HN user
What tax benefits this move might have is my question as well. It seems like if this were purely about internal organization they could have effectively reorganized Google in the same way without making Alphabet (although I'm not an executive so I could certainly be missing something here).
Yeah, if we're talking about JavaScript, the explanation should start with promises. It's a pattern lots of people know, and it's a very real-world example. No need to front-load the explanation with a bunch of complication before people even know why they should care.
I suspect some people (not saying this author) butcher the explanation intentionally. Makes it seem like an ineffable topic that only the smartest programmer can understand.
Yeah the Haskell part is mostly tongue and cheek :P I wouldn't use it for any old project but I could see how the benefits of Haskell could outweigh its difficulties in some scenarios. Personally, I like functional programming, but I'm not sure it's suitable for the masses (perhaps some day? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYk8CKH7OhE).
Certainly, it's one experience among many. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Yep, when I see "flat management" I really hesitate to apply. Especially as a minority in tech, I would rather find a hierarchical place with good managers who value good arguments than trust the herd.
Unless you have a team of unusually conscientious engineers, "democratic" or "flat" decision-making often translates to who shouts the loudest.
Not to mention engineers often want to complete the project in the most technically exciting way possible, rather than the way that will most benefit the product. Flat structure + too many engineers like that and you end up with this http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2597, written in Haskell.
Could you elaborate about the kinds of things that constitute a major failure?
Also, would you say your experience matches those of people you know on other teams with other managers?
As someone from a group that's underrepresented in tech, a co-op structure would make me hesitant to apply. I would be concerned that as a minority my voice would be lost. At least with a hierarchical structure I sign on knowing who the decision makers are and what their approach is (and thus I can find a place where the decision maker values solid arguments rather than whether the majority agrees).
I would like to know how they gauge performance too. Some cultures are about the perception of productivity, some are about actual productivity. Taken to an extreme, either case can make for a miserable work environment.
That is precisely the point. People with similar qualifications should have similar salaries. The "not great" trends implies salaries were correlated with something other than merit and qualifications.
The public schools I attended were far more economically, culturally, ideologically, and ethnically diverse than both my private college and post-college work environments (and you can throw in gender diversity too wrt my work environments). I would not have met kids like this otherwise -- certainly not if I had been in a homeschool group socializing with the children of parents who had similar philosophical views about schooling.
Public education is certainly in need of big reforms, but I'm grateful for the diversity I was exposed to attending one. It's a big part of what keeps me grounded in the ridiculous Silicon Valley bubble.
What is your programming interview like? If it's whiteboarding algorithms, it's likely to be eliminating a lot of good people who get nervous, and selecting for people who are good at studying interview questions and coding under pressure in an artificial environment. There is good evidence it doesn't predict job performance well, see: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/ and https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768
Do you have any testimonials from engineers who have been placed with help from Jobstart?
If discussions > broadcast then why disable comments?
I have told my designer friends in other areas how well in-house designers are paid in the Bay Area, and their response has always been that they think being in-house would be boring and they strongly prefer agency work (despite, in their experiences, super low pay and horrific management).
I have always wondered if in-house work is legitimately more boring or if the goal of working at an agency has just been drilled into them since design school.
Is it considered a stigma on one's resume to have done in-house work? If not, it seems like designers could go for the programmer model of employment -- work in-house for a few years then switch to a new place for new challenges when you stop learning and growing, unless a new challenge is presented.
Is the price listed anywhere?
I totally agree. Ironically I can't recommend LastPass to the people who most need it because they aren't tech-savvy enough to figure out and tolerate the UX issues.
I wish it were easier so I could get my parents using it.
"From 5:30pm-8:30pm, I’m not a startup CEO. I’m a dad." <- That statement right there pretty much illustrates my point.
I don't understand. Most of the non-founder, regular engineers with kids I know don't even get home at 5:30. Sounds like he's doing well for a working dad.
In that dish is the rice hot? Does the egg end up semi-cooked? I really hate most convenient American breakfast foods because I don't like to eat sweet stuff in the morning. Egg and rice sounds pretty appealing and very convenient.
I agree that these interview questions are going to be around for the foreseeable future, so people need to just learn them. But it's still a waste of time -- you have a limited amount of time to devote to learning new technology. You can either spend your time building a cool side project with interesting languages, frameworks, or technologies that are highly relevant to your work or you can use it to study algorithms you will never implement outside of an interview.
