exBarrelSpoiler

Stripe is renowned for having a good corporate culture.

#36 is Apple and #37 is Microsoft. I suspect that once you get to that level those happiness ratings spiral into meaninglessness. Especially when the companies involved are huge.

Did he say why he was unhappy?

Just look at the Frightful Five. At least two of them are renowned for having brutal, sometimes abusive, corporate cultures. Three if you include stack ranking-era Microsoft. Having an awful culture doesn't preclude business success.

If only more tech companies can learn from bees for when they do on-boarding!

It's quite fitting that the dating scene in S.F. is often similar to tech interviewing. Play the number games, don't get attached, and move on. Nothing personal, it's just metrics. Is this what cutthroat economic competition does to people?

Curious synergy between this article and the San Jose Mercury story about SF Bay Area commuter traffic now being worse than LA's.

It's been said that's why Google hires the best of the best, only to assign a lot of them to do mundane tasks like A/B testing and the like.

At the very least, they should write less treacly Dear John letters to their former customers

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com

Plenty of time to get cracking at a Feedly to their Google Reader, then.

Heaven save those who have to handle Heidegger.

I thought Code Fights was the current hotness, people have been hyping how they feature real AIs (testbots) created by actual companies or note. Isn't its format at least distinct from the other sites, which are mostly the same Top Coder format of "here is an algorithmic problem, solve it and we'll grade it?"

Maybe try to figure out how and why there can be devs with experience yet no programming ability:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12826364

My theory is that the state of technology is that people are able to use APIs, libraries, and Stack Overflow code to muddle through most business requirements. And if that's true, perhaps the standards of an engineer have shifted? If those people actually did work at those companies for those many years, surely they did something of business value?

Or maybe the questions being asked in technical interviews are no longer germane to the actual day to day experience of coding?

I'm not saying you should necessarily hire those people, but perhaps all of those articles that go "Why can't our programmers program???" should stop pearl-clutching and actually try to figure out why that is.

Which coding challenge website do you prefer? HackerRank, LeetCode, TopCoder, CodeFights, Stockfighter, etc.?

Sounds like corporations should either:

1. Lower their standards and admit that many, many coding positions are API gluing and tinkering with libraries to fulfill business requirements, and not actually about engineering. Software is in a state where you can be a non-engineer and still write performant code, or at least satisfactory work, thanks to the other people who actually write those libraries. Entire successful products, even companies, have been launched on less-than-optimal code.

OR

2. Actually spend time cultivating their engineers, and allow them to gain access to deeper understanding of CS, by giving them the chance to work on non-trivial problems. Maybe stronger standards need to be built into the industry as a whole, engineers should be encouraged to take a regular coding challenge outside of work, to ensure that they still remember their fundamentals. Or at the very least, they should be assigned work by the companies that is more than API gluing.

Either way, it seems unfair to place the entire blame of a candidate who has 10 years of actual development experience for having the wrong type of experience. I'm sorry, but that wrong type of experience could still make deadlines, launch products, and bring value to companies.

Either be open and transparent about your industry requirements, and give engineers a chance to live up to them, or accept that technology has advanced to a point where people can "program" for 10 years without knowing- or remembering- the fundamentals. And at the end of the day, isn't that the abstraction and convenience we're pushing for?

Also remember that there's a difference between a developer who's been working on say Rails apps ten years, and one who's been working on compilers or embedded code.

As far as the examples you brought up: did those candidates actually develop in C for ten years?

They're probably working on some sort of next-gen haptic feedback interface.

$129 is pretty cheap nowadays, you can get a Google Home for that price.

The ad makers are people too, for now. One would assume they would get wise of the stigma of having ads plastered on your face and would try to create commercials in different styles and formats that are more subtle/interesting than the banner ads we're all accustomed to.

Hire both!

Robert Zubrin has been planning for Martian colonization for decades. He's like the Kurzweil for the movement, his Mars Society has been on a quixotic quest. Hopefully SpaceX hires him on as a consultant.

Don't forget The Expanse, which is coming back in January.

Submit to Our Incredible Journey?

Well, for those who love work so much, they'd do so regardless of the extra monetary benefits, would they not?

It's not so hard to defect, when the time comes. And in tech, there has always been some degree of resentment between engineers and the managerial-founder-VC class.

You can spend ten thousand hours doing the first hour of the same work, at a bad job. There's a lot of bullshit positions with poor management that don't exactly lead to programmer development.

Apple's secrecy and critical darling hides a lot. There's a reason why Tony Fadell's Nest was so toxic when it was incorporated into Google.

Maybe, but Apple CEOs have always given out their email addresses since the days of Steve. What is it for, if not for greater accountability?

You'd be surprised what people are willing to put up with, even when they're not literal slaves. Ben Farrell was just the tip of the iceberg. AAPL is just AMZN with better press and intra-organizational warfare that puts Ballmer-era MSFT to shame.