16 ms·

As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and e

by mabbo 10y ago

As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.

Panini_Jones 10y ago
They also have a pretty bad reputation among U of T students.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- brutus1213 10y ago
  Toronto seriously needs better tech employers :'(
- stephanos2k 10y ago
  how so?
  - Panini_Jones 10y ago
    They have a reputation for being a bad employer for interns (culture/mentorship) and also producing bad software. Apparently, many of the students (not including myself) have actually used the software and not enjoyed the experience.
    - js4win 10y ago
      Hi, I'm a current dev at Top Hat, went to UofT and started about a month ago. As @fastftw mentioned, the culture and mentorship are much better than you would expect at most growing startups. The teams are small, yet the software we deliver is well tested internally before being put out into production. The best part here is that employees are encouraged to use the Top Hat products themselves, which really helps better the overall applications. As for mentorship, team leads and the execs are very accessible and guide you through how the processes at the company work. New employees are encouraged to share their opinions while doing development which is a big plus. I hope this cleared up some concerns you had!
- fastftw 10y ago
  - Current TopHat Full Stack Dev PEY here - I'm not sure what your basis of a bad reputation is, but, I've been working at TopHat for the past 10+ months as part of their engineering team and it's been my favourite internship thus far (I've had 2 previous internships in development). As far as I know, myself and one other UofT student are the first PEY's to have been hired, and our current opinions of the company are quite high. To highlight some extraneous comments regarding mentorship, it should be known that the teams are sized to about 5-8 people, with a team lead & product manager facilitating each team. Bi-weekly one-on-one's are in place to catch up with your respective lead and talk about your experience thus far, goals for the future, and really providing a basis of mentorship and growth. Higher ups such as the VP's are always accessible throughout the day to chat; we're pretty open. If you have further questions, feel free to comment below and I'll get back to you ASAP! ^^
  - rconti 10y ago
    "Professional Experience Year" http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/PEY http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/PEY
  - Panini_Jones 10y ago
    My negative comments on the reputation of the company come from 3rd hand sources (possibly even more hands). I'm glad you're finding your experience to be fruitful; I will add it as a datapoint to my understanding of the perceived reputation of the company. Do U of T students like the software TopHat produces?
danielhooper 10y ago
I called them out on this in one of the Who's Hiring posts they always comment on. This seems like a reallllyyyy obvious problem for them...
- pyre 10y ago
  This reminds me of people calling out DeviantArt several years ago in Who's Hiring posts, and their hiring practices. Which culminated in this blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061860
  - canistr 10y ago
    What's interesting to me about the discussion in this article is how many people talked about wanting to adopt Google/Amazon's hiring process and how they liked the 7 interviews/whiteboarding way more than take-home assignments. Call me weird, but I prefer the assignments than the mindless discussions about balancing trees and Big-Oh notation.
    - cholantesh 10y ago
      I think there is a place for both. Maybe not data structures, but things like application architecture and development practices are ripe for good discussion. A well designed take home assignment, meanwhile can be a good filter, telling you immediately if the candidate knows the basics and has the added benefit of showing you strengths and weaknesses in their practice.
    - lkozma 10y ago
      Having written a thesis about "balancing trees and Bih-Oh notation" I am saddened that you consider the topic mindless :)
3pt14159 10y ago
I haven't heard great things about working there over the years.
libovness 10y ago
what are some of the other more interesting companies/startups in Toronto?
- todazar 10y ago
  I'm at CanadaStays - one of the biggest in vacation rentals in the great white north.
- ptmstart 10y ago
  I would say Wealthsimple.
- throwawayosiu1 10y ago
  Shopify seems interesting. There really are not that many tech companies in Toronto (and that are hiring unless you have 5+ yrs of experience). Either 1. you have very very early stage startups (that expect you to work for free till they get funded), 2. funded startups that have a short runaway and expect you to work like crazy till they get to the next round of funding (during an interview with a fintech startup - it was mentioned that they expected me to work for ~12+ hrs / day but I'd still get paid for only 8 hrs. But when they scaled up, I'd be "rewarded" for my hustle, grit and commitment". 3. Big companies (Google, Mozilla, etc.) who are looking for quite a lot of devs but seem to be insanely picky about hiring them. To add to this, there seem to be a lot of devs than jobs (or that companies can go for long without hiring for those open roles).
