'That thing you're doing, you're much better at it than you realise'
To which I hope my younger self would retort
'That thing you're doing, you're not half as good at it as you think you are'
875 karma · joined January 21, 2010
http://fragile.org.uk/
email: neil@ the domain above
To which I hope my younger self would retort
'That thing you're doing, you're not half as good at it as you think you are'
Lumi is looking for an experienced Mobile Designer to shape our Android App (lumi news). We're a startup based in Farringdon, brought to you by the folks who made Last.fm
The role requires hands-on visual design (pixel magic) on mobile. We need your ability to help shape and define our product. Experience in doing quick mocks, Android design, and designing for small real estate very useful. Your designs are likely beautiful and cool!
https://lumi.do/about/jobs/design-leader https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=done.lumi
Join Lumi and help us change the way people discover content. Brought to you by the people who started Last.fm.
We're looking for someone to take technical ownership for mobile at Lumi, initially this means a greenfield Android app.
For information here's the spec https://lumi.do/about/jobs/app-developer
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot about something.
Reasons to be interested in Lumi
* Founders with recognised pedigree
* A small but extremely strong engineering team
* A really cool product that /could/ go onto take over the world :-)
* Genuinely hard and interesting machine learning/data retrieval problems requiring original research.
Either launch a CV at jobs@lumi.do, or get in touch personally if you'd like to chat first (details in my profile)
Join Lumi and help us change the way people discover content. Brought to you by the people who started Last.fm.
We're looking for someone to take technical ownership for mobile at Lumi, initially this means a greenfield Android app. For information here's the spec https://lumi.do/about/jobs/app-developer
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot about something.
Reasons to be interested in Lumi
* Founders with recognised pedigree
* A small but extremely strong engineering team
* Recently funded, about to grow rapidly - a great time to join
* A really cool product that /could/ go onto take over the world :-)
* Genuinely hard and interesting machine learning/data retrieval problems requiring original research.
Either launch a CV at jobs@lumi.do, or get in touch personally if you'd like to chat first. https://lumi.do/about/jobs
Join Lumi and help us change the way people discover content. Brought to you by the people who started Last.fm.
We're looking for fine folk to work on
* Android and iOS apps
* Our Recommendation Engine, both developers and data scientists
* Our Django app
* Backend services and middleware
We are also looking for a Product Manager
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot about something.
Reasons to be interested in Lumi
* Founders with recognised pedigree
* A small but extremely strong engineering team
* Recently funded, about to grow rapidly - a great time to join
* A really cool product that /could/ go onto take over the world :-)
* Genuinely hard and interesting machine learning/data retrieval problems requiring original research.
Either launch a CV at jobs@lumi.do, or get in touch personally if you'd like to chat first.
Join Lumi and help us change the way the world discovers content. Brought to you by the people who started Last.fm.
Lumi allows you to anonymously and securely record the pages you visit to let Lumi know what you’re interested in. It finds popular webpages among all users and makes suggestions of pages that will interest you.
We're looking for fine folk to work on
* Our frontend
* Backend services and middleware
* Android/iOS apps
* Our Recommendation Engine, both developers and data scientists
We are also looking for * A Product Lead
* A Design Lead
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot of something.
Reasons to be interested in Lumi
* Founders with recognised pedigree
* A small but extremely strong engineering team
* With funding imminent, about to grow rapidly - a great time to join
* A really cool product that /could/ go onto take over the world :-)
* Genuinely hard and interesting machine learning/data retrieval problems.
Either launch a CV at jobs@lumi.do, or get in touch personally if you'd like to chat first. https://lumi.do/about/jobs
Join Lumi and help us change the way the world discovers content. Brought to you by the people who started Last.fm.
Lumi allows you to anonymously and securely record the pages you visit to let Lumi know what you’re interested in. It finds popular webpages among all users and makes suggestions of pages that will interest you.
We're looking for fine folk to work on
* Our Django app
* Backend services and middleware
* Android/iOS apps
* Our Recommendation Engine, both developers and data scientists
We are also looking for
* A Product Lead
* A Design Lead
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot of something.
