jchonphoenix

I think most people misunderstand what an acquihire actually entails, so they get up in arms over a statement like this.

It's not uncommon for even male founders to not join on in an acquihire. In an acquihire, the only thing the acquiring company cares about are specific talents/skill sets. The product, business, and assets of the startup are worthless to the acquirer. It looks like in this case, Google was only looking for the engineering talent and nothing else. There's no sexism here on Google's part because they're doing exactly what's best for Google. Gender isn't part of this equation for them.

Now, the lines on the startup's side are less clear cut, but if this was a failing startup, this would not be sexism, but a clean way out for people to get jobs. If it wasn't, it just sounds to me like she cofounded a startup with people she shouldn't have trusted. Men make that mistake all the time.

I'm pretty certain this is only somewhat true. Most companies I know (including almost all YC companies) would still need a "Yahoo premium" to go to Yahoo.

There's a surprising number of negative comments here. Have any of you ever started a company and been involved in an acquisition process from the front lines?

If not, I'd suggest being a little more careful with your wording. Your statements come across as worse than naive--they come across as petty, with a tinge of idiocy. I'd just make sure I was more informed about these decisions/processes before making commentary on them.

I've worked at similarly (or perhaps even better regarded) companies with lunch interviews. They always say the same thing.

I've definitely seen the lunch interviewer pulled into the conversation. When the process isn't supremely formal, lines get blurred. Being paranoid is probably a smart thing to do.

In the particular case of Everpix, I'm relatively certain I can guess who these VC funds are and who that competitor is. Given this information, it's not just some empty excuse for a VC to bow out.

Stanford and MIT are both not Ivy League schools... But your point is noted.

Except, I don't believe a minute of this. I have sisters and cousins.

This is blowing things far out of proportion. It's like watching Mean Girls and then assuming all of high school is like that for every single student.

Not to be mean, but in the dev circles in the valley, I tend to hear the exact opposite. Just what I've gathered from the rumor mill.

Hey tfinch, check out http://koalitycode.com (founder here). One of our huge value adds is flexibility and we give you sudo access to the machines you use.

I'd love to see if we match your use case and how we can improve. Can you shoot me an email (in my user info) with your thoughts?

Thanks!

They don't come from afar. As an ex-dev, I can actually say that most of them come from across the street (Stanford). When I was there, the heaviest represented schools were Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, and Cornell.

And no, at least on the core dev team, I can't imagine any of them ever even considering joining the NSA. We did what we did because it was fun. NSA sounds too corporate.

Full Disclosure: I'm ex-Palantir Government Dev

Ok guys. Let's use Occam's Razor for a second. What's more likely?

1) A company that purposefully goes around blackmailing people to make deals, uses underhanded tactics, and spies on the people, yet is able to hire amazingly talented (and opinionated supporters of the EFF) engineers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.

Or

2)a company that builds a data analytics platform that is useful to a lot of people and honestly believes they're helping the world by finding missing children, tracking terrorism, and fighting fraud.

Although this article is just ludicrous. All because I think up the same domain name as someone else doesn't mean I hacked into their computer and stole their code.

A little off topic, but I think people need to realize that when someone says they're a programmer, all they mean is that they write code.

I know a lot of my friends (especially the ones in tech heavy cultures like Google, Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox) easily forget that when someone says "I'm a software engineer," they mean they write code. It doesn't mean they've gone through the same coursework, can reduce 3-SAT to everyday problems, form intricate algorithms, or have written their own memory allocator.

Keeping this in mind might make conversations go smoother.

Shoot me an email. I'll run you through our Interview process and give you feedback. Who knows, you might get a fun job out of this too :-)

The one that will produce more value for my company. In many cases, that person is person A.

I don't care if you were pampered and that's why you got A's. If you have the necessary knowledge and are a hard worker, you have my vote.

The list doesn't seem that accurate. Some of these "VCs" are actually angel groups that don't do Series A, other than follow ons (Webb Investment Network).

Others have started Angel funds (Ron Conway) and no longer invest personally.

