12 ms·

I disagree with this article, to some extent at least. Perhaps it's specific for trendy companies and startups. Most of which are just looking for the next shin

by chirau 9y ago

I disagree with this article, to some extent at least. Perhaps it's specific for trendy companies and startups. Most of which are just looking for the next shiny object, true. However, when you look at companies that move the needle in different industries, companies that have repute, market share and profitability, they couldn't care less what is trending these days. They look for domain expertise and excellence. I have friends who work at Renaissance, the hedge fund. The company couldn't care less about your grasp of the latest ML framework or Keros or whatever you were. As long as you know what you are doing and are exceptionally good at it. Having worked, full time, at Microsoft, I'd say the same goes there and at Apple, Oracle, even Google for the most part. They don't care about what is trending, just prove your weight. I think this conclusion was drawn from the companies that make the most noise but are actually not major players in industry. The same companies that are hot for a minute until they meet their eventual demise. The most robust, relevant and profitable companies out there basically say, 'F* trends, show us your worth in salt'. It's the hippie companies that ruin it all yet dictate social media conversation...for the 2 minutes their company is hot, then it dies. Long live domain expertise and exceptionality.

Boothroid 9y ago
I want to believe this is true.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  Most SWE interviews at Google take place in either Java or C#. These aren't sexy, trendy languages. They're