130 karma · joined February 9, 2010
Except, remember, top company also means experience. If you are at a top company, your second-year CS stuff might be a little rusty.
Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job'
Most of these interviews are more like math problems than anything a practical developer would encounter.
Shit, if these interviews were "What do you think of node?" or "What is Go's concurrency model?" I think experienced people would do fine.
Seeing someone as brilliant as Ezra saying he liked my project (Haml was the first thing I ever released) really encouraged me to continue on in OSS development. And, of course, we added iterators to Haml shortly after Ezra suggested it.
Also, Ezra was super helpful when we built m.wikipedia.org using Merb... helping me get everything set up so that we could scale that project to 2 billion pages a month through the three dinky machines I had!
I'm totally surprised and gutted to hear that he's passed. :(
But, I also see how someone who only moved here for a tech job and to be financially comfortable, who previously lived in a very middle-class suburban area, wouldn't be totally thrilled. Fair enough! Lots of good jobs in lots of decent places.
I do want to throw in one small defense item in the middle of SF hating. I didn't move here because of the tech stuff (which I am a part of) or because of the weather. I moved here for the crazy, wild, weird city that SF is without technology. For the hippies, the dropouts, the drag queens, the commies, the environmentalists, the capitalists, the techies, the artists, ... the great mashup of people that make up SF as a big and wild city.
Before anyone moves to SF, they should read "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin. If reading that doesn't make you want to immediately move to SF, then you'd probably do better in some other city with a decent tech scene. Or, as another reader pointed out, you'd probably be happier in the Valley if you are looking for a more NC-feel.
PS: the homeless problems being right next to the rich reminds me of the Settlement Movement of the early 20th century. check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_movement
Also, thanks for the supportive post!
At Moovweb, some of our customer's projects can take 30 seconds just for the Sass to compile for fairly straightforward sites.
Aaron Leung and I have been working on this for a while. I'm the original creator of Sass and Aaron is a badass computer linguist. Hoping to announce some big new features around the end of the year.
Official site is at: http://libsass.org Or, follow us on Twitter for more updates: @hcatlin & @akhleung