  - omouse 10y ago
    The market is definitely strange in Toronto. Did the #2 type companies offer any equity at all?
    - throwawayosiu1 10y ago
      They all do. the first ones offer anywhere between 30% (if you are a co-founder), 15% - 1% (if you are in the first 10 to get hired). The 2nd type offer equity (generally less than 1%) and in all honesty it's pointless - chances are they'll fail before your 4 yr vesting period (and if you work for 12 hrs/day everyday you'll probably get burnt out even before you hit your year 4). And even if they don't fail, if you do get equity (and convert it to cash) divide it by 4 + salary / yr, you are basically making less than the avg salary for your position / exp in your area.
pyre 10y ago
I went through the interview process with them several years ago (when they were still called Top Hat Monocle). I basically got very positive feedback from the interview process, until I had to interview with the CEO. Apparently the reason given by the CEO for torpedoing me was that I didn't have enough projects on my Github account so I didn't "love the web" enough. Take from that what you will about their attitude towards hiring (taking into account that this was 3+ years ago). That said, I haven't met anyone from Top Hat that I personally had a bad opinion of.
- surge 10y ago
  Seriously? Not every project can be in a public repo, are all their projects on open repos? Some of us host our own or use different sites because we've been using git longer than github. Also, love the "web". It's called the Internet, are you a tech CEO or not? I love how critical they are because you didn't conform to their specific idea of how coders share their code and communicate. Someone can be pro open source, and have lots of projects ongoing but host their own gitlab, IRC server, etc, they share with their community or started long before github was a thing. I also can't imagine someone whose in this field that doesn't "love the web". Github is good, but it's not the only way to do it.
  - latch 10y ago
    I agree it's ridiculous to get to be turned down for that reason at that point. If that was their attitude, they could at least be efficient about it for their own sake and out candidates. But, in general, I think you should consider the other side of the argument. The "problem" is that people without public profiles are competing with people with. And if you're looking at candidates and someone has code online that looks promising after a brief examination, I think it's reasonable to take that into account. It's not that the other person is lazy or "doesn't love the web".
    - sidlls 10y ago
      If "It's not that the other person is lazy or "doesn't love the web"." then why is it "reasonable to take that into account?" Those two sentiments seem to contradict each other. The real problem here is that there is now yet another terrible signal being used as a measure of acceptability in the vetting and interview process. "Have some GitHub/GitLab/etc profiles" is in the same category as "give the most personable person in the office promotions and raises".
axiom 10y ago
I'm the founder/CEO of Top Hat I'd love to hear about your experience and what we can do better - my email is mike at tophat dot com Hiring engineers is one of the most important things we need to get right, so I'd hate to think we're doing such a bad job at it. Really sorry that you've had a bad experience with us
- eth0up 10y ago
  Maybe not the suggestion you're looking for, but I'll take the opportunity to vent. First and foremost, don't arbitrarily block Linux users for web interfaces. McGraw Hill does, or did in the past and so do others. I spent hours contacting their useless support and playing politics with the college to get this changed, to no avail. At first, I could simply change my useragent and sneak in, with everything working well enough. When they 'smartened up' (or whatever) a bit, they effectively kept me out thereafter. This was a very nasty and persistent problem for me and one I won't forget. Also, I never once found McGraw Hill software helpful. It seemed a cheap, shameful way to employ 'professors' otherwise too inept and uncreative to manage their own coursework and classes. At the undergraduate level, many colleges are becoming odious rackets (by my observations). McGraw Hill et al are indispensable allies here. Be different, be effective, be honest about education. Real education isn't a gravy train.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    Funny, physical textbooks have never blocked me from using Linux, nor has physical paper coursework...
    - VT_Drew 10y ago
      Exactly. >Even as the big publishers work to increase the proportion of sales that come from digital products, they’re still largely dependent on physical books. The other issue the large sum of money they want to charge per book. The cost of the books is so high that it is propping up "physical book" market. Mostly because publishers have offered no way to resell your digital or ebook. Lots of students buy used text books, and students that buy new often sell their books to recover some of the cost when they complete the class. The publishers see digital books as a way to prevent students from doing this so that everyone has to buy new (at the ridiculously high prices). The students are going to do what is economical for them, until the prices either drop significantly, or you offer an online marketplace where students can sell/trade digital books then physical college text book industry will be here to stay.
