yanilkr

It is a general understanding that you hire someone who wants the job and who shows some acceptable level of seriousness to that effort. If someone goes to an interview and messes up that dynamic, many interviewers make a really quick decision in their head and waste the remaining interview time trying to be polite and not mess up the company image. Skills wont matter at that point of time.

Most of the "WTF" events in interviews happen because the interviewer made up their mind already and there is still a lot of time left and is under-prepared to handle the social situation that happens next.

I am sorry to be the one telling this. The startup founders (not all) are in no way position to be picky about programmers. Programming is an actual skill that takes significant amount of effort to learn and requires constant learning and improvement. After 5 years of good experience, programmers can see through the fragile nature of startups where everyone else other than them is some form of an executive in title but cannot deliver any value equivalent to writing working code.

It's often the other programmers at startups judging the other programmers. Based on my personal experience, the best kind of programmer is the one that gets along well with others.

The wishlist was a bit arrogant. If it is so difficult to get women to work in tech may be it's not worth the effort for the founders to make it happen. It's already difficult to get people to work together and then you get a list of demands like this, it's just too much to handle for 90% of companies.

That probably explains why "other engineering disciplines" do not have as many startups as software. If you do not like the current place and its values why do you hold others and its owners hostage to your ideals? Why not start a new one and attract better talent with your better values.

Tech companies are trying to do something better than what previous generations could do.

Tech workers have something so much better than that. Freedom. If you do not like the values of the current company find a new one or start one.

Mob rule knows no fairness. When your ideas are vague, people fill them up with their version of fairness. Employees who are just starting out do not know anything about making sacrifices to build something bigger than themselves. If they collectively form a gang and override the will of the founders and investors who made more sacrifices, it drains the spirit of the individual to risk their time and savings to start something new.

People are free to organize their efforts but it takes founders and their sacrifices to make things happen. This collective power should embrace ideas of fairness and voluntarism instead of laws and force to get their way.

Vuejs just wants to be a web frontend framework. Reactjs wants to be a common way of building apps across Web, Android and iphone. Both have different goals targeting different usecases.

Vuejs might do well for webapps due to its simplicity alone.

The same thing happened in digital advertising. People developed "Banner Blindness" and mostly do not notice the presence of ads in your page. It's almost like people are very intelligent and you cannot fool them for a long time.

To answer that question first you have to know what happens inside many of these companies. Its just too complex to come up with a process that is fair to everyone.

There is a lot of overlap into different roles in this field

Programmer

Developer

Software Engineer

Web Developer

Full stack engineer

Backend Engineer

Frontend Engineer

Software Design Engineer

DataScience Engineer

There is no standard or a clear definition of these roles or the skills you need for these roles or skills relevant to particular company. Not all companies have a clear cut hiring standards or insight into what kind of people they should be hiring. Hiring is overshadowed by a lot of players who are just following process. Most of them search in google to figure out a perfect recruiting approach or just want to one-up the popular company hiring approach. They are easily convinced by "tech hiring done right consultants" or their SEO tailored blogs, who actually are good at selling their services. The interviewers in the loop do a google search to figure out what to ask and it does not occur to them if it is relevant or not, its just what other big companies ask in an interview. At the end it is left to un-empowered hiring managers, many times also dev managers who are afraid of breaking tradition and have to make a better decision in a bad situation.

If you ask a web developer a lot of algorithmic questions, the candidate fails and a candidate who "cracks" your algorithmic interview is most likely to fail at front end web development job. Design skills are as important as algorithmic skills and they need constant improvement just like programmers improve, who decides what level of design skills are needed for this role?. For a web developer there is a decent amount of algorithmic thinking necessary but who determines that for your company or team? From my personal experience, I needed someone who knows a couple of javascript frameworks and can make sure things look good. The company did not have a role as "web developer" and they choose to call him "software developer" and paid him at the same scale. After a year, the person was transferred to a different team that did not value his skills and the company thought it was too expensive to retrain him.

Most management at mid sized companies want to see tech people as lego blocks/building blocks who can be transferred to a different team or project/product on demand. There is a preference for generalist programmer who sort of can do web development/app development/ data science/machine learning/AI etc on demand. It is kind of good and bad because many people get bored after sometime and want to do something else at their job and would like it if a company allows them to transfer.