Reasons to be interested in Lumi
* Founders with recognised pedigree
* A small but extremely strong engineering team
* With funding imminent, about to grow rapidly - a great time to join
* A really cool product that /could/ go onto take over the world :-)
* Genuinely hard and interesting machine learning/data retrieval problems.
Either launch a CV at jobs@lumi.do, or get in touch personally if you'd like to chat first.
Lumi helps people to discover new content based on their browsing history. Brought to you by the people who started Last.fm.
We're looking for developers to work on
* Our Django app
* Backend services and middleware
* Android/iOS apps
* Our Recommendation Engine
We are also looking for a
* Product Lead
* Design Lead
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot of something.
Reasons to be interested in Lumi
* Founders with recognised pedigree
* A small but extremely strong engineering team
* With funding imminent, about to grow rapidly - a great time to join
* A really cool product that /could/ go onto take over the world :-)
* Genuinely hard and interesting machine learning/data retrieval problems requiring original research.
Either launch a CV at jobs@lumi.do, or get in touch personally if you'd like to chat first.
Lumi uses your browsing history to create a personal selection of what’s happening online. Brought to you by the people who started Last.fm. We're looking for developers to work on
* Our Django app
* Backend services and middleware
* Android/iOS apps
* Our Recommendation Engine
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot of something.
You'd be joining an East London based ten-person team, with plans to expand rapidly in the near future.
Either launch a CV at hello@lumi.do, or drop me a line personally if you'd like to chat first.
Keep up to date with the things that interest you automatically, powered by your browsing data.
We're looking for developers to work on
* Our Django app
* Backend services and middleware
* Android/iOS apps
* Our Recommendation Engine
Our stack is mostly Python backed by Cassandra, Elastic Search and Postgres. We'd like you to know a bit of everything and a lot of something.
You'd be joining an East London based ten-person team, with plans to expand rapidly in the near future.
Either launch a CV at hello@lumi.do, or drop me a line personally if you'd like to chat first.
"So, Mr Johnson, what would you say is your greatest weakness?"
Worst. Interview. Question. Ever.
In isolation, it’s an interesting question to ask yourself, it requires a great deal of honesty and openness on the part of the individual and it requires trust that there will not be repercussions for the answer.
An interview is a place for none of those things. Candidates need, and are expected to, go out of their way to impress their interviewers and actively admitting weakness is a high risk strategy.
And yet it’s popularity remains, company’s still ask it and candidates still find a thousand and one tortured methods to say “I’m a workaholic”. In a novel attempt to get around this, Data Connection used to ask for your three greatest weaknesses. I’d love to know what they gained from this.
So how should this question be answered? From personal experience, responding ‘My left elbow’ sadly does not work.
In comes down to framing, strengths and weaknesses are pretty much alternate views on the same characteristic. Above a certain level of competence it is rare to find people truely good at certain pairings.
For instance, think those people who you admire for their vision. These people are inspiring, charismatic they lift you up and show you a world that you dimly knew existed but couldn’t quite realise. Wonderful people, but tell me, how are they on detail? How good are they are dotting the Is and crossing the Ts and meticulously going through the minutiae of a project, ensuring that everything is as it should be. Not so much huh?
Clearly there will exceptions but Richard Branson, just isn’t a details kind of guy and nor should he be. Conversely I want an Accountant to be exactly the opposite, they need to get down to the details.
Since the question is now framed in terms of strengths it is much easier to answer. Just figure out what strength of yours you wish to highlight, determine how that makes you weak and then go for it.
Not convinced? Here is an example.
Imagine for instance the Great Remallo, Lion Tamer extraordinaire, sitting for an interview. His CV/Resume contains plenty of past experience dealing with many different types of lion and as the inventor of the lion proof cape he clearly knows his stuff. As the final question of the interview the Circus owner, Mr Top, fires out the big kahuna:-
Mr Top: Mr Remallo I have one final question for you. Tell me, what is your great weakness?
The Great Remallo: Well, Mr Top, if I had one weakness it would be that I seem to have trouble accurately assessing the level of danger I might be in at any given time, even as a small child when I used to play in traffic. Actually it’s something that really helps me as a lion tamer, I should think that if I ever truley understod the peril I put myself in everyday I would be petrified and never even enter the ring.