omouse 10y ago
Read through their GlassDoor reviews, it suggests they're an awful company on both the dev and sales side. And that means thatm at this point, their product probably isn't very good because devs keep leaving. Which means it'll be a mountain of technical debt to deal with and of course the inevitable, "omg we must have new features X, Y, and Z". They're no longer a startup, yet they act like it. If they didn't raise more cash I would suspect that they would be out of business in a few short years.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Sucks because I'd like to see real disruption in the text book industry. It's like trying to compete against Wal-Mart .. I still shop at Target/Kroger/et. al, but I realize they now employ a lot of the same supply chain practices Wal-Mart started just to stay competitive. So it makes me wonder if Top Hat, claiming to be disruptive and different, is or will eventually employee questionable practices just like the current industry.
jtchang 10y ago
Really good to know. I wonder if there is a site that actually lets you post reviews of interviews from companies. Glassdoor I guess is one but I'd be curious about culture as well.
throwawayosiu1 10y ago
A friend of mine was selected for a Support Role (that too, a temp one). They had him and a bunch of other come in on the same day, and write a 16 page exam. From what I understand, my friend didn't like the atmosphere and was already overqualified so he accepted another position. But this left a bad taste in my mouth about their hiring practices - but then again, if they are continuing with this, it probably means that it works for them.
- omouse 10y ago
  What was on the 16pg exam? that sounds ridiculous!
  - throwawayosiu1 10y ago
    Everything from: 1. how you'd handle customers for various problems? (which seems fair enough). 2. some coding questions (my friend did this in matlab but they wanted him to do it in python). 3. some IQ questions 4. some questions about the platform (which my friend didn't have an idea about as he'd never used top hat before).
    - softawre 10y ago
      > some questions about the platform I think it's useful to know whether an interviewee who has driven into your place of business is serious enough to spend 30 mins learning your platform.
      - flukus 10y ago
        It's fair if the website has useful content. I've been pinged before for not researching the company after their website basically said "we specialize in absolutely everything".
alexc05 10y ago
I never went through the "full process" at TopHat - but I've been impressed with the interactions I've had. As a former teacher, now an engineer I thought they'd be a really great fit. The one time I reached out to them though, I called it off before we could move forward because I got a promotion, raise and change of role (all of which I was specifically looking for). I don't know much about the culture - but my understanding is that they've got good compensation & a reasonable work life balance. (EDIT: wow, reading the other comments here, my understanding may have been WAY off) Actually taking on the textbook publishing industry would be a really big deal IMO. I could imagine a few really interesting disruptions there. Tablet versions of all textbooks via a "netflix" type model? Maybe like $250/year for access at the university level rather than $600 for that one totally esoteric 30 page title on the mating habits of the African fruit fly. Students save over the cost of all books, and the edge-titles get brought up. Maybe that's a bit too Pollyanna an idea. I'm sure there would be an amazing volume-market if you did it at the high-school level. One digital subscription account, all textbooks. No defacing, no lugging heavy books, access anywhere, always up to date. If pages and sections were PDF exportable with low-impact DRM it really could be revolutionary.
canistr 10y ago
+1 to the reputation of Top Hat amongst Toronto devs. Everyone I know is avoiding the place like the plague. Regardless of the salaries touted on places like StackOverflow Jobs.
tempVariable 10y ago
Same here, in 2012. I talked with who I remember is one of the founders. I believe there were already in Toronto or in the process of moving from the Waterloo area. It was very bad as far as whole process was concerned. I didn't mind though since they were in their infancy and I moved onto a different position anyway.
- georgee 10y ago
  I can't speak to the process in 2012, but I assure you we have a very mature, modern agile process in place now.
lhorie 10y ago
