501–510 of 552 posts
I apologize for being completely off-topic, but I find it completely ridiculous that we have to scroll past half the page to see the next highest-level comment. Are there any plans for implementing collapsible comment threads?
Incidentally, it was precisely that kind of programmers who built Watson at IBM, possibly the most impressive software of the past decade, which is not only both academically and technically challenging, but also brilliantly packaged and marketed and probably very lucrative to boot.
The exact same is true of the Graal team at Oracle, who have made what is probably the biggest breakthrough in compiler technology in the last decade, and might well power many important technologies in the near future (Ruby, server-side JS, R) as well as commercial Oracle products.
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> Here's why: I made well over 400K this year at my job. I am not jumping through hoops killing myself to learn new things I may not even need. My time away from work is too precious to me This is what makes you all talk. You say in other comments that you're a really good programmer and you express concern that people are passing on you. Then you make this post swinging your dick around saying how much you make and…
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Because ML/AI are feature enablers. They make a good product better, but they won't make a product successful. It's a signal that people are more interested in solving technical problems than solving business/product problems.
So Google without good AI would be still as good because of the neat interface? Self driving cars would be just as good without good AI? I get what you mean, and it might be true for a lot of products. But there are also products were good AI is the core.
Likewise with Google; there were search engines long before Google. Hell, Google first appeared as the search technology powering Yahoo! long before they had their own presence. Granted; in this case ML enabled the "killer app" of generating relevant results and allowing ad targeting, but use cases where ML is as critical to the product as Google are rare. More typical are things like Netflix's recommendation engine - the value of the service is in the video library, the recommendation engine is just another avenue for content discovery. It is also being increasingly curated as opposed to automated for promotional reasons.
All of this matters. ML is great, but ML results are often so narrowly scoped that you need to identify your product scope first, then find an ML solution that helps. And even then, at small scale you can often "fake" the impact of ML via manual labor or "doing things that don't scale" (i.e. operating the service via manual labor at a loss with the hopes of adding an AI component to handle that function later in a scalable fashion). If the product doesn't resonate with the market, all the ML in the world won't help it succeed.
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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,…
Have you considered saving up enough money to quit and give yourself 3-6 months to find a job you enjoy?
My Euro-biased perspective is for the job to be something that you don't actively hate doing. The fun stuff(hobbies, family, etc) can be done outside of that.
Well, consider that there are well documented academic studies (that I can't be bothered to look up right now) showing that most hiring processes are no better than throwing darts at a board with regards to retention rate, employee success, and every other measure of success of the HR process. The only thing that is remotely effective are IQ scores, and even then it's only a weak correlation. So regardless of what th…
Not true. Actually work sample tests have a .29 correlation to on the job performance, followed closely by structured interview questions. See: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/
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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.
Yes, but did you hire the recruiter? I think they are usually hired by the companies, or "loyal" to the companies, because that is were the money come from. Would be a fun experiment to hire somebody to sell yourself. Then again, maybe that is what is usually called a "personal coach"?
I cycled through like three recruiters before finding one with a job I was interested in. If you really like working with a particular recruiter, what you might do is look for jobs yourself and then forward those listings on to the recruiter, so he can do his thing. It's not how most recruiters are used to operating, and it's not something I've done, but I think it could work based on my previous experiences.
In my experience, recruiters are far more 'loyal' to job hunters than they are to employers, at least in tech fields. Hunters have nothing but options in who they go through and how they conduct a search. Whereas the requirements of companies are usually fixed and often are completely irrational. It's often easier to work with and influence a job seeker than it is to talk sense into an employer.
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I'm a CS student and most students I know dislike whiteboarding too (and by extension many, if not most, YC startup employees do too). But I'm pretty okay at them now, having had lots of practice. The key advantage for students I think is the ability to have sustained practice over the course of a month (e.g. > 4 onsites over the course of a month), which most students can afford since their schedules are flexible. A…
IF they have you write code, think twice about taking the job. That's an indicator of a junior engineer conducting an interview in a company that didn't care enough to work out a good process. Seriously. I've been working for startups and starting companies for 26 years, and for half that time I've been building teams. I stopped asking people to code a long time ago. If they can't code it will be obvious by their ans…
Anyway, I disagree with you. Though I'm not saying your process is bad.
> "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…
You actually take vacation days for interviews? I either call in sick or come in late. I usually provide a plausible excuse, like having to take my cat to the vet. Or maybe my foot is bothering me, and I had to wait to get an appointment. Just the other week, I ran out for a meeting with a potential new employer in the middle of the day. All I said was I "had to run an errand." If I was less checked out, I would've m…
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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.
>It sounds like you don't live in the Valley. Indeed, I don't. I even asked, in one of my replies, if this was a "Valley" thing. I'm ok with being asked to code or write things out during interviews - that is, if it is pertinent to the job I'll be performing. If I'm expected to do complex DB queries, for example, it is reasonable to see if I can write one. If I've been doing it for years, I should be able to handle s…