I'd love for this sort of thing to have a filter with the type of office employees would be working on. That way everyone on Hacker News can apply for the jobs with the offices best aligned with software development sending a positive signal to those companies and hopefully encouraging better office design overall for those types of jobs.
Interesting idea. I kind of doubt office layout is a dominating factor in how most people choose their next job though. This should be especially true if you're trying to choose a rocket ship startup right before it blasts off. Office dynamics, location, and layout will all change (and will be shaped by the employees) as the company scales.
You're right, but I think if an early stage company has "developers get quiet working conditions" in its DNA, it's more likely to persist as the company grows.
It is a litmus test issue. It tells you if the startup really is a rocket ship because it's run by people who know what they are doing, or if it's a roll of the dice.
They might all be crowded into a small room, but if the founder says "we believe in collaboration and will never put developers in silos" instead of "we'll be getting individual offices ASAP, but you can work from home if you need to" then you have some visibility into the companies chances.
Yeah, I agree. I mainly mention it because the way people comment about office designs around here, you'd think it was the only factor considered. But it might also just be cathartic to talk about disdain for open plan offices.
I had some coworkers that really couldn't deal with noise or open-plan offices. For them, it's really important that they have a quiet private office. For the majority of my coworkers, they didn't care, and did just fine in an open-plan office.
I think it's one of those things where if it's important to you, it's really important to you, but it's not important to all that many people. Which would make it a good sorting filter for a job-matching website. I don't think it'd really send much of a signal to companies regarding the relative merits of each, but it sends a very strong signal to employees who care regarding which companies might be a good fit for them.
Good point. I imagine it is a similarly strong signal for employees in the same way Remote Work can be. People who want it seem to only want it and nothing else.
Why limit applications to programmers? I looked through manually and found about a dozen companies each with non-programming technical openings, such as for biologists, physicists, or electrical engineers. The "programmer-only" requirement seems self-imposed by the site, and it would be trivially simple to organize non-programming-centric engineering positions. The same puzzles could be used as a barrier to entry, as the same type of thinking is needed in solving problems in scientific research or hardware engineering.
It's very hard to find hardware engineering startup jobs, and this is a space where your site could really stand out.
They don't exactly hire through TripleByte, TripleByte filters candidates and "fast tracks" you through to another interview stage at the company. It's a first line of defense.
I went through the test couple of weeks back. It was pretty interesting take on the screening part. Wanted to see how the phone screen was, but they seem to be out of slots for a long time.
Yeah, we've been very busy. Sorry about this. We're focusing more on learning and less on throughput right now. We'll have more spots opening up next week. Send me an email at ammon@triplebyte.com, and I'll make sure we get you in.
Yep - for all their talk about how traditional interviewing is broken, if you go through their screening process, you'll discover that it devolves into the same old puzzles and algorithms questions you get in any other interview. The result being that a terrible software engineer who had spent some time memorizing the highlights of CLRS would do much better on a TripleByte interview than a good software engineer who hadn't spent his spare time studying material orthogonal to his day-to-day work.
Hey, one of the Triplebyte founders here. We do using coding problems but we try hard to mitigate the issues you bring up. We give candidates a selection of problems to choose from and we'll often explain how to solve a problem if it seems they're getting stuck. We're less interested in sudden flashes of insight and more looking to see if someone can write code and implement ideas they talk about.
We know it's still not perfect though and our goal is to keep experimenting to find what works best and be open about the results. As we mentioned in our last blog post, we're planning to offer take home tests as an option for our next experiment.
I found the tests pretty interesting and thankfully not puzzle-like, though a little like an advanced fizzbuzz as it was a series of unconnected methods. I was really hoping for some feedback at the end as to how I did and what the weak areas were, do you offer any feedback at all?
Perhaps as well as take home tests you could consider a longer form one which builds a feature using several methods, offering help if required so most people don't get stuck. Say parsing a set of data files, something like that.
When hiring I've found walking through something like real work with candidates most useful, and also crucially using the same challenge for all for comparison.
I've been through the process and it wasn't careercup style puzzle questions. It was mostly practical things or things related to CS interests (programming a game) and they let you google documentation and use any tool you would normally use.
I have also done it. None of the things you mentioned predict success. In fact, very little aside from basic hygiene is likely to predict success, which is what renders these purportedly meritocratic hiring processes so out of touch with reality.
The evidence simply does not support present hiring methodologies as predictive of successful business outcomes. Therefore, you should hire and invest in people who need jobs. The reason the increasingly widely accepted status quo of interview processes continues is essentially due to confirmation bias: companies want you to feel like you are part of a special, select team. In reality, we are not that much different from each other. The evidence suggests hiring people who need jobs and dispensing with the bs.
Where is the evidence that present hiring methodologies don't predict successful business outcomes? I recall seeing evidence re: resumes, but not on the overall process itself [1].
If this data is present (data showing that present hiring methodologies don't predict successful business outcomes), do you have data showing that hiring people who need jobs is any better? We /are/ different from each other -- as an example so obvious it borders on the ridiculous, people who have been programming for ten years will be much faster at it than people who haven't. At what point do you draw the line to state that people stop being different? If so, what data did you use to draw that line?
