Techonomicon

Because we still don't know how the brain really does all it does in very specific terms, so why assume to know exactly how we think?

I've always taken to the perspective that money alleviates stress and anxiety, but alleviating stress and anxiety is not the definition of happiness (even if it helps).

This is entirely false. My s.o is relatively well known in comic art communities and they (and many others) are using this right now. I don't think HN quite grasps how much artists are trying to ensure ownership and governance over their art.

Or, you simply ensure you get salary bands relayed up front before continuing.

This is an extremely interesting subject. I understand the "hate" for leet code, or simply live coding exercises in general, though so far the majority of "hate" I've heard for this comes from the candidates who haven't had to do a ton of hiring. Or they've had the ability to hire slower and take their time evaluating fewer people over a longer period of time without a ton of inbound pressure. Or they've set some arbitrary bar for inbounds that many people also disagree with (such as only talking to people from top ranked CS schools, or only candidates from well known companies, basically some other metric they can use for themselves as some abstraction on competence).

I do believe having someone do paid work / pair with the team for a few days is likely the most valuable, and I do actually think the best people are ok with this because they use it as a way to evaluate a company. But this strategy simply isn't scalable and can take a lot of company man hours without extremely good up front vetting.

I've found coding exercises, of some sort, they don't have to be leet-code-esque, to be one of the very few "put your money where your mouth is" activities to perform. The amount of folks that can speak forever and in-depth about what they've worked on, and then will completely fail at writing for-loops in their favorite language has astonished me. I don't believe live coding exercises have to be adversarial, I believe candidates should be offered a more accessible often if it's too high pressure for them, but I don't believe coding exercises are inherently bad or evil. I do believe there are bad or evil exercises that can be chosen.

A practical coding exercise that requires no more than 8-10 lines of code done live has generally served well in my experience for assessing candidates. I've seen similar pure failure rates from practical exercises as I have from "perform a dfs" style exercises, in the above 60% range.

Assuming they sign up for an account. Email them, and ask. There are tons of products out there to allegedly help with this within your site: i.e feedback popups, chat popups, etc. But the easy way is simply to email them!

As an engineering leader who has done a reasonable amount of hiring in the heart of silicon valley, every single negotiation tactic provided by a candidate who received an offer (when we hired for on premises) was along the lines of "I need more / should be given more salary because of Cost of Living".

Some might say there's a power dynamic, and it's just an excuse used by a candidate to negotiate higher - but at the end of the day that is what I heard every single time, without fail, when someone wanted to negotiate their salary.

If that's the case, then it does definitely indicate to me that "where you live" is a variable, and an especially important variable.

And the standard startup contract says business hours are "9-5"

The poster's point is that what they say doesn't match reality, contract or otherwise

If you're collecting data, you generally want a) as much as you can get and b) be able to make use of it any way you want.

Yes users of a privacy centric analytics tool are opting into less information, though the inability to do more may be a large downside to counter (if it is the case that it has less data collection capabilities vs plausible at this time). You never know what data you will need later, better to collect however much you're able to in a fashion you can do anything you need to with it.

Can't speak for the OC, but I'd say decision paralysis for these sorts of utilities is more about "will I regret having used this after a year vs something else" and less about "can I dump this after trying it for a week".

Competition is great, but people are people and want to know they're making a good longer term decision, which isn't always clear in the short term.

This is just something you can't help with outside of provide information, especially since use cases and desires of users of these services change over time.

Using a better algorithm makes sense, though a single color seems to be the point of the "product" in this case.

You should recognize your privilege along with your strengths, and not overtly hide your privilege to appear on equal footing.

I have intimate knowledge with writers, specifically offspring of well known writers who do their best to hide this fact, yet will still use their parents agent. And yes, it is unfair for them to believe they are on equal footing with any other writer.

That doesn't mean they don't try hard, but they do have benefits built into their life that others don't.

If you want to trailblaze without being perceived as someone of privilege getting there then you should take paths that align with that, and not ones that don't.

Definitely not meant as a deterrent for anyone. Just stating information I've viewed. That's all.

If anything those coming from backgrounds I didn't list should try to be as involved as possible with startups. Thanks for the alternative take, but nothing stated was meant to deter as much as inform.

We also shouldn't erase potential truths for lack of crowdsourced data. We as a tech community have a large desire to ask for the source, which is great, but double edged.

Relaying information of this sort that I and others brought up is important on the basis of more eyes on the potential problem and looking into the data than not.

Don't think there was any weighing in on fairness going on as much as it not being acknowledged enough.

I believe, from experience seeing it, many founders who succeed will quote literally everything but their background, upbringing, and privilege as a factor, even though the fact that they had little to worry about while building their empire with respect to you know, the things everyone else has to care about on a daily basis (bills, debt, what happens if I fail) is an extremely large factor.

The barrier to entry of them taking a risk is so much lower that it is (in my opinion) directly correlated to their success at the end of the day.

Anyway, that's all. Less about fairness, and more about wish this was really highlighted more.

I love this comment. I don't think this notion gets highlighted enough.

This is definitively anecdotal, though I've been at / through approximately 5 startups across 12 years, and looking back, I believe each end everyone one (except for one) was definitely helped / started by a founder or set of founders who didn't have to worry about whether they went belly up or not due to family wealth. Hell, I still know some that I've consulted for that have lived in the bay area for the past 8 years without a product that makes any money, no vc funding, and were just out of their masters 8 years ago.

