You can literally work on software for any industry, company or government in the world. I would think you would have some sort of preference. At the least you should be interested enough in the place your are interviewing at to find out what they do and and then tell them you are interested in working on that. Otherwise you just come off as a mercenary or desperate.
Wow I am shocked to see how little money Balanced raised. Considering their pedigree and name recognition I would have expected a lot more. They must have either not been interested in raising funds or had really bad financials that scared off any Series A prospects. Hopefully we get some kind of post-mortem once the dust has settled.
It's an interesting and complex subject but ultimately defining what makes a "true" nerd is a never ending debate. My professor in college was incredulous when he found out that I, a CS major, never watched Star Trek. The nerve!
This can work well if the person currently functions as a freelance consultant or is unemployed but has worked as a consultant in the past. Also, ideally you have a specific small project for them to work on. Finally, you have to be able to pay them the market rate. If all of that fits (rare) then it's a great choice.
No side projects even? I used to be one one of those big corporate programmers with no side projects to show off and while I was decently good I wouldn't hire my old self to work on my startup. Also, an interesting idea - ask candidates to find any 3 unanswered questions on stack overflow and answer them. It would at least provide a useful exercise for the candidate and the community at large.
I've been seeing the same basic topic come to the top of hacker news over and over. I thought the with the advent of GitHub, Stack Overflow and easily sharable web and app projects that this would make vetting software developers easier. Are these resources not being utilized at all in the hiring process? Am I to believe that a software developer with several years of professional experience, references, and some sort of work portfolio can't code at all? I don't get it.
I think the key insight in this article is "A recommendation engine is a feature (not a product)". As a side project I built an e-commerce recommendation engine part time over 2-3 months. I didn't want to build out a massive product database and I didn't want to ask users to fill out lengthy profiles so I leveraged existing product and social APIs to handle both. It wasn't very difficult to get something that worked reasonably well - though competing solutions were mostly far worse so maybe I'm selling myself short. In the end it was decently well received (had some press, good user feedback, thousands of initial users) but it failed as a standalone business. Cost of customer acquisition vs customer lifetime value just wasn't there. I've seen no one else succeed in the space so I think the net takeaway is what I referenced at the top - it's really more of a feature than a standalone product. Building the world's best recommendation engine is really just a piece of the puzzle.
I can relate to this comment and the others that replied to my original. I guess my overall view is that far too much time is wasted and it is mostly preventable. As a senior developer I have a detailed LinkedIn profile, a few recommendations, some side businesses and startups I have been involved in, a portfolio website showing off websites and apps I've built, a tech focused blog, a GitHub and a Stack Overflow. Right there if you just spent 15 minutes reviewing my profile you should have a pretty good picture of who I am and what I am capable of. If you need to see a 3 hour coding exam and have 8 hours of interviews on top of that I think you are just not decisive. I think a lot of it is people rationalizing with themselves that having gone through a "thorough" interview process of tons of candidates and lots of time that they somehow found the best candidate when it's a lot of noise IMO.
My biggest issue with the work sample tests is the companies that waste your time with them. I've had 3 cases over the years where I was asked to work on something, I did it quickly, with quality and exceeded the specs and I was still turned down at that point (I confirmed that the code was good in at least 2 of the cases). As a senior technical person at this point in my career I simply have very little stomach for wasting time. Have at it young'ins.
How did the rating agencies come up with their AAA ratings on CDOs comprised of mostly subprime debt? They used historical models aka trends that basically assumed that housing prices never went down on a national basis. Throw a bunch of subprime MBS from different regions together into a CDO and bam our model spits out a AAA rating. It was based on a historical model aka trend. I don't dispute any of your other details.
You could enforce it in other ways. Require a longer holding period or even plain increasing the transaction fees would knock out high frequency trading.
See my other answer here but basically I see all of these things as the same: find a trend, abstract it with algorithms/risk models, exploit that trend and then walk away when the trend inevitably breaks.
Replace "stock market" with "MBS/CDO type derivatives" and "computer trading algorithms" with "risk models" and you will see the similarities. I probably should have been more clear but the idea is that all of the financial markets work basically the same way: find a trend, abstract it with algorithms/risk models, exploit that trend and then walk away when the trend inevitably breaks. Every 10 years we keep having "10,000 year floods" according to the latest whiz-bang model/algorithm. It's all the same thing in a different variety.