A lot of companies I know tried the tailored approach where they let the teams decide who they hire but the problem is lot of the team members are unskilled at making hiring opinions outside their area of work, they mimic the Hippo(highest paid person opinion) in the room. People with other skills can make the team/product better but many hiring teams do not have that self-intuition and mostly hire someone like themselves. There is also a conflict between hiring for known chunk of work already planned vs hiring for longterm with skills to solve vague problems related to a specific field. The same hiring approach does not work for both the cases.

To deal with this complexity, many big companies come up with a process that looks like standardized testing. Hire hardworking people who can deal with really hard problems and solve very complex math/computer science problems and have spent enough preparation time learning the literature. Kids who are very good at school can easily get through this tests. This will become a new normal to them. Also the standardized testing approach gives the companies immunity from gender/race discrimination complaints.

The fact that these smart people seem to be unhappy everywhere and have to change companies every 9 months tells you that not everyone needs to write MonteCarlo Markov Chain likelihood estimators with Bayesian inference in python. Your average CRUD app may not be able to keep them happy no matter how much PR you give this product. There is a need to tailor these interviews with time. Its a constantly improving process.

I was watching this documentary on notorious gangs. The common way to get into that gang was always designed to be very hard. One approach was they throw this new wannabe gangster down and 5-10 people start kicking this guy brutally and after 10/15 mins if this guy survives with out crying/screaming/giving up then they will admit this person into the gang. It was psychologically important for the gang to recruit only the toughest people and at the same time it was important for the person to mentally go through that rigorous process and beat it which after "winning" creates a psychological bond and loyalty with the brand of the gang and a sense of earning that respect from the gang. Our tech interviews sounded very similar to the recruiting done by these notorious gangs. So lets just say that this kind of whiteboard interviewing evolved in nature.

For lack of better ideas, this is going to be new normal. Spend significant time and get comfortable dealing with whiteboard/standardized tests. The alternative is networking and referrals where some managers in few companies can bypass the hiring process and hire you if they like what you have to offer.

Current advertising model of Twitter is not suited for the product. They tried to emulate google and facebook model of ad revenue by programmatically showing the user what might be useful to them and it did not work so well. People developed blind spots for such content. Twitter should really look into micro payments to reward users who increase engagement.

Some of our friends are good at recommending a movie or a restaurant and their opinions matter at a micro level similar to celebrity endorsements matter at a macro level. They would do more of it if they get paid like celebrities do but at a proportional rate. Take the burden out of complicated algorithms to match ad content to users and instead let users do it in between their conversations and pay for the content of their tweets. Make the normal user to be their spokesperson for the product/idea. Twitter is a very good medium for this.

This is native advertising at a whole new level. Financially rewarding users who are influential in their small circle might be difficult to implement. Take the ad money from businesses, local and global and share it with users who say nice and constructive things about their campaign to their followers. It could be as simple as rewarding a user for retweeting a well designed ad. Many users will get creative and make endorsements from their daily lives if it meant their followers liking it. Its like design crowd mixed with advertising. Brands would pay for this model because its driven by results.

Understanding user tweets and matching them to a business campaign and fairly allocating the reward to top/all contributors might be a much harder computer science problem but I think this model of advertising has a potential to work well for twitter. There is so much for user to tweet about. Local restaurants, to movies to their brand loyal purchases etc in exchange their tweets get financial reward based on how many people read them and engage with them.

Toxicity at workplace comes from attitude like you are showing. You just called me stupid for holding a different point of view. I bet you are not such a great colleague either.

I do not think the stories out of Uber are any out of ordinary. These are same stories that came out from finance industry and Hollywood. Success attracts problems like this. There is nothing you can do about it other than wait it out.

Are you calling me a shill? Look at my profile, 3268 days on this site.

You are not able to handle a disagreement and called me all kinds of names. You should talk to your colleagues and see if they think you might be one of those overbearing colleagues who is contributing to a toxic culture by throwing a fit at everyone who disagrees with you.

I am not taking a side on this issue. Uber is a victim here. No one plans to have a toxic culture at work. I am just trying to put down the mob mentality by pointing out the obvious challenges.

We do not know what the truth is. We can only speculate. If those allegations were true, I wish uber will come out and address them.

Uber itself is a victim here. They are going after some other big monopolies in the industry. It could be as simple as their mistakes are blown out of proportion to smear them by their competition. We see similar big co is bad stories once a while its not like Uber has a monopoly in treating employees badly.

It is a PR problem because all the other people who did not have problems do not come out and say they like it there. If people come out and say I think uber is good to me they will look insensitive given the context of two women with bad experiences. PR will create a place where other people can speak out.

