HN user
I've started and run five companies. I've had nothing but great experiences with Corp Dev and nothing but horrible experiences with VCs. Corp Dev wants to give you cash (usually!) for your company. VCs want to put you into their portfolio of companies, and they know ahead of time that they will destroy nine out of ten of their portfolio companies in order to coddle the tenth to Google-dom.
No, poor product management from neglected product managers did that. You might not be very excited to design icons as your primary job, either, if you thought your job was to manage the entire product.
The most fundamental problem at Google, of which bad UX/UI is one symptom, is that product management has no real power there. Engineering has all the power there, and basically does whatever it likes. It takes product management research as "input" for its decisions, but does not share power with product management.
Strong, competent product management balances user needs, marketplace conditions (competing and complementary products), and technological factors to create optimal products. What we see from the outside are products that are technologically strong, but suffer from lack of useful user perspective and market awareness.
Google will never create new (i.e. post search and AdWords) great products until it undergoes a complete cultural transformation toward a product management-focus.
Developers who have great insurance coverage at their current job and require it at their next job aren't candidates for startups like mine. We don't have health insurance for employees - it's just too expensive for all but the very well-funded startups.
For this reason, experienced developers from other countries which have universal healthcare coverage and low cost of living, such as many Eastern European Countries, are very attractive to many startups.
I take a completely different approach to hiring, and I've gotten fantastic results.
Instead of throwing tricky algorithm questions at a candidates, I scour their detailed employment records for the most relevant experience for the first project. In other words, I'm looking for relevant experience rather than top-of-the-head algorithmic brilliance. In the interview, I pose our project problem, and the candidate who gives me the most impressive proposal to get that done gets a chance to solve it.
I hire from an international pool, often on Upwork, so I can start developers on a project basis.
If the developer does a great job, we hire him/her for another project, and so on. At some point, this becomes a full-time relationship, with stock options and other perks.
Using this approach, we value experience over "raw intelligence," per se, and we end up with a team of self-directed developers who are fabulous at delivering great finished products.
It's amazing how well this has worked out for us. I think there's an arbitrage opportunity to avoid coding tests and hire on this basis.
I wrote a book advising parents how to give kids a life of independent neighborhood play. Check out Playborhood - http://playborhood.com
In a nutshell, I contend that this is a social problem of neighborhood culture, and parents should work to make their neighborhoods as fun and inviting as video games and the Internet. Simply cutting off electronics and shoving them out the door won't do it because there's no one out there - neighborhoods are very boring. Somehow, we need to create a culture of play, first with parents, and later without, in our neighborhoods. The book Playborhood is all about that.