Hey, drop me a line: balajis at a16z dot com. We try to help entrepreneurs who have an experience like you've had get back on their feet. No promises, but often we can find you a great job at one of our portfolio companies.
Do any VC's provide subsidized (and heavily encouraged) psychologist/therapists to their portfolio companies?
Obviously wouldn't help in this situation, but I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Lots of pressure on founders, and often no one they can really open up and talk to truthfully.
Founder -> Product Manager is probably the only way I've seen which produces good PMs for startups. Startup PM is totally different from PM in a big organization with great process and resources.
The company I now work for (CloudFlare) seems to have 100% of the PMs come from startups (including me), either from acquisitions or direct hire. It works really well.
We're also looking for a head of marketing. Email me (rdl@cloudflare.com) if you're interested, although I'd also strongly recommend balajis.
Hey all. Surprised to see our little site at the top of HN :) We'll be updating the website at some point with more news. Till then, sign up for notifications and check out trybtc.com and blockscore.com.
Hey, it's interesting to see Counsyl representing. I interviewed with you guys a while back, and while I couldn't move to California this time and I bailed out of the interview process, you came across as a team with great ideas and amazingly clever environment. Looking forward to see what will happen to this project, have a lot of bitcoin related activity here in Taiwan now, and I can see that a lot more work is needed. Cheers!
A BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent is nice
to have, but the most important requirement is significant
independent programming experience as demonstrated by your
GitHub account, personal projects, academic publications,
or startup success. Your accomplishments are much more
important than your paper credentials.
Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it! :) Three hours is pretty lenient (you could blaze through it in less time), though the last question is challenging. We think the questions are kind of fun as well.
Without something like this we'd just have 100s-1000s of unstructured resumes in different formats to rank against each other. This process is more fair and (IMO) allows someone without a college degree, or from outside the US, to compete on a level playing field.
> Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it!
> Without something like this we'd just have 100s-1000s of unstructured resumes in different formats to rank against each other.
So instead of hundreds or thousands of unstructured resumes in different formats, you have hundreds or thousands of completed programming tests. Even assuming that you automatically filter out submissions that fail testing, given that there are a lot of ways to solve a problem, you'd still be stuck evaluating potentially hundreds of correct submissions.
More importantly, a test doesn't seem to be aligned with your top priority:
> ...but the most important requirement is significant independent programming experience as demonstrated by your GitHub account, personal projects, academic publications, or startup success.
Are you assuming that all of the folks most accomplished in the real world are going to complete your programming test successfully?
Since you ultimately seem to be interested in folks who can build dashboards, I would think you'd be far better off asking candidates to build a dashboard prototype using sample data you provide. There are lot of really smart developers out there with advanced degrees who could solve programming quizzes all day long but couldn't design and implement a useful dashboard application.
> You'd still be stuck evaluating potentially hundreds of correct submissions.
I'm guessing the MVP of hackerrank was the web code editor + lint/findbugs/whatever for filtering. A lot of people have spent a lot of time writing open source projects that convert code to metrics, so making a reasonably prioritized list is probably fairly easy.
> There are lot of really smart developers out there with advanced degrees who could solve programming quizzes all day long but couldn't design and implement a useful dashboard application.
Agree!
I think this is a great critique of HackerRank as a business idea -- while they are new, it's just a hurdle that weeds the busier coders out of your hiring pool... if they become established there will be books on cramming for it, and will no longer separate the wheat from the chaff.
To be honest I think it's the other way round - if you can do programming tests all day long you will succeed at most coding jobs. However there are a lot of developers who can't tackle an interview that with a nights sleep and no pressure can easily code a intuitive and effective architecture.
Sorry - programming tests raise far more false negatives than false positives (and this from a person who considers himself a false negative in most tests)
I'm not sure what kind of coding work you do, but I assure you the vast majority of web development work has little resemblance to coding questions. You are almost never designing an algorithm: that was already done for you by whoever designed the library you are using.
Majority of the tasks IME:
- code reading & refactoring
- figuring out why two libraries aren't playing nice
- bug triangulation
- optimization (not the algorithmic type, but rather the fix-the-auto-generated-SQL-query / frontend asset packing kind)
- repetitive/simple/obvious bits of jQuery
Maybe there's some kind of online test that could exercise those skills, but if you ask me the main performance changers for modern web development are, they're: really knowing the stack (problem anticipation, what to use, how to use the various tools to quickly get search keywords), google fu, and most importantly having done it a couple hundred times (muscle memory).
That's terribly negative. If you are doing agency work maybe (same website, same functionality, just different skin) but that vast vast open plains of http-based development are around and going to be around joining parts of the business, public world together in ways they do not know or imagine.