I applied directly a few years ago (prompted from an ad at stack overflow), and response times were pretty reasonable. The interviewing process itself was somewhat time-intensive for a Toronto company (it had a do-at-home assignment, which is fairly uncommon in TO), but other than that it was a fairly average experience. Ultimately I turned down their offer, because their offer was low (and going from the who-is-hiring threads, it still is lower than market averages) With that said, I got a chance to talk to some of the developers, and the work-life balance seemed reasonable (although not as good as, say, working at CGI)
- gabbo 10y ago
  May I ask where you chose to go instead? I don't see much which is exciting in Toronto (bad money, uninteresting tech).
  - mabbo 10y ago
    There's a growing number of startups in Toronto, mostly in the Fintech space. Amazon's office here has around 500 devs now too, doing various interesting things (I spent 5 years there). Apart from the madness that is housing prices, dev wages vs cost of living aren't too bad here. Hopefully that housing bubble pops, and then Toronto will really be attractive to developers.
    - gabbo 10y ago
      One can hope :). TBH, absent Amazon Toronto paying unexpectedly well and having great work (or a Toronto real estate collapse), it sounds almost like going to work for Google in Waterloo and somehow making that work sounds like the least bad option in the GTA.
  - lhorie 10y ago
    I stayed at the company I was at (Klick Health) for a few more years, but moved to a different department doing more interesting things. Truthfully, I left because even after two very large raises, the salary was still not competitive w/ similar recruiter-advertised positions. After that, I went to work remotely for a company in Boulder, CO, called Human Design. Money-wise, the better opportunities I heard about in TO were mostly from a recruiting agency called JobSprings (usually in the 120k range, usually in the queen west area). It's exceedingly rare to find anything above 150k. Tech wise, yes, it's predominantly Angular 1 jobs.
dbg31415 10y ago
Recruiting is an imperfect endeavor. That whole "85% personality, 15% skill" saying really applies here. I've seen great developers get frustrated that they have to talk to a junior HR rep for their first screen and say things that were way over her head, or just flat out rude. (Not saying you were, or intentionally were at any rate.) HR / Recruiters really piss me off too... I was working at a company as a contractor, helping to build their in-house dev team and transition them away from using contractors. I sent them one of the best devs I knew, and a great guy who had worked on very similar tech stack to boot. He didn't even make it to round 2. His version: Well, the HR screener was 15 minutes late calling me, then wasted another 10 minutes asking questions about the wrong role -- an accounting role instead of a dev role. About the 4th accounting question in, I realized what was wrong and asked her if she was reading off the right question list. We got if fixed up, but she seemed really embarrassed. Her version: He wouldn't have been a good fit for our company culture. Total shame, but what can you do? The screener gets all the power in that situation... we trust her because we hired her, but she's clearly in a position where if she makes a mistake and doesn't want to own up to it... she can just sweep it under the rug. She has a bad day... wants to take it out on a candidate, what are you going to do about it? Her knowledge of tech is 100% limited to what sounds like a good answer relative to other answers other candidates have given her. Culture fit, and the human side is important... probably a safe bet in most situations that if you can't talk with the bubbly 22 year-old recent college grad, you probably will have communication issues with others too. All you can do is be kind, move on to round 2 and hope you eventually get to talk to someone in your specialty smart enough to know how to actually rate your talent. =P
andrew_wc_brown 10y ago
Toronto startup hire culture is really sad even today. I interviewed at Top Hat 3+ years ago and I remember their hiring process was sad because it was a FizzBuzz test under conditions that were setup for me to fail. I wasn't allowed to use my own laptop, editor of choice, or language of choice to complete the test. They wouldn't tell me what conditions they wanted eg. do they want test code? I had to do the test on their computer, in javascript, no internet. They said I was slow. Well you should have let me use MacVim and I would shown how slow you are in TextMate. They said I didn't write test code. They wouldn't tell me, and they wouldn't even look at mass bodies of work of production apps where I had tons of test code I written with CI.
- wahnfrieden 10y ago
  Hey, I'm Alex @ Top Hat, in engineering Sorry to hear you had an awful experience like that. We definitely want to provide a better candidate experience than that. As I mentioned before in this thread I can't speak for interviews that long ago, but these days we have a standard process: we want to see you in your element, so you're encouraged to use your own machine and whatever tools and languages you're best at. We also currently do a pairing-style mini-project where you're free to look things up - Google has become another essential tool for devs, so we want to avoid forcing people into unnatural ways of working that won't reflect their actual abilities in an interview.