Clearly looking back, nearly every founder I've worked for came from a family with $$$. Even currently, at least one of my co-ceos just up and left their 2 million dollar menlo park house and went to live in their parents vacation home in monterey right when covid began.

Taking risks becomes extremely easy when you have a large family wealth backed safety net propping you up along the way. This happens way more often than people realize, and often the founder(s) will definitely not talk about this at all / downplay it if it is brought up.

The privilege is real.

Yea don't lie. That won't go well if you get hired and now you have to remember to keep some lie consistent.

Just be honest. Seems fine. As someone who speaks with many candidates a week, I'm more worried about people who average 1 year at various jobs across 5 years (such as someone working 4-6 jobs in a 5 year span) than someone who has a year gap that is likely more reasonably explained.

Sure, for now. We would all be naiive to believe that insurance companies wouldn't lobby to be able to use other such information continually if they had it until they can use it to charge you more.

The least interesting part of intercom at this point is the chatbox itself.

Intercom at this point is / is moving towards a tool to reach your customers / specific audiences sitting atop your eventing system to Target specific users at the right time (where a single one of those avenues may be through the chat widget).

The realized the least interesting part of this all is the chatbox itself, what's more interesting is leveraging internal information towards a better customer experience (through chat or other messaging channels)

"work somewhere or on something you enjoy"

Definitely not true, and a generalization. I've worked at the shittiest of shitty culture game startups in the early 2010s to places that really strive to build a great culture for everyone at work, is empathetic, and cares about putting employees on a career track they care about.

Just because you haven't been at such a place doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just because you had a bad experience doesn't mean that speaks for everyone.

At this point you can definitely work for interesting startups remotely, I've personally consulted for several in the past year on the side. They use interesting tech, have great people, and are working on interesting problems.

I'm tired of the whole "if you're doing x at a startup you're foolish"

You only live once, it's amazing to be an engineer now and have all the choices of being able to actually work somewhere that you ENJOY working at, that you align with and find interesting. If that job happens to pay you $250k / year then great, but if it pays you only $150k and you actually enjoy half your waking hours then seems like you're the real winner.

Doesn't have to have been made with any malice to still be creepy.

Because yea, it's creepy.

This. A million times over. I lead the engineering and run the hiring and I too just turn down senior engineers left and right at times.

We run about as practical a process as I can imagine. A short take home exercise where you use your own environment and build a very small project and are free to even have a starter ready to go ahead of time to focus on the question asked.

In house we have a project you work on on our code base. Very small. Maybe ends up requiring less than 20-30 lines of code for the day. Most people who come in are always familiar with our stack.

The amount of people that just fall on their face is astonishing. Many people will be fine with Greenfield development but then have zero skills being able to deal with an existing code base with places stubbed out with //todos and the ability to pair with people on the team.

I'm convinced people are getting turned down not because of the interview process, but because they just aren't that good at the end of the day.

Yes. I do not need a bunch of code wizards, we aren't solving if p=np daily. But that doesn't mean I should accept people who can't code I'm hopes of them growing into fine developers. I can do that worth one person, but not when bringing on 8.

People are hinting that it is not strictly required to get what was initially desired done.

And that seems 100% true.

You do not have to do everything at one time. You can easily to one thing, and then right after that, literally right after, do another.

You could have gotten the proxy up and going, and then upgraded node.

It's not about "doing the minimum work" it's about understanding the problem space, what can be split up, and how to attack the surface area efficiently.

You're also introducing other problems that can occur by doing multiple things at the same time.

Generally speaking I advocate my developers to be really good at separating problem spaces and attacking accordingly. It's really hard to take on multiple issues at one time and actually have high confidence in not breaking many systems along the way.

Plenty of people, and I mean plenty, like many (I can back up with citations if that is really helpful)

a) own their content 100% that they make on their own sites b) definitely rely on social networking / media applications for driving a fanbase.

Meritocratic in the most boring uninteresting sense of the term where you literally only work on things in a way which Google tells you will help advance you up their ladders while not actually working on anything in a way you would find interesting in general.

I posted somewhere else on this thread, but putting a main one as well.

What gets lost in the whole "get rid of like counts" argument is that doing so generally speaking just helps those who are well-known and really makes it more tough for others to get there.

Many individual creators rely on likes, shares, reposts, w/e to drive their reach. Without a replacement that provides the same ability for the individual to gain that same reach this sort of change just hurts them.

Sadly, people do care about how many others found something interesting as a reason for whether they should pay attention to it or not, so something like this can literally take money out of people's hands that make pretty honest livings at what they do (such as webcomic artists) and makes it even more tough for them to just get while working for themselves.

The problem is people make honest livings off of doing things that at this day and age require these sorts of mechanisms within social networks to allow them to thrive and work for themselves vs a company.

Many individual / independent creators 100% rely on the ability to reach others and people generally respond to the flock of many people liking / sharing a single post of some kind. I don't think it's fair to negate this as being useful.

We with generally much better paying jobs to stress / work life balance ratio within the tech industry have the privilege of not having to worry about such things being taken away and literally taking our paychecks away as well.

Political leaning is not a protected class.

nor in 2019!