"The biggest gains came at funds that practiced a "trend following" strategy. Those managers—who use computer models to bet on price movements in either direction and often perform best when clear patterns emerge over several months"
This is headed for 2008 all over again because we've learned nothing. These algorithms rack up consistent wins for years on end, the markets rise and rise, everyone gets bonuses and all is great. Then the market turns on a dime, all the computer algorithms break at once because chaos theory takes over and your trend algorithms are useless. Liquidity disappears in an instant and the the federal reserve steps in and gives away free money to the banks until the banks become solvent again. This will continue until the parasite kills the host.
Discussing almost anything highly technical over the phone is usually a disaster. When's the last time you solved a production problem without reference materials over the phone? Sounds hard right? Whiteboards are a crap shoot - we can all come up with lots of problems that are difficult to whip up without any reference materials but what's the point? Neither method reflects how anyone actually does their job so get rid of it.
Every skill takes time to develop yet most people think they are good at giving interviews with zero experience, research, experimentation or methodology. Allow a typical junior employee to start interviewing candidates and it will go right to their head as they are given their first taste of power over others in a professional setting. It takes time to learn how to interview properly, figure out the specific attributes you want to screen for a particular role, remove your own personal biases and plain get over the fact that you have the power over someone else's career for probably no good reason.
My philosophy on interviewing is that as an interviewer you want to avoid screening for anything that is not reflective of the actual job duties and to also avoid anything that the candidate is expecting to be asked. If you ask typical programming questions then you are likely screening for candidates that have the most time to prepare for interviews which screens out the lazy but also screens out the no-nonsense doesn't like to waste time types. Ask questions that get to the core of what interests them and figure out if they will be motivated enough to learn what they need to get the job done. Then get back to them quickly!
Nonsense. You are coming up with excuses for your own lot in life. Many people were given even better opportunities than Gates and had limited success. The guy is a genius, took huge risks, worked hard and had good fortune.
Moore first made his claim in 1965. Assuming we have at least 5 more years wringing out efficiencies with the move to 10nm that's 55 years of continuous innovation. It's mind boggling. Maybe there will be a gap until the next major breakthrough but an entirely new process will come along eventually.
I was told early in my career that I could use to ask for help more often. I think that was actually good advice for me since the other team members all had 10+ years experience so I obviously didn't know everything at 23. To each his own I guess. And I can't believe that developers self reference themselves or others in the field as "rockstars" - I honestly thought that was a layman's term.
I would say Microsoft has more in common with 1990 IBM i.e. huge entrenched profitable companies that missed the biggest shift in technology in the previous decade that they should have dominated (IBM: PCs, Microsoft: mobile). I still don't think people appreciate just how much Microsoft blew it by not owning the dominant mobile OS.
"Market segmentation by introducing lower-cost models is nothing new."
That's not how Apple became the most profitable company in the world. The first thing Jobs did when he returned to Apple was cut out all of the excess product lines.
I didn't say they only design the shell for everything - the shell was the only change for the iPhone 5C so for that particular product that is all they did. It's not even about how technical the design team is, it's that they are making the majority of the decisions and hold clout over other teams within the company.
As a software developer I am of course biased but I feel like Ive wielding so much control without a strong technical counterpart is a mistake. The first evidence of this in my mind was the iPhone 5C - a cute shell around 1 year old technology. It's too early to tell but I feel like the Apple Watch has similarities - cute designs and features without compelling utility or really any sort of technical innovation, which is surprising. You also see this in the lack of focus on stable software throughout Apple's ecosystem which I honestly think has gotten a lot worse in the past year. I can appreciate what Apple has done for industrial design, user interfaces, and heck even in packaging, but there is a tipping point.
It's interesting to examine which historical figures have been remembered and which have been forgotten. Money is part of it but not the full story. Political leaders during times of chaos are remembered. Artists are remembered, many of which died penniless. Mass murderers are remembered. I think in general people just need a simple story to attach to a single person to remember them. Building a computer and making a billion dollars is a simple story. Walking on the moon is a simple story. Designing packet switching protocols is not. It's not a tragic situation it's just interesting to note.