I disagree with this essay, I have no knowledge in the field that would allow me to argue against this essay, I think this essay lacks brevity, and the moral of the story seems weak.
The Lesson to Unlearn
501–510 of 588 posts
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#502The way we filter candidates into any stream be it college or companies need to change. People are inherently pressurized by capitalistic mindsets and competition that makes them to not question things but just follow the herd mindset of setting up papers and interviews mechanically. We always are chasing the next than solving the now.
Some related thoughts I wrote a while ago on the state of Education https://medium.com/@thallukrish/why-the-why-matters-d7b8170b...
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#503One of my favorite college courses was a computer science course that taught C++. It only had 4 graded components, each worth 25% of your final grade. There were two tests (programming tests with paper and pencil only) and two projects.
It wasn't hard, but it was the fifth most failed course in the university because the tests were extremely difficult to "hack" and the projects were big enough that a student could not rush them at the last minute. There was no homework or attendance to pad grades.
It was one of the few times in my college career that I felt like a professor actually cared whether or not students actually learned about the subject.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an initial phone screen and in this context this a valuable approach. This is one level past fizzbuzz. 'Can you code something past "hello world"?' is what they're looking for. There's nothing worse than an onsite with somebody who just cannot code at all.
The particular example is bad, though, because there’s room for a massive algorithmic insight. There’s an obvious-enough but terribly inefficient way to do it, and a fancy efficient algorithm that either you know or you don’t. If given this question I would middle through the inefficient way, aware that there must be a better algorithm out there that’s eluding me, and I’d probably get a “vaguely pass” mark, but the k…
> because that’s closer to what a real world programming task looks like
To make it even closer, you'd have to have people coming in at various points with contradictory updates to the task, impossible requests, an overbearing managerial diktat, etc.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#505The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…
I think testing algorithmic questions is certainly evil, but it's a necessary evil because all other methods are either too time-consuming or unrealistic. You wouldn't believe in a big company how many clearly unqualified applicants there are, and there has to be some quick and dirty rule to run a filter through them. Perhaps it's the aura of FANG companies that make unqualified applicants try because they have nothi…
> which is basically among the first things schools teach in a CS curriculum
I'm pretty sure that didn't come up until at least my 2nd or 3rd year - which was 25+ years ago (and I've never had to implement it by hand since.) You seem to be biasing your selection criteria towards "new/very recent graduates"?
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#506I know that learning how to hack systems is valuable because that's how I got into YCombinator. I set out specifically to hack the application process and succeeded. It wasn't even that difficult to do. If pg believes what he's saying in this essay, I have two questions: 1. why did he design a testing system that was easily hacked? 2. why does YCombinator itself focus so much on hacking the venture capital system, as…
Companies are this way too. The best companies are all run by OKRs and metrics. But if you peek under the hood, all of it is insanely hackable; you have to be naive to try and actually meet your explicitly stated objectives because that's not how you get promoted. It reminds me of a quote from The Elephant in the Brain. I don't remember the wording exactly, but it's something like "if there is a behavior in a large g…
I really like the steelman interpretation. I suspect that often times, PG's trying to express some sort of core idea, but readers bring their own context with it, and apply it to something else, in this case, YC. And in a different thread, interviews.
But if one were to find oneself in a situation where there are no gatekeeper tests, then how would you go about doing great work? And by being able to see it as an idealism, at least we have a target to shoot for, even if we might fall short in practice.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. Creating a company with users / profitability / growth is. You can get into YC and still fail with your company. And it's desirable for founders and YC to be more interested in building a successful company. When he says, "Make a good product", I think he's trying to convey a core and fundamental principle of business that gets obfuscated by all the…
> It's because he doesn't believe getting into YC is the achievement. But so much of YC felt (and probably does more so now) like you're being judged all the time . Which makes total sense to me, because seeking prestige is so fundamental to human nature. That co-evolved with social cooperation in a virtuous cycle. If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently. The moment…
> If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently
Yes, I agree. I can't tell if he's ever thought about it. I would have thought Jessica, being the social radar, would have picked up on it. Maybe it just wasn't a high order bit on the list of priorities.
I've come to think of PG as the disapproving father I never had.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#508The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…
I think I blame Google, because it was started by a couple of graduate students. I don't know how it was at Stanford, but at Berkeley in Physics there was a series of big honking tests ("Qualifying Exams") that dominated our attention the first two years. You were expected to know all of undergraduate Physics. Fail it, and you're out. Grad students don't know any better. "How do we hire the best people? I know - they…
Stanford physics PhD student here. We actually don't have qualifying exams, but my unpopular opinion is that we should. Physics is a lot of fun to study. The undergraduate and core graduate curriculum show off all its greatest hits. Why not learn that by heart? I spent two years doing that, it pays off every day in research, and I'd have been happy even if it didn't.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a hiring manager at a big company for years. We never did coding tests, and I like to think that I made good choices every time. I kept a high-functioning team together, under fairly humble pay, and stressful, sometimes demoralizing, conditions, for decades. I'm mediocre, at best, at these tests. I don't come from a traditional CS background (started as an EE). I tend to take unusual, hybrid approaches to solvi…
I've often wondered as well why tech companies seem to go out of their way to ignore portfolios. First I thought it's a misguided but honest attempt to make the process look more like a blind meritocracy, to basically turn the interview into a modern version of the Imperial Examination of ancient China. Then I read "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, a book that documents the design process of a minicomputer in…
Portfolio's don't play nicely with NDAs.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
The benefit of a portfolio for picking a designer is that most often the designer was the only designer on a project, therefore the design can be said to theirs, whereas programmers are seldomly the only programmer on a team and the portfolio can be unclear as to what they contributed.
I don’t think that’s true for typical commercial design work. Clearly explaining what you did as part of the creative team is a major element of presenting the portfolio.
I suppose you're right, I made the mistake of thinking the role of designer in web design was the same all around.