Dropbox (YC S07) looking for Android Developer

http://dropbox.theresumator.com/apply/eq08Lm/

by bigwill • 17 years ago

40 37 17 years ago

dropbox.theresumator.com

RK• 17 years ago

Someone please get this job! :)

mcotton• 17 years ago

I would love to have dropbox on my G1.

amichail3• 17 years ago

BTW, the iPhone app would be more useful with editors. Even just a plain text editor would be very useful.

sown5• 17 years ago

>* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from a top-tier institution.

I always hated this requirement. I'm sorry if I don't have the right pedigree to satisfy people like this. I'm sorry I didn't go to the "right" school, wasn't born into the right family or just a failure in their eyes.

huangm• 17 years ago

Your problem is that you're taking job postings personally. Dropbox isn't posting a job posting to make an objective statement about what makes someone good. They're posting it to fill a position in their company.

Your bachelors degree institution also isn't just a pedigree. You can't perpetually argue that 'everyone is equal'. People aren't equal, and where you went to school is a useful signal.

Beyond all this, the Dropbox guys are predominantly MIT, and expecting applicants to be from a similar environment should be seen not as insulting, but natural.

shaddi• 17 years ago

Fair enough, but I have to agree with the GP. Sure, your average MIT grad may be pretty good, but some of the most talented and impressive people I know come from (decently ranked but not super prestigious) state schools. Hiring from one population is going to lead to homogeneity, and if I were doing the hiring my first cut would be based on proven accomplishments, not school.

In short: no, not everyone is equally skilled, but you're going to miss a lot of gems if you only hire from MIT's peer institutions. I'm sure Dropbox will have no problem finding someone good to fill their position, however, so I guess that isn't such a big concern for them.

mattrepl• 17 years ago

There is probably a correlation between top-tier CS pedigree and performance, but using it as a filter for joining a startup is detrimental. The chance you're missing a "diamond in the rough" is high, and those are exactly the folks you want.

If you're Google and have tons of résumés to sort, then fine; but in this case it seems a good way to miss a great hire.

sown5• 17 years ago

I'm not arguing that everyone is equal.

What I am saying is that it is almost but not quite discrimination. I can't control with total fidelity what school I get in no matter how good a student I might be -- ie, if I'm good enough to go to MIT I can go to MIT. They can't let in anyone who is good enough to go to MIT because there is only so much space. And besides, I don't have the money to go there nor did I have the money for the right college prep school[1]. I got handed some cards by life that meant I had to slowly work through a state university at my own cost.

I'm not mad at you or people who went to Ivy league schools, it's just that I get a little tired of people immediately shutting me out (parties, interviews, life in general) as soon as I mention that I went to some Unknown State university. Maybe it's just a SV thing but it gets old. Really old. So when I see it in a job posting I can't help but to take it personally. It's something you'll never have to worry about since you yourself are an MIT student.

I realize that they don't have to make me happy and they're free to hire from whatever school but they don't have to say it out-loud.

1 - Whether that prep school was an actual school or it was a parent who could stay at home screeching into the ears of their kids to motivate them or both, it means that they had the money for that school or one parent could stay home.

gcheong5• 17 years ago

I suppose then that I would be a good candidate for the next CEO of Apple given that I dropped out of the same school as Steve Jobs.

tsally3• 17 years ago

The phrasing is a bit unfortunate, but I think a person talented enough to work there could probably make it happen anyway. They hired Zed, and although I'm not sure where he went to college, it was probably his demonstrated programming talent that did all the talking.

jpeterson• 17 years ago

Agreed. This requirement is just plain dumb, and bitterly disappointing given how much I've praised Dropbox and their product in the past. I won't be doing that anymore.

I didn't go to a "top-tier" institution, for reasons I'd rather not discuss here. I have worked with a few graduates of these kind of schools, and I can say that their coding and problem-solving abilities were not any greater than my own and others who didn't have such prestigious names on their diplomas. In my experience it makes no indication whatsoever. In fact, I generally ignore the specific undergraduate school when I look at a resume.

This is simply a statement of extreme and irrational elitism, and it stinks.

idoh• 17 years ago

Often these requirements aren't literal. If you've got a background that is otherwise a good fit they might give you a look anyway.

sown5• 17 years ago

Well, it is a good product and I will probably keep using them.

gcheong5• 17 years ago

Maybe it's because they're looking for an employee and not another co-founder?

http://steveblank.com/2009/04/07/the-good-student/

markerdmann• 17 years ago

This discussion reminds of the time we interviewed a senior in the EECS undergraduate program at Cal (who had a 3.9 GPA). To quote directly from the interview:

Interviewer: So, what was your favorite course? Interviewee: Oh.. probably Data Structures. Interviewer: Ok, great. Let's start with a question about that. What's the running time of a hash table lookup? Interviewee: Oh.. uh... <stares blankly>

The rest of the interview continued along those lines. By contrast, another guy we interviewed who had earned his CS degree at Oregon State was a brilliant programmer.

mailanay• 17 years ago

Many companies put such requirements as filters to reduce number of applications they receive. Going through a huge list of resumes is time-consuming and not exactly what a start-up is looking forward to.

sebg2• 17 years ago

Disagree. The point is that it is a filter. A high percentage of people will not respond based on this criteria. But the people who believe that they are as good or better will respond anyway. These are the type of people you want to get - the ones that are willing to go around the system to get things done.

joubert• 17 years ago

So it isn't really a requirement?

phreanix• 17 years ago

Kinda related, but why is dropbox.com or getdropbox.com coming up as attack site? I'm using Firefox.

spicyj• 17 years ago

From the (supposedly malware-filled) forums:

hi guys,

google falsely blacklisted the entire domain as a result of some users hosting malicious files as public links. your files are safe and nothing about dropbox is malicious. this happened as a result of the switch from getdropbox.com to dropbox.com. the dropbox.com domain hadn't earned a positive reputation and thus a single user hosting malicious content resulted in the entire domain being blacklisted. we're working with google now to resolve this ASAP.

Dropbox (YC S07) looking for Android Developer

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