balloot

A couple things here:

1) I simply don't believe your claim that the number of stolen emails is so high that sending password retrieval links via email is unfeasible. This isn't a new problem that is just faced by hover.com, and most solve it without resorting to plain text passwords.

2) You aren't taking a wide enough view here. By storing and sending plaintext passwords you are doing more than making someone's hover.com account insecure. You are creating a weak link that may reveal a user's password that is used in any number of places. If I were to use hover.com, and someone got access to your DB, they would get my 2nd tier PW and instantly have access to my Facebook account and a number of other things that could cause havoc in my life. This seems obvious, but there is little to no acknowledgement of this fact in the post above.

3) Trust has been lost, as account security is clearly not a priority among your engineers. You may change things, but those changes will be made by someone who thought storing plain text passwords and sending those passwords in email is OK. Even after passwords are no longer sent around via email, who knows what kinds of other security flaws will remain that aren't clearly explained on the corporate blog?

With all this being said, it's great that you came here to acknowledge fault. Best of luck to you, but I have to say that I won't ever be a customer.

What a horribly wrong comment.

First off, nobody chooses their domain registrar because it provides plain text lost passwords instead of something more secure. That is such a silly claim that I would hope you don't actually believe it. However, people will certainly leave a domain registrar based on an insecure password policy. This is especially true of the people who frequent domain registrar services.

Second, you claim the market is failing. It's doing exactly the opposite. You are commenting on a widely read post with hundreds of comments and many thousands of views that is in the process of putting a black mark on this stupid company as we speak. They will get a nontrivial number of emails and cancellations referring to this post, and I guarantee they change their policy within the month. This is exactly how the market is supposed to work.

This entire argument is simply without merit. Google is, and always has been, a filter.

If I type in "Barack Obama", it will not show me links about The Green Bay Packers NFL team. This is not because Google is conspiring to keep me from reading about the Green Bay Packers. It is because it is most likely that I am not looking for Packers links and will not click. The general idea is that Google starts with every single piece of content on the internet and filters to get the content it thinks I am looking for.

Now, this article complains that Google is flawed because it will more likely show some MSNBC over Fox News, or vice versa. The implication here is that you never click on Fox News when it is presented. Because if you did click on Fox News and its ilk from time to time, Google wouldn't start filtering it in the first place. The problem isn't that the search engine creates the "bubble", it is that the user does!

So if the scenario presented in this article offends you, then start changing your behavior and browsing more diverse sites. Otherwise, don't blame Google for noting that you hang out in a very narrow corner of the internet, and presenting you links from that corner. It's just doing its job correctly in that case.

You're definitely right about the competitive advantage thing. You want to create a silly blanket rule? Fine - I'll be happy to interview the guy who's a rockstar engineer but decided to travel Asia for 6 months.

Also no data, but my perception being in the Bay Area startup world is that Asian engineers are way underrepresented in comparison to their numbers in my CS programs (both undergrad and grad). This goes for both Chinese and Indian engineers. I always got the impression that Asian engineers tend to prefer larger companies like Oracle etc.

This has been my experience too. If you specify exactly what you want down to every little detail, Indian teams can write the code. But if anything is left hanging at all, you get results that are subpar.

My take away from working with graduates of Indian universities, both abroad and at home, is that these schools do not impart critical thinking skills as well as they should. This definitely hampers employability for many grads.

Not quite. People simply aren't spending like they did before, and you're at least expected to have some reasonable revenue model. Having worked in the startup world for 7 years now, I've heard plenty of stories of the excess of the late 90's, and it certainly seems we're still quite a ways away from that.

It's a close knit community, and as such there's little to no chance of getting a good investor's attention without proving yourself within the community first. Without any prior connections, I am in a spot where I am quite certain I can get funding when I start my own thing. The best advice I can give is to get out to the Bay Area and work for a startup. If you're good, you'll get noticed by people that can hook you up down the road.

The good news is that it's pretty easy to get a job with a VC-funded startup right now. Good engineers are hard to come by. The hardest part is making the jump!

Yeah I found that part especially wrong too. His article is all about fairness, and it seems especially unfair to me that someone would work and have a huge chunk of compensation deferred with a nontrivial chance the company never pays.

If I work for someone, they need to compensate me right away. This may mean I receive an option grant that is eventually worthless, but at least in that case I would have had an upside to my risk. The IOU has no upside but has the same possibility of worthlessness.

Anyone know of a resource like this where you can take problem sets and/or tests? For the way I learn, it just doesn't stick unless I can do problems and correct my mistakes.

I disagree with the assertion that solving a coding question on a whiteboard is equivalent to asking a surgeon what a scalpel is. The equivalent for an engineer would be asking what an if statement is. Both are simple tools that are used for your job, and interviews should assume you know what they are.

The real equivalent for a surgeon would be to give him a theoretical case of a patient and then ask him to explain how he would solve it. I'm not a surgeon so I have no clue what their interviews are really like, but asking a question like this would seem like a very reasonable thing to do.

As for the guy in the article who whines about employers stubbornly wanting someone who has written code sometime recently, I'm not quite sure why he'd think otherwise. When you hire someone at a PhD's salary you generally don't expect to have to hold their hand for a few months as they get back into learning how to write code. Not to mention anyone I know who is good at writing code writes code for fun in their free time. Would you hire an artist who has a Fine Art degree but hasn't actually drawn anything for years? I think not.