by mabbo 10y ago

Panini_Jones 10y ago

They also have a pretty bad reputation among U of T students.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
brutus1213 10y ago
Toronto seriously needs better tech employers :'(
stephanos2k 10y ago
how so?
- Panini_Jones 10y ago
  They have a reputation for being a bad employer for interns (culture/mentorship) and also producing bad software. Apparently, many of the students (not including myself) have actually used the software and not enjoyed the experience.
  - js4win 10y ago
    Hi, I'm a current dev at Top Hat, went to UofT and started about a month ago. As @fastftw mentioned, the culture and mentorship are much better than you would expect at most growing startups. The teams are small, yet the software we deliver is well tested internally before being put out into production. The best part here is that employees are encouraged to use the Top Hat products themselves, which really helps better the overall applications. As for mentorship, team leads and the execs are very accessible and guide you through how the processes at the company work. New employees are encouraged to share their opinions while doing development which is a big plus. I hope this cleared up some concerns you had!
fastftw 10y ago
- Current TopHat Full Stack Dev PEY here - I'm not sure what your basis of a bad reputation is, but, I've been working at TopHat for the past 10+ months as part of their engineering team and it's been my favourite internship thus far (I've had 2 previous internships in development). As far as I know, myself and one other UofT student are the first PEY's to have been hired, and our current opinions of the company are quite high. To highlight some extraneous comments regarding mentorship, it should be known that the teams are sized to about 5-8 people, with a team lead & product manager facilitating each team. Bi-weekly one-on-one's are in place to catch up with your respective lead and talk about your experience thus far, goals for the future, and really providing a basis of mentorship and growth. Higher ups such as the VP's are always accessible throughout the day to chat; we're pretty open. If you have further questions, feel free to comment below and I'll get back to you ASAP! ^^
- rconti 10y ago
  "Professional Experience Year" http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/PEY http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/PEY
- Panini_Jones 10y ago
  My negative comments on the reputation of the company come from 3rd hand sources (possibly even more hands). I'm glad you're finding your experience to be fruitful; I will add it as a datapoint to my understanding of the perceived reputation of the company. Do U of T students like the software TopHat produces?

danielhooper 10y ago

I called them out on this in one of the Who's Hiring posts they always comment on. This seems like a reallllyyyy obvious problem for them...

pyre 10y ago
This reminds me of people calling out DeviantArt several years ago in Who's Hiring posts, and their hiring practices. Which culminated in this blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061860
- canistr 10y ago
  What's interesting to me about the discussion in this article is how many people talked about wanting to adopt Google/Amazon's hiring process and how they liked the 7 interviews/whiteboarding way more than take-home assignments. Call me weird, but I prefer the assignments than the mindless discussions about balancing trees and Big-Oh notation.
  - cholantesh 10y ago
    I think there is a place for both. Maybe not data structures, but things like application architecture and development practices are ripe for good discussion. A well designed take home assignment, meanwhile can be a good filter, telling you immediately if the candidate knows the basics and has the added benefit of showing you strengths and weaknesses in their practice.
  - lkozma 10y ago
    Having written a thesis about "balancing trees and Bih-Oh notation" I am saddened that you consider the topic mindless :)

3pt14159 10y ago

I haven't heard great things about working there over the years.

libovness 10y ago

what are some of the other more interesting companies/startups in Toronto?

todazar 10y ago
I'm at CanadaStays - one of the biggest in vacation rentals in the great white north.
ptmstart 10y ago
I would say Wealthsimple.
throwawayosiu1 10y ago
Shopify seems interesting. There really are not that many tech companies in Toronto (and that are hiring unless you have 5+ yrs of experience). Either 1. you have very very early stage startups (that expect you to work for free till they get funded), 2. funded startups that have a short runaway and expect you to work like crazy till they get to the next round of funding (during an interview with a fintech startup - it was mentioned that they expected me to work for ~12+ hrs / day but I'd still get paid for only 8 hrs. But when they scaled up, I'd be "rewarded" for my hustle, grit and commitment". 3. Big companies (Google, Mozilla, etc.) who are looking for quite a lot of devs but seem to be insanely picky about hiring them. To add to this, there seem to be a lot of devs than jobs (or that companies can go for long without hiring for those open roles).
- omouse 10y ago
  The market is definitely strange in Toronto. Did the #2 type companies offer any equity at all?
  - throwawayosiu1 10y ago
    They all do. the first ones offer anywhere between 30% (if you are a co-founder), 15% - 1% (if you are in the first 10 to get hired). The 2nd type offer equity (generally less than 1%) and in all honesty it's pointless - chances are they'll fail before your 4 yr vesting period (and if you work for 12 hrs/day everyday you'll probably get burnt out even before you hit your year 4). And even if they don't fail, if you do get equity (and convert it to cash) divide it by 4 + salary / yr, you are basically making less than the avg salary for your position / exp in your area.