I understand the paradigm paralysis - we have been led to believe that having the best CS zombies in the world is what makes success, but it's just not true. Meanwhile, jobs aren't filled and the people who need them are suffering.
It's a nice catchall phrase for all kinds of discrimination that would be illegal if stated explicitly. If we call it a gut feeling or culture fit, it's suddenly legal.
Cannot ++ you enough.
In my experience, people prefer to surround themselves with those similar to them.
The same holds true for any software organization.
Just as it was important to people in the pre-1960s southern US that their children only go to school with children whose families they were "comfortable with." Somehow, they've since (somewhat) figured out how to adjust to their discomfort.
One of the cruelest ironies of the post-recession hiring environment has been how companies are much more interested in hiring those who are already employed.
i reserved my slot and scheduled a phone call, then they sent me an email that i lost the slot till further notice because they got busy. that's worse than the bad hiring practices that companies already have.
Not that it matters that much but I notice there's no .NET or C# on the "Technology Used" list. Is there really not a single YC company that uses the .NET stack? I'm not surprised that there's a strong bias toward open source technologies among these companies, but given how widely .NET used elsewhere in the enterprise world I find it pretty remarkable NONE of those companies decided to go with a MS stack.
Back in 2005 when I started Loopt I went all in with Windows Server, .NET, and SQL Server. I already knew the tooling[1]. No regrets. It never held us back - product issues did.
Now I'm using it again, for the same reasons. I already know it, I'm pretty quick with it, it's predictable, and it works. I'm also old school and will probably deploy physical servers when the time comes. Look at StackOverflow - their whole site runs on a handful of properly configured servers running properly written code.
That said, .NET is not sexy. The tooling is expensive (Pro, Ultimate) or crippled (Express). It runs on Windows, which has fallen out of favor[2].
Even though I like .NET, I'd advise anyone new to learn JavaScript first. In my opinion, Node.js is my nightmare realized, but it works, and it's now possible to make things work in the browser and on the server with knowledge of only one language. More bang for your buck.
For startups technology choices are incidental when they're not the core of the business. If you're making a database, your tech choices matter. A consumer app? You're more likely to die of a bad product or team drama[3] than fallout from rendering HTML with bash scripts via CGI.
So anyway, you don't see more .NET because it's expensive, it's not the best beginner language, and it doesn't run on OS X. Also, the alternatives are much improved - It's hard to argue for .NET over something else because even where it's better, it's not that much better. And most of the time it doesn't matter.
[1] Grew up with access to an MSDN subscription. I knew of and played with Linux, but in the pre-virtualization days, I had to reboot to use it. Understandably, I preferred tools I could use on Windows, my primary OS. Also, while it's no longer the case, the MSDN documentation used to be fantastic. I basically taught myself how to program by reading the MSDN docs and tearing apart the sample code and programs.
[2] For the same reasons I developed on Windows as a kid, younger developers will want something they can run on OS X directly, or for free in a VM.
> The tooling is expensive (Pro, Ultimate) or crippled (Express).
Visual Studio Community 2013 (and 2015) are completely free and nearly fully featured. Gone are the days of Express being a super lightweight VS IDE. I used to buy Pro for side work but now I can get by with Community.
> Visual Studio Community 2013 (and 2015) are completely free and nearly fully featured.
But have licensing terms which limit the contexts in which they can (legally) be used.
> Gone are the days of Express being a super lightweight VS IDE.
Express is still a super lightweight VS IDE. Community may eliminate most of the use cases for Express, since most of the cases where it makes sense to use Express may be places where Community is an available, per the licensing restrictions, and better choice.
SQL Server Web Edition is not the same as Standard or Enterprise. The reason you use SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL is for Database Encryption, Analysis Services, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, etc. Web Edition won't even do mirroring.
The cost is worth it if it saves you multiple employees worth of development work or administration overhead, and in my experience it does. The pricing is also (surprise!) negotiable. At Loopt, our annual software licensing cost was well under the cost of one developer, and this was before BizSpark.
I've shipped production code developed in Mono on OS X, deployed to both Windows and Linux. I don't think that should be a huge roadblock moving forward. MS itself is trying to foster this (for the benefit of selling more Azure services presumably) with the next version of ASP.net which will run on basically everything.
Re the expense of doing it the MS way, Microsoft will gladly throw free/cheap software and services at you: https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
We got most of the data (more than half) from the founders of the companies directly. The rest we scraped. I bet there are a few on an MS stack, but it's a small percentage
I wrote C# for 8 years, but switched to Ruby after following an my boss to a new startup that is using Ruby. I advocated for years about how great .net is (and the tools still are the best), but if i'm being honest here. Ruby really is a lot quicker for prototyping. It's the perfect fit for startups.
Microsoft's technology stack doesn't seem to be popular with startups and young technology companies, but I don't think that's because of .net itself, but rather because of the barriers presented by the rest of the Microsoft stack.