Still not convinced? Let’s try the same question for a Software Developer.
"My biggest weakness is that I can’t stand not knowing how things work, it used to drive my family crazy as took everything I owned (and somethings I didn’t) apart in order to see what was going on under the hood. To this day I really struggle to take things at face value if I can’t look and see what is going on. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I became an engineer in the first place, this drive to understand how things works stands me in good stead when wrestling with a gnarly code base or diving deep into library code, bug hunting."
I’m sure you can come up with something better yourself. Just remember if you reframe the question as an opportunity to talk about strengths, it’s then just a question of determining the flip side to that strength and using it as an in.
Anyone else got a good answer to this question?
The article is written in such a way as to highlight Smith's dismay and frustration due to his colleagues' questions and suggestions. As a reader you are left with no idea why the Redroot does not see that a line cannot be red and green at the same time.
In practice this is exactly the bridge that Smith must cross otherwise the meeting ends in disaster. To do this it's not just a case of speaking in simple terms (though this is often effective), it's a case of figuring out what the other people will consider to be 'simple', in practice this /could/ be something quite complicated - especially to Smith since he is not used to thinking in this way.
B2B telecoms, highly available low latency systems. Zero brand name but fantastic engineering driven culture. Small enough for individual impact but big enough to have some very interesting projects and clients. London based.
OpenMarket are looking for Java developers to work on mobile messaging/payments platforms.
We offer hard problems, lots of autonomy, an engineering driven culture and full control over product delivery from design through to deployment.
See http://www.openmarket.com/europe/careers/roles/softdev for more details or contact me directly at neil.johnson //at// openmarket.com
OpenMarket makes it really easy for enterprises to add a mobile element to their business. This means SMS, MMS, mobile payments and voice+video telephony.
This link is for a full time role, but it gives a flavour of our internships.
http://www.openmarket.com/europe/careers/roles/softdev
Interested? neil dot johnson at openmarket dot com
The thing that's so great about questions like that is that you can tell so much about the candidate simply by what they choose to talk about i.e. what really excites them.
OpenMarket are looking for Java developers to work on mobile messaging/payments platforms.
We offer hard problems, lots of autonomy, an engineering driven culture and full control over product delivery from design through to deployment.
See http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev for more details or contact me directly at neil.johnson //at// openmarket.com
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/01/lean-hiring-tip... http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.ht... http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/five-essential-phon...
You might also find this link to be useful, but I wrote it myself so ymmv http://fragile.org.uk/2010/03/anatomy-of-a-technical-intervi...
OpenMarket are looking for Java developers to work on mobile messaging/payments platforms.
We offer hard problems, lots of autonomy, an engineering driven culture and full control over product delivery from design through to deployment.
See http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev for more details or contact me directly at neil.johnson //at// openmarket.com
OpenMarket
Hiring Software Developers and Systems Developers for mobile messaging and payments, might be your cup of tea....
We're a Java MySQL shop with some C++, Python and Scala around the edges, but really we just want passionate programmers.
questions to neil.johnson at openmarket.com
http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/sysdev http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev
OpenMarket http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/sysdev http://www.mxtelecom.com/uk/careers/roles/softdev
Hiring Software Developers and Systems Developers for mobile messaging and payments, might be your cup of tea....
We're a Java MySQL shop with some C++, Python and Scala around the edges, but really we just want passionate programmers.
questions to neil.johnson at openmarket.com
Ideally, I think I'd prefer not to have to assign labels at all (for the very good reasons outlined in this thread), but in practice I've found this not to be practical.
Is it something specific to the individual, or something more general?
I've found it extremely challenging to write a light weight tech progression ladder, that is flexible enough to still be of use on a week by week basis for a specific individual and general enough to provide comparison across teams.
Any thoughts much appreciated (my initial stab can be found here http://fragile.org.uk/2010/09/how-to-appraise-a-developer-pa... it also explains why, despite this thread, I have a need for a tech ladder).
Neil