Yes, binary trees are pretty much coded for you, and you would be a fool to roll your own hashing algorithm for production, but thats still not a reason to keep your head down.
I don't understand this response. To be clear, I think web development is fun. I very much enjoy it and don't resonate with "keeping my head down".
I guess to reiterate my point: once you've done web development for a couple years, coding most websites is less about solving new problems and more about applying known solutions.
To reiterate how this point relates to the question of coding interviews: in as much as they don't test for lots of known solutions, and the ability to apply known solutions quickly, they aren't filtering for productive coders.
How does your response relate to the points at hand?
but web development is not about "making new websites"
Think micro-services supplying REST APIs over HTTP - that's going to be same-y after a few years yes, but behind that is a world of business apps, integration challenges, complex algorithms and calculations - sorry I just see "web development" as "anything that has of will have an http access point" which I mentally count as "pretty much everything from here on in"
Programming tests do generally test for ability to apply known solutions quickly - it's about all they do do. You just have to know the known solutions (oh look calculate primes).
As for finding productive coders - well the amount of false negatives is large, and the false positive rate is probably higher (plenty of people who can waltz through these tests i find fairly poisonous to morale) so I am not a big fan - but if you need to make a first cut this is a good start
> Well, empirically we're getting quite a lot of people attempting it!
I think you missed my point. It's that the people submitting to a multi-hour exam just to submit a resume are more desperate / value their time less than those that can stand on their experience.
The fact that there a "quite a lot" of submissions only worsens the probability that the multi-hour effort will be wasted.
The questions were pretty good, because they were close to the real world and you couldn't google them so easily.
The programming tasks were rather unbalanced. The first two were super easy, while you can easily get stuck on the last one, even as a good programmer. I knew that I wouldn't be able to answer it today, so I skipped it after a short while.
If I'd plan such a test, I'd try to get an example of the structure and comprehensibility of my future employees work.
>> allows someone ... from outside the US, to compete on a level playing field.
Just curious, why do you say that the normal process doesn't allow people outside the US to compete on a level playing field? Higher barrier to on-site interviews?
Great question. The short answer is that there are many social goods which are only available when people of like mind are in the same physical location. Among other things:
1) Walkable communities where everyone has some things in common are extremely popular (e.g. college).
2) By contrast, today many of us live corridored lives in anonymous apartment complexes, knowing more people at work than at home. Just from an efficiency perspective, that is a huge waste of time and life. Every single person there has to do a commute (or get on the internet) to meet people they know.
3) The specific location that people end up concentrated at is unimportant. But being located near someone else will be extremely important for the foreseeable future; among other things: you can't read body language, you can't yet easily collaborate on physical objects, and people can't yet reproduce over the internet :)
4) In more detail, it's a bit like dinner. Whether you meet your friends at place X or place Y doesn't matter. What matters is that you meet your friends in person. You could be more technically precise and say only the variance in location matters, and not really the mean (the specific spot on the surface of the earth).
Anyway, I have a much longer version of the essay (really, a short book) that I had to edit down which went into this and related qs. I'll post that at balajis.com soon.
Sheesh. Balaji here. Clearly this touched a nerve, so will be writing on this at some length. But this is the bit I don't get:
But when I asked him what harms techies faced that might
prompt such a drastic response, he couldn't offer much
evidence.
He pointed to a few headlines in the national press warning
that robots might be taking over people's jobs. These, he
said, were evidence of the rising resentment that
technology will foster as it alters conditions across the
country and why Silicon Valley needs to keep an escape
hatch open.
But I found Mr. Srinivasan's thesis to be naive. According
to the industry's own hype, technologies like robotics,
artificial intelligence, data mining and ubiquitous
networking are poised to usher in profound changes in how
we all work and live. I believe, as Mr. Srinivasan argues,
that many of these changes will eventually improve human
welfare.
But in the short run, these technologies could cause
enormous economic and social hardships for lots of people.
And it is bizarre to expect, as Mr. Srinivasan and other
techies seem to, that those who are affected wouldn't
criticize or move to stop the industry pushing them.
But that was actually exactly my point: as Farhad states, people may indeed "move to stop the industry", so we need to keep an escape hatch open. A huge chunk of the people here in the Valley are first or second generation emigrants who picked up stakes from their home countries and currently work from a laptop. They left their N home countries because those locales weren't favorable to technology. Is it impossible to think that backlash could make it necessary for us to leave an N+1st, as our ancestors (recent or distant) did?
I can only speak for myself, but the motivating emotion here isn't arrogance. It's one part apprehension, knowing what happened to the Chinese in Malaysia, the Indians in Uganda, and the Jews in Europe. And it's one part hope, thinking that we can build something better with a clean slate, without 230 years of legacy infrastructure and cruft.