Over all churn rate in the valley is pretty bad, uber cannot doing any worse than the other companies there.

This reminds me of a scene from the popular TV show Silicon valley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Smartphones, youtube, facebook and many other success stories had exponential growth. Once a product/idea goes big, there will always be people who do not like something about it. Thats the cost of making a product that everyone can use. A better example is the idea of money itself. Its an invention used by almost everyone in the world, We still have people who absolutely hate money with passion based on their own principles that are right for them. Overall it did more good to humanity.

We have created an economic world, where good ideas travel faster and share the rewards with everyone. Its a good thing. The alternative would be a hierarchical society where some other parts of the society will always be left behind.

Actually time will solve this problem very easily. Uber does not have to do any thing differently. (Its not a recommendation).

Every successful company has these problems. Success attracts ambitious people and many of these high achievers accomplish their goals ruthlessly. In this process some other people who have different priorities feel left behind. Its just the way of life.

Take all the ambitious people and throw a challenging problem at them that can humble them other than that there is PR. PR expert will come out and tell you that not all teams in uber are bad, some of them are really good and the routine stuff we hear about any other big company.

How do you explain the amount of money/effort spent by the big companies in trying to attract young kids out of college and the cultish attraction for these companies from young people who know nothing about the industry?

Do you know of any big company that has a magic solution to this problem? Everyone has this problem but the end users perceive it differently depending on how the brand presents itself.

It is impossible to keep everyone happy at a company at all times. The difference between a company which seems to have happy employees and the one that doesn't seems to be the amount of PR spending. It is an advertising problem. Some companies managed to build that image by selective targeting. Otherwise how do you explain the churn rate of employees in the valley?

They might have problem retaining that talent if they misrepresent themselves.

I do not see anything wrong with that. Some companies work hard to keep a simple and fun work culture. Not all companies solve hard problems. Some of the entertainment focused tech companies cannot attract right talent by putting a serious face.

It makes very less economic sense. If we want to dig ditches, digging with a spoon and fork creates thousands of jobs but using a robot, one person can do 1000 people work. Making this robot pay the taxes of many spoon & fork workers will make it un necessarily expensive and creates hurdles for progress and limits the human potential.

The human capital freed from innovative technology can be utilized some where else. That free time can be used to invent new things or focus on some other problems that make our lives better.

Taxing natural resources makes sense but taxing innovative products/services that consume less natural resources is very bad idea.

Why would you make such unsubstantiated claims about "management" in general? Were you in management? What did you do differently to address such problems?

This lack of trust in "management" and politicizing working to a damaging extent might be the biggest reasons why manufacturing will never come back to America.

yes exactly. the unions can be on the cloud.

Why cant the workers create a forum and a bug tracking system and write their concerns and let everyone up-vote it and get the management to address them.

Organizing is so easy and transparent with technology. You do not have to use old-fashioned politically motivated words like "workers union"

Thats something conservatives are usually accused of saying.

Are you going to run away from canada too if some other trump clone wins there?

so words stop you?

Trump marched forward despite so much negativity against him. He worked really hard to overcome his limitations and at the end won people over. Nothing could stop him.

Why are you guys throwing in the towel at the slightest discomfort?.

Is president taking credit for successes of private enterprise?

Peter Theil had a long term vision for the world where others failed to see such future. I see similar line of reasoning for Peter Theil's support.

1. If you think that business people can govern better than Politicians or want to achieve an environment where it gets easier and acceptable for business leaders to seek political offices, this is a huge step in that direction. China already took this step of inviting people who succeed in business to participate in governance. If Trump can do it, so can every other business person who thinks they are better than Trump. If Trump wins this, I guarantee you next season its going to be more qualified people running for office and if Trump loses, we still would have made progress in that direction.

2. Peter Theil's support for Trump gave him (gay guy) a platform to speak at a republican convention. This is a huge progress for everyone when republicans are standing up for gay people. It makes it easy for other people to reach out and co-operate with each other.

3. Peter Theil getting into politics allows something like a Y-combinator(not the news site but a complete accelerator) for politics possible otherwise it would just be more lawyers running again and again. Just like YC grooms tech leaders, Theil's expertise into this venture could groom next generation governing leaders.

What ever your politics are, this is progress.

No matter who you are or what you are trying to succeed in tech industry, How about you make news for accomplishments like Peter Theil?