Probably a major driver is the various virtualization and cloud-driven technologies not fitting real well with Microsoft's server environment. Startups want scalable architectures that allow them to easily adjust to changing demands and Microsoft doesn't really offer that right now -- or, at least, they don't offer that as cost effectively as Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS, RackSpace, and so on.
If Microsoft did offer something in that arena, I'd expect the licensing costs to be obnoxious. As a recent example, we've migrated two mid-sized office networks recently to Windows domain environments, and that cost the customers extra money just for CALs -- one CAL per domain-connected device (or user account, depending). That sort of licensing scheme is a rounding error cost of operations for the enterprise, but for startups it's a major nuisance.
And then there are databases: should Microsoft-stacked startups go with MS-SQL, which is slow and cumbersome and requires maintenance schedules to be developed for it, or should they go with the other default enterprise choice, Oracle, which is stupidly expensive, or should they try integrating MySQL with Windows and hope nothing breaks in the future?
They're also not getting to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies with the Microsoft stack. NoSQL? nginx? The fastest-iterating web technologies right now aren't happening under Microsoft's roof. I don't mean that Microsoft doesn't offer a lot of advanced technology, I mean that the open source world is able to push an update to GitHub one day and everyone can be running the latest and greatest version a few minutes later, and then it can happen again a few days later. Microsoft isn't doing that, so they're lagging behind some bleeding edge developments.
And Microsoft has its own history to overcome. They have burned people a lot over the years. Younger people working in technology are largely ignorant of it, so for them, Microsoft has a pretty OK reputation. But us grey beards remember the Microsoft of the 90s and would sooner exit the industry altogether than be stuck with being responsible for a Microsoft stack for the next 10 years. Just do a search for "Microsoft discontinued technology" or similar, and you get a handful of recent results -- since Google has the long-term memory of a goldfish -- but you can start to get the idea: if you build something with the Microsoft stack today, Microsoft might discontinue support or development for some part of it next year and you might be stuck. With open source technology, you can either choose to continue support or development for it yourself, or continue running it unsupported for as long as you'd like. There are options. Vendor lock-in is harmful in the long term and startups have no leverage for dealing with it and I think many of them are at least subconsciously aware of that.
Microsoft has its place. If you want stability -- in a slower rate of change sense -- Microsoft is what you want. If you wan to be able to hire people based on their certifications, Microsoft is what you want. If you have a massive IT budget, Microsoft is a choice you can afford.
They just aren't the right fit for most tech startups.
>If Microsoft did offer something in that arena, I'd expect the licensing costs to be obnoxious.
Nope. First, both AWS and Azure offer Windows hosting. Second, licensing costs on AWS are around 30% markup on top of same Linux hardware. Hardly "obnoxious".
Licensing fees and tech made for large slow enterprise teams.
I've seen the shops that have C# or Java as their backend and they move too slow to be a competitive threat. If their frontend is written in Ruby/Rails or Python/Django then maybe they have a chance against the competition but usually they'll be held back by the slow progress made on the backend.
For some reason the big slow enterprise mindset gets transmitted through the choice of language. Companies that use Scala or some other JVM-based language are less likely to be enterprisey for example.
Licensing fees and management are a big deal for Microsoft.
It all relates to the enterprise vs hacker mentality.
I work at a small company writing NLP R&D software. Our core in-house codebase is entirely Java. There is no "enterprise mindset" here; in fact, many of the engineers make fun of that mindset.
Choice of language only affects your culture if you believe choice of language affects your culture and let it happen.
> Choice of language only affects your culture if you believe choice of language affects your culture and let it happen.
I would disagree with that. I just came from a startup on .NET. The develop/build/test/deploy cycles were really slow (mostly due to tooling/infra, not the language), which meant devs didn't ship frequently and didn't test their code much. That affected the culture quite a bit: no rapid experimentation means no hacker mentality.
It may be that you can develop rapidly with C# or Java (I just wouldn't know, I haven't ever used either in a highly-productive environment) but if they hold you back from shipping quickly, they hold you back from the hacker/startup mentality.
This is complete nonsense. It is popular nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. .NET is a perfectly reasonable tech stack for certain kinds of problems -- for example if your application has to interact regularly with MSFT core APIs, you'd have to have a pretty compelling reason NOT to use the MSFT-native stack.
> It all relates to the enterprise vs hacker mentality
This too is a story that HN likes to tell itself to justify its preference for this week's hot new javascript framework (or whatever).
At the end of the day, different tools are good for different use cases -- and while yes, .NET tends to work better when you're coding to "enterprisey" use cases, that doesn't mean that your product team itself has to operate in a "large slow enterprise" way
(Plug: If you're a top notch .NET developer and you want to work with others who are as well, at a place that doesn't treat C# and .NET as second class citizens, hey, drop me a line.)
Sure but using C# and Java are fairly good indicators that there's a slow-moving enterprise mindset at work.
I guess I should have said that in my comment; that they're indicators. I didn't mean to imply that there aren't some good uses for C# and Java. You mention one and the other reply mentions another.