pyre 10y ago

I went through the interview process with them several years ago (when they were still called Top Hat Monocle). I basically got very positive feedback from the interview process, until I had to interview with the CEO. Apparently the reason given by the CEO for torpedoing me was that I didn't have enough projects on my Github account so I didn't "love the web" enough. Take from that what you will about their attitude towards hiring (taking into account that this was 3+ years ago). That said, I haven't met anyone from Top Hat that I personally had a bad opinion of.

surge 10y ago
Seriously? Not every project can be in a public repo, are all their projects on open repos? Some of us host our own or use different sites because we've been using git longer than github. Also, love the "web". It's called the Internet, are you a tech CEO or not? I love how critical they are because you didn't conform to their specific idea of how coders share their code and communicate. Someone can be pro open source, and have lots of projects ongoing but host their own gitlab, IRC server, etc, they share with their community or started long before github was a thing. I also can't imagine someone whose in this field that doesn't "love the web". Github is good, but it's not the only way to do it.
- latch 10y ago
  I agree it's ridiculous to get to be turned down for that reason at that point. If that was their attitude, they could at least be efficient about it for their own sake and out candidates. But, in general, I think you should consider the other side of the argument. The "problem" is that people without public profiles are competing with people with. And if you're looking at candidates and someone has code online that looks promising after a brief examination, I think it's reasonable to take that into account. It's not that the other person is lazy or "doesn't love the web".
  - sidlls 10y ago
    If "It's not that the other person is lazy or "doesn't love the web"." then why is it "reasonable to take that into account?" Those two sentiments seem to contradict each other. The real problem here is that there is now yet another terrible signal being used as a measure of acceptability in the vetting and interview process. "Have some GitHub/GitLab/etc profiles" is in the same category as "give the most personable person in the office promotions and raises".

axiom 10y ago

I'm the founder/CEO of Top Hat I'd love to hear about your experience and what we can do better - my email is mike at tophat dot com Hiring engineers is one of the most important things we need to get right, so I'd hate to think we're doing such a bad job at it. Really sorry that you've had a bad experience with us

eth0up 10y ago
Maybe not the suggestion you're looking for, but I'll take the opportunity to vent. First and foremost, don't arbitrarily block Linux users for web interfaces. McGraw Hill does, or did in the past and so do others. I spent hours contacting their useless support and playing politics with the college to get this changed, to no avail. At first, I could simply change my useragent and sneak in, with everything working well enough. When they 'smartened up' (or whatever) a bit, they effectively kept me out thereafter. This was a very nasty and persistent problem for me and one I won't forget. Also, I never once found McGraw Hill software helpful. It seemed a cheap, shameful way to employ 'professors' otherwise too inept and uncreative to manage their own coursework and classes. At the undergraduate level, many colleges are becoming odious rackets (by my observations). McGraw Hill et al are indispensable allies here. Be different, be effective, be honest about education. Real education isn't a gravy train.
- coldpie 10y ago
  Funny, physical textbooks have never blocked me from using Linux, nor has physical paper coursework...
  - VT_Drew 10y ago
    Exactly. >Even as the big publishers work to increase the proportion of sales that come from digital products, they’re still largely dependent on physical books. The other issue the large sum of money they want to charge per book. The cost of the books is so high that it is propping up "physical book" market. Mostly because publishers have offered no way to resell your digital or ebook. Lots of students buy used text books, and students that buy new often sell their books to recover some of the cost when they complete the class. The publishers see digital books as a way to prevent students from doing this so that everyone has to buy new (at the ridiculously high prices). The students are going to do what is economical for them, until the prices either drop significantly, or you offer an online marketplace where students can sell/trade digital books then physical college text book industry will be here to stay.