Have you done it before? Just curious what you're experience was. I've always found that the angel who's willing to put in a lot of time (not just at the inflection points a la every angel group) is really hard to find.

A good metric on this is the number of investments they've made. More than 4 and you're probably not getting any time.

Logo is a terrible concept. I tried it at school as a little kid and it almost turned me off to programming because of how stupid it was

Ilya and Aaron's situations are very different.

Aaron was harassed and harangued by an overzealous attorney. His suicide is, in a sense, a direct consequence of another's actions. The actions that led to his trial also are laced with strong moral beliefs that seem to conflict with the law, leading me to believe that perhaps he knew his actions would cause him to become a martyr.

Ilya on the other hand, is a textbook suicide case. That's not to diminish the significance of his death, but to point to the fact that there are two factors at play here. One is the tragedy of young aspiring minds who take their own lives. The other, of an uncalibrated and overreaching legal system.

I believe Aaron would wish his legacy and his death to help impact and reform the latter.

Depends on the university you go to.

Also, most kids go to college with the mindset that they're there to have fun. If people actually attended college with the intent of getting a job and didn't major in basket weaving (art history majors I'm looking at you) then this figure would be much more likely.

The course is copied from CMU's. I have a friend who TAed the first iteration of the MIT course and was a former 251 ta @ CMU. The goal of the mit course was to offer their students the same experience as CMU's class because it was highly successful and they relied heavily on my friend's experiences as a tax at cmu to build the course.

In general, I view this as a good thing. Universities should take the best material they can find and offer them to students even if it's not original.

The course is copied from CMU's. I have a friend who TAed the first iteration of the MIT course and was a former 251 ta @ CMU. The goal of the mit course was to offer their students the same experience as CMU's class because it was highly successful and they relied heavily on my friend's experiences as a ta at cmu to build the course.

In general, I view this as a good thing. Universities should take the best material they can find and offer them to students even if it's not original.

My first reaction to this was "Puppet must either have horrible documentation or be difficult to pick up."

I mainly gleaned this from him correcting himself about puppet all the time and took this to mean he had a harder time picking up puppet.

What I'm getting from this article:

"It's not fair that asians get in because they work harder and try harder. We shouldn't let hard work be a determining factor."

But who knows, I'm asian so I'm biased. I had to work my ass off for things while other people went out, partied, slept in, went to bars and hung out with friends. I studied for my standardized tests by going to the local Borders and sitting there for hours without paying for the book but I guess not everyone is that creative.

I'm not really sure this article explains any myths about hashtables at all.

Aren't all of these statements obvious is you actually understand what a hashtable is?

Even though it is one of the first things a Computer Scientist learns, quicksort is still one of the most beautiful algorithms ever.

It's quirky in the sense that it is a randomized algorithm. It's analysis is beautifully simple once understood, but painfully non-trivial. There are multiple ways to analyze the running time of quicksort (dartboard, recurrence, etc) and its ideas apply to many other algorithms.

Ha, I actually use a similar question in phone screens. Its surprising how many people can tell you how to do fibonacci and can't invert it.

I generally believe interview questions aren't a terrible way to screen people. There are, however, stupid questions and good ones. Ones that test how people think or how good they are at designing/accomplishing tasks are good. Ones that test stupid syntactic knowledge or language specific things are dumb.

Wow, this got picked up on HN too.

My roommate wrote this last year as a joke for CMU students. It's a simple script that pulls from a pre selected discrete set.

Author is Alan Pierce btw.

I assume you're referring to starting their own startups or joining one correct?

While I agree there likely is some confirmation bias, I can at least say that I included those who joined startups.

The sad part is, there are very few of them. When I was thinking of starting a startup at CMU, I was completely blown away by how little people there cared about taking risks. In 2010, the only startups people knew about were really Palantir and Facebook. In 2012, people at CMU actually still buy the tagline that Facebook is a startup.

It would be great if someone could change this, but as of right now, I'm relatively certain there is less confirmation bias than you think.

I'm actually quite sure you'll find much more diversity from Stanford on that front.

CMU students tend to be a little clueless on the job search side of things, so they tend to stick to firms that are well known or well respected because they're safe.