightly busy this week with the impending launch of Stockfighter and would prefer to not be HN's designated notary public, as I'm just another geek here, but if you want to chat about career stuff my inbox is always open. (Offer good for anybody.)

FWIW I have _zero_ difficulty believing "finance company pays talented programmers $400k" and equally zero difficulty believing "startup folks mystified how this could possibly happen when that programmer hasn't even installed NodeJS."

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#478

Post by jlees » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:47 AM UTC

ammon wrote: post #77

dsugarman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to ask the same question. Harj, is it people with ML/AI interests without experience? Does this also include PHDs? On that note, are Academic Programmers Comp Sci PHDs or from other fields?

Author of the post. We did not distinguish by experience level in the question that we asked about tech / product. But experience is VERY helpful in a job search, so an experienced ML/AI person would almost certainly have more interest than a product person fresh out of school. We've not seen much weight given to CS PhDs. Someone fresh out of a CS PhD program is viewed much like someone out of a BS program. Industry…

Hmm, I think you may find different responses based on experience level with something like ML in particular. I'm a product focused engineer (former PM) with a master's degree and an unfinished PhD in machine learning. I've also been a mentor at a 12-week boot camp where students did machine learning projects, so I totally get the "it's sexy but nobody actually bothers to understand it" argument. But with my experience level (several years real world experience and a Big Name) I think I've had more interest due to my specific background, not less.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#479

Post by frakkingcylons » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:57 AM UTC

henrikschroder wrote: post #449

ammon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I totally agree. We actually asked YC Companies about their fire rates. The fire rate at most of the companies was under 6% (documenting a high false negative rate approach)

Isn't it kind of weird that startup culture is supposed to be all about failing fast, MVP, and pivoting, but when it comes to hiring, it has to be perfect from the start?

Hiring is a critical piece of running a startup. It's one of the few things a startup can control, so hiring choices should be as close to perfect as one can manage. Also, the hiring philosophy at most startups is closer to the 'fail fast' principle than you think. The universal piece of advice is to fire someone quickly when you realize you made a bad hire.

Re: Who Y Combinator Companies Want

#480

Post by mailshanx » Wed, Dec 09, 2015, 5:58 AM UTC

throwaway456789 wrote: post #371

reefoctopus wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of company do you work for? Is it a government contractor? I've known many highly paid people in that line of work that are not fit for startups.

All I'm willing to say here is that I work in financial services. Actually, one of the reasons why I mentioned patio11 above was because it would interesting to talk to him about this kind of stuff given he's also trying to change how tech companies hire talent. I've thought about trying his star fighter project, but it's another example of "invest a lot of time on the side in doing something tangentially related to…

I'd be very grateful if I can talk to you about your journey / career path. Could you shoot me an email (mailshanx at yahoo dot co dot in)? I'll be immensely grateful if do :)