omouse 10y ago

Read through their GlassDoor reviews, it suggests they're an awful company on both the dev and sales side. And that means thatm at this point, their product probably isn't very good because devs keep leaving. Which means it'll be a mountain of technical debt to deal with and of course the inevitable, "omg we must have new features X, Y, and Z". They're no longer a startup, yet they act like it. If they didn't raise more cash I would suspect that they would be out of business in a few short years.

djsumdog 10y ago
Sucks because I'd like to see real disruption in the text book industry. It's like trying to compete against Wal-Mart .. I still shop at Target/Kroger/et. al, but I realize they now employ a lot of the same supply chain practices Wal-Mart started just to stay competitive. So it makes me wonder if Top Hat, claiming to be disruptive and different, is or will eventually employee questionable practices just like the current industry.

jtchang 10y ago

Really good to know. I wonder if there is a site that actually lets you post reviews of interviews from companies. Glassdoor I guess is one but I'd be curious about culture as well.

throwawayosiu1 10y ago

A friend of mine was selected for a Support Role (that too, a temp one). They had him and a bunch of other come in on the same day, and write a 16 page exam. From what I understand, my friend didn't like the atmosphere and was already overqualified so he accepted another position. But this left a bad taste in my mouth about their hiring practices - but then again, if they are continuing with this, it probably means that it works for them.

omouse 10y ago
What was on the 16pg exam? that sounds ridiculous!
- throwawayosiu1 10y ago
  Everything from: 1. how you'd handle customers for various problems? (which seems fair enough). 2. some coding questions (my friend did this in matlab but they wanted him to do it in python). 3. some IQ questions 4. some questions about the platform (which my friend didn't have an idea about as he'd never used top hat before).
  - softawre 10y ago
    > some questions about the platform I think it's useful to know whether an interviewee who has driven into your place of business is serious enough to spend 30 mins learning your platform.
    - flukus 10y ago
      It's fair if the website has useful content. I've been pinged before for not researching the company after their website basically said "we specialize in absolutely everything".

alexc05 10y ago

I never went through the "full process" at TopHat - but I've been impressed with the interactions I've had. As a former teacher, now an engineer I thought they'd be a really great fit. The one time I reached out to them though, I called it off before we could move forward because I got a promotion, raise and change of role (all of which I was specifically looking for). I don't know much about the culture - but my understanding is that they've got good compensation & a reasonable work life balance. (EDIT: wow, reading the other comments here, my understanding may have been WAY off) Actually taking on the textbook publishing industry would be a really big deal IMO. I could imagine a few really interesting disruptions there. Tablet versions of all textbooks via a "netflix" type model? Maybe like $250/year for access at the university level rather than $600 for that one totally esoteric 30 page title on the mating habits of the African fruit fly. Students save over the cost of all books, and the edge-titles get brought up. Maybe that's a bit too Pollyanna an idea. I'm sure there would be an amazing volume-market if you did it at the high-school level. One digital subscription account, all textbooks. No defacing, no lugging heavy books, access anywhere, always up to date. If pages and sections were PDF exportable with low-impact DRM it really could be revolutionary.

canistr 10y ago

+1 to the reputation of Top Hat amongst Toronto devs. Everyone I know is avoiding the place like the plague. Regardless of the salaries touted on places like StackOverflow Jobs.

tempVariable 10y ago

Same here, in 2012. I talked with who I remember is one of the founders. I believe there were already in Toronto or in the process of moving from the Waterloo area. It was very bad as far as whole process was concerned. I didn't mind though since they were in their infancy and I moved onto a different position anyway.

georgee 10y ago
I can't speak to the process in 2012, but I assure you we have a very mature, modern agile process in place now.

