durga

Google is simply bored while making so much money so comfortably, with an absolutely dominant market position in search. So every few months they need to do these copycat things simply to entertain themselves ;-).

this is amazing. thanks for sharing... His talk on user testing at Stanford is also amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAws7eXItMk

Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman is amazing.

I tried to read this book but never quite understood it. What's it really about?

If you aren't being merely rhetorical just google for Facebook quarterly earnings

Just like how google's predecessors were not keen on search relevance so that users didn't find what they were searching for quickly - leading to them spending more time on the website and increasing ad revenue. We know where that logic led those companies to ;-)

Pretty standard in my opinion. Depending on your negotiability, you're going to get diluted 10-40% in every round. Do that a few times, and you can see where one ends up :)

Amazing, practical advice. Segmenting users into happy and unhappy and then using that to ask for reviews is a really smart idea..

We have been using Amplitude at 12 Labs (getapplause.com) after having tried several analytics platforms, and it's an amazing platform. Large free tier, really intuitive interface, and the tracking is really accurate (we did rigorous testing to verify that).

Yelp is an example of a system where it'd have been easy to be cynical about their system scaling up. It's nowhere near being a perfect system, but I use it frequently and I'm able to repeatedly find great restaurants there. It does work reasonably well at scale for me.

And the whole site is based on people actually spending tens of minutes crafting reviews. Who'd have thought it'd work out as well as it does?

Having worked in enterprise companies, I'd conjecture that enterprise sales guys are not using AL much yet. Just a matter of time though..

Congratulations. Can you share some insights into what works well for attractive engineers, esp on AL?

It's somewhat hard to argue with a generalization like this. It's like saying: you give loans to 100 people meeting some very specific criteria, and the return rate is great. When you scale it to a million, the return rate isn't the same any more.

Of course the return rate won't be the same with 1 million people. But if you are grameen bank (http://www.grameen-info.org/), you institute mechanisms so keep the return rates high. That doesn't mean that there are no defaulters at grameen bank. It just means they were able to work creatively on a problem and actually meet their metrics (maybe sligtly relaxed) at very high scales.

It's non-trivial, but not impossible.

I think a measure of low quality is: do users/participants actually stop using it because of bad quality? It's a point of debate, but for me HN's quality is as good (probably better) that it was several years ago. Just my opinion.

Yes, some of that company information is written with investors in mind, but AL allows you to share that with job candidates. Since that doesn't really contain super-sentitive info, it's almost a no-brainer to share with candidates (at least for us).

That's a really bad hiring strategy. What the company doesn't realize is that they are still paying 80%. If the company flipped their position and added an extra 10% to the 100%, it's conceivable that the motivation could actually make the employee 30% more productive and engaged with making the company successful.

Great companies are not built this way. And sorry to hear you went through this - though you are probably better off not working there.

Just curious: what are some historical examples similar to this?

Fixed now.

Maybe the salaries are actually that high. It's really difficult to hire engineers in the valley. And there are tons and tons of funded startups looking for them.

Unless you're a startup with celebrity status, you might just have to pay up.

You could say that about discussion forums too. But reddit and HN would disagree. Quality has to be managed and maintained. It's plausible to me that by designing the right mechanisms you could scale AL and maintain quality.

If you are saying that density of jobs posted varies by region I totally agree - that sounds reasonable. I don't want to defend other companies postings but that's a somewhat weak generalization to make, esp for Silicon Valley.

Yeah. Case by case.

I'll aks them for you :)

Fixed.

We tested on chrome. That's a lesson.

Very much so. Getting so many high quality applications in such a short time is not disruptive to the recruiting industry. Then what is?

If you're familiar with how recruiters work or the general quality and response on job boards, it's hard to characterize it as anything short of disruptive.

Congrats

AL doesn't really have any control on that. But they could suggest best practices.

One reason we got so many applicants is maybe because our compensation feels fair.

Didn't realize that. What machine are you reading it on? Looked ok on my Mac.

You're right. It's very useful for hiring. But that's not really well known.

in certain instances and with certain managers, boot licking might work. but it's not a good strategy, and doesn't work with good people as much as competence does.

Yes soft skills matter. You do not want to be seen as someone who's more disruptive than productive. You do not want to be 'tolerated'. Being able to persuade is a very important skill in a tech company. It's to be learned, rather than scorned :)