When faced with this dilemma in the past I have picked the interview prep because it's necessary, but I'd rather have been building cool stuff that actually helps me do my job better.
The problem is that irrelevant whiteboarding questions are far more the norm than relevant whiteboarding questions. Most companies interview this way, so if you avoid those companies you avoid nearly everyone.
I'm a full stack developer who specializes in front-end. Knowing how to structure a front-end app, knowing/following JavaScript best practices, and understanding the arcane idiosyncrasies of JavaScript are in my opinion three of the biggest values a front-end developer can add. However, the companies that assess this stuff in interview are an extremely small minority. I usually get questions about binary trees.
It's partly because it's more difficult to assess those ways of thinking in interview, and it's partly because linked list kinds of questions are just the way interviewing has always been done, so people keep doing it.
I actually would not be surprised -- I did neuroscience research at two major research universities, and I handled the lab finances as part of my RA duties.
Our grants and the university-provided lab startup funds bought the smaller stuff -- EEGs, eye-trackers, etc -- which ran in the thousands of dollars. The university financed the building and some of the maintenance of the larger stuff like the fMRI facilities we used, and we paid hourly to use them.
Apparently You and the author haven't haven't heard of the Rinzai school of Zen, which is not a Western invention. You're espousing quite a narrow point of view of a philosophy that is about supplanting dualistic closemindedness.
For people who are put off by ceremony and do not find long periods of sitting meditation (40 minutes or more) particularly useful, check out the Rinzai school of Zen. Shorter periods of sitting meditation, more emphasis on thinking critically about koans and "dharma combat" -- critical discussion. Rinzai abhorred ritual and ceremony for its own sake, so less emphasis on that.
Large research universities offer things that I think you would have a hard time replicating with this model. For instance, a research-grade fMRI facility costs millions of dollars to run and requires a large number of dedicated staff to maintain it. I can think of a lot of other resources like this -- primate facilities, certain kinds of DNA sequencing equipment, etc. Universities absorb this kind of cost with their endowment. I'm skeptical you could get a critical mass of scientists in a certain sub-speciality to be able to fund those things profitably, especially if they were doing basic science research (not pharmaceutical kinds of stuff that can make a profit on their own)
Totally agree with you. I would just use Linux if I could run Illustrator with out any special setup on Linux. Instead I have a MacBook Pro.
Synology released a security advisory outlining the affected Synology NASs: https://www.synology.com/en-global/support/security/bash_she...
This talk discussed coding at far more depth than the vast majority of recruiters could do. How many recruiters could tell you about big O time? Binary trees? Breadth first search? Not many.
Source https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8291665
Interesting you can't imagine this, because as a woman, similar situations as Gayle's have happened to me and to every female programmer I know. I have talked about code to people at language and framework-specific meetups only for them to later assume I'm not a programmer.
No recruiter, out of every recruiter I have ever spoken with from Google down to smaller startups, has ever discussed code with me beyond what languages I know and if I have experience writing tests.
It is absurd to talk with someone about code for an hour and assume they are a recruiter.
I was trying to figure that out too, whether they're making money off the hardware or my data. I found their privacy policy but I am still unsure what they're going for https://onlycoin.com/privacy/
I really think hard about whether these services are really worth forking over that much of my personal data, and as cool as this product is I don't think it's worth it. If vast amounts of my personal data weren't at stake I'd pre-order for sure :(
"So in essence, this is geared towards a micro-niche of tech savvy SF/NY/LA crowd."
I disagree. I sent the Coin video to my technology phobic parents in the midwest. They are hesitant to use most smartphone apps and online banking but they were really excited about Coin and could see themselves using it. It really appeals to them that 1) it's only slightly more complicated to use than a regular credit card (whereas, say, online banking requires you to learn a relatively elaborate user interface) and 2) keeps them from having to actively worry about leaving a card or wallet behind.
When you make a user interface a slight variation of something the user is already very familiar with, you can draw in the less tech-savvy because it's less intimidating. It's the same reason why my parents are avid Dropbox users but it's hard to get them to try new web apps.
I had a purchasing card when I worked for a state university. They monitored the transactions on the card extremely closely since it was tied to state money and federal grant money. If I had mistakenly charged a personal expense on it, I would have had to contact a couple different administrators, explain the mistake, and get the transaction refunded (and then pay for the expense myself). It would have been a bureaucratic pain, but I would not have gotten in trouble for it, certainly not jail.