lhorie 10y ago

I applied directly a few years ago (prompted from an ad at stack overflow), and response times were pretty reasonable. The interviewing process itself was somewhat time-intensive for a Toronto company (it had a do-at-home assignment, which is fairly uncommon in TO), but other than that it was a fairly average experience. Ultimately I turned down their offer, because their offer was low (and going from the who-is-hiring threads, it still is lower than market averages) With that said, I got a chance to talk to some of the developers, and the work-life balance seemed reasonable (although not as good as, say, working at CGI)

gabbo 10y ago
May I ask where you chose to go instead? I don't see much which is exciting in Toronto (bad money, uninteresting tech).
- mabbo 10y ago
  There's a growing number of startups in Toronto, mostly in the Fintech space. Amazon's office here has around 500 devs now too, doing various interesting things (I spent 5 years there). Apart from the madness that is housing prices, dev wages vs cost of living aren't too bad here. Hopefully that housing bubble pops, and then Toronto will really be attractive to developers.
  - gabbo 10y ago
    One can hope :). TBH, absent Amazon Toronto paying unexpectedly well and having great work (or a Toronto real estate collapse), it sounds almost like going to work for Google in Waterloo and somehow making that work sounds like the least bad option in the GTA.
- lhorie 10y ago
  I stayed at the company I was at (Klick Health) for a few more years, but moved to a different department doing more interesting things. Truthfully, I left because even after two very large raises, the salary was still not competitive w/ similar recruiter-advertised positions. After that, I went to work remotely for a company in Boulder, CO, called Human Design. Money-wise, the better opportunities I heard about in TO were mostly from a recruiting agency called JobSprings (usually in the 120k range, usually in the queen west area). It's exceedingly rare to find anything above 150k. Tech wise, yes, it's predominantly Angular 1 jobs.

dbg31415 10y ago

Recruiting is an imperfect endeavor. That whole "85% personality, 15% skill" saying really applies here. I've seen great developers get frustrated that they have to talk to a junior HR rep for their first screen and say things that were way over her head, or just flat out rude. (Not saying you were, or intentionally were at any rate.) HR / Recruiters really piss me off too... I was working at a company as a contractor, helping to build their in-house dev team and transition them away from using contractors. I sent them one of the best devs I knew, and a great guy who had worked on very similar tech stack to boot. He didn't even make it to round 2. His version: Well, the HR screener was 15 minutes late calling me, then wasted another 10 minutes asking questions about the wrong role -- an accounting role instead of a dev role. About the 4th accounting question in, I realized what was wrong and asked her if she was reading off the right question list. We got if fixed up, but she seemed really embarrassed. Her version: He wouldn't have been a good fit for our company culture. Total shame, but what can you do? The screener gets all the power in that situation... we trust her because we hired her, but she's clearly in a position where if she makes a mistake and doesn't want to own up to it... she can just sweep it under the rug. She has a bad day... wants to take it out on a candidate, what are you going to do about it? Her knowledge of tech is 100% limited to what sounds like a good answer relative to other answers other candidates have given her. Culture fit, and the human side is important... probably a safe bet in most situations that if you can't talk with the bubbly 22 year-old recent college grad, you probably will have communication issues with others too. All you can do is be kind, move on to round 2 and hope you eventually get to talk to someone in your specialty smart enough to know how to actually rate your talent. =P

andrew_wc_brown 10y ago

Toronto startup hire culture is really sad even today. I interviewed at Top Hat 3+ years ago and I remember their hiring process was sad because it was a FizzBuzz test under conditions that were setup for me to fail. I wasn't allowed to use my own laptop, editor of choice, or language of choice to complete the test. They wouldn't tell me what conditions they wanted eg. do they want test code? I had to do the test on their computer, in javascript, no internet. They said I was slow. Well you should have let me use MacVim and I would shown how slow you are in TextMate. They said I didn't write test code. They wouldn't tell me, and they wouldn't even look at mass bodies of work of production apps where I had tons of test code I written with CI.

wahnfrieden 10y ago
Hey, I'm Alex @ Top Hat, in engineering Sorry to hear you had an awful experience like that. We definitely want to provide a better candidate experience than that. As I mentioned before in this thread I can't speak for interviews that long ago, but these days we have a standard process: we want to see you in your element, so you're encouraged to use your own machine and whatever tools and languages you're best at. We also currently do a pairing-style mini-project where you're free to look things up - Google has become another essential tool for devs, so we want to avoid forcing people into unnatural ways of working that won't reflect their actual abilities in an interview.