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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

Knowing the average SV interview loop too well, I can't imagine how many bad (for corporate type work) hires growing that fast brings in. A bunch of leetcode-hard optimized engineers being thrown into an organization that just grew from 200 to 1000 people.

If you are part of that 200 original group, you probably have a paycheck for another 5 years just answering tech debt questions

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Now imagine if they opened those jobs to all of us in low cost of living areas instead of demanding in person presence. They'd get better people, and people like me would be getting a decent bump even if we were only getting 50 or 60% of SF salary.

Why would they give you 50 or 60% of SF salary when they could hire someone in a real low cost area then?

Exactly - I feel that folks in the US or Western Europe who are in "low cost areas" are in for a shock, as in many ways they have the worst of all possible combos. Either you're in a big "tech city" where being present (often in person) provides a tangible benefit that your employer is willing to pay for, or your essentially bidding on cost, where someone in a lower-cost country will be able to beat you every time.

I've been in tech for a long time, but this is the first time we've had a significant downturn where remote/videoconferencing options have been so good. In the past it felt like executive cries of "we'll just outsource everything!" always backfired because the communication and management overhead (not to mention varying quality levels) had been extreme. Now, though, with everyone used to remote work, why bother looking to save a few bucks hiring in Wichita when you can save more, and get just as good if not better quality, hiring from Cordoba Argentina?

Because they already hired those people. There aren’t millions of super high skilled software engineers in Argentina or where ever, there are a limited quantity, and they are likely already employed somewhere.

Time Zone, English proficiency, familiar tax and legal regime and cultural affinity? When you get basically the same employee for 50% less, that's really appealing.

The people in the "real low cost area" aren't the same employee - I'm not saying they are less capable, but most companies are afraid of the significant hidden costs when trying to go too cheap this way.

When hiring fast, there's also an element of "we'll find something for you to do", meaning that you're expected to find something yourself. This can lead to people becoming very narrow on something that the business doesn't really value

Or better yet, "We hired you to do some work" but at performance review time "tell us how you have made an impact"

Dear company, I did what you asked me to do. If my work doesn't have adequate impact, that is on you for planning poorly.

thats the meaning of working for engineering-driven company. Engineers are trusted to collaborate among themselves and drive feature roadmap, and to make an impact.

Leadership doesnt trust non-engineers to handhold engineers and spoon feed feature requests, all non-engineer types should be focused on selling/marketing product or customer support

Brilliant! As if a solid feature roadmap doesn't require inputs from sales, marketing or customer support.

what makes you think that engineering-driven cultures ignore or don't ask for input from sales/marketing/customer support?

that's the collaboration part. But the final decision over prioritization of feature X over feature Y and planning is done by engineers, not salesmen

> what makes you think that engineering-driven cultures ignore or don't ask for input from sales/marketing/customer support?

The part where managers who don't partake in these efforts refuse to believe engineering estimates, engineering challenges and unknown unknowns and yet feel empowered to blame engineers in performance reviews.

That's all fine and dandy when you are small, and have a bunch of generalists that will throw themselves at any problem there is.

But when you grow to the point of having a sizeable middle management layer that isolates engineers from one another, by enforcing strict area of interest for each team, you really shouldn't call yourself "engineering driven" anymore. And also, the more you scale, the more specialists you need. Specialists that aren't able, or just aren't willing to move from place to place rapidly

Unless your client base is exclusively the same kind of engineer employed by said company, how could that possibly work well?

Goggle started it, I think it worked well for 1.9 trillion company as gogel

It sounds like a recipe for ruining a product and turning a company into a dysfunctional organisation. Onboarding 800 idle people prepared to reverse linked-lists :-)

Seems like it ends up with lot features that few people asked. And then another bunch that no one asked. And then outright user hostile things like reworking entire UI time and again and somehow it being worse each time...

Well maybe they just have like a lot of linked lists that they need reversed? With that many people working in parallel you could really increase the throughput of the reversing process. Of course this is assuming that you previously hired people to identify and remove any cyclical nodes in those link lists.

Tell me, what's the big O of having the people working in parallel on the reversing? And as a follow-up, can you explain whether it is better if you have a team of n people doing the cycle detection to do it using a system which is eventually consistent or strongly consistent and why?

Discord interview questions are not your typical leetcode problems. Your premise is wrong.

The graded lunch is dumb as fuck.

“Do you play any video games?”

“I’ve been playing a lot of KSP, but I’m not sold on KSP2 yet.”

“Yeah, I don’t play that game.” STRONG REJECT

Never heard of that happening, and neither would you, since you do not see interview feedback. Please don't make up a story.

Bwhahahahahahahahaha

Anonymous shill calls named lived experience a liar. What a time to be alive!

So you did somehow get access to your interview feedback? And you’re sure that your lunch buddy gave you a strong reject and swayed every other interviewer who otherwise gave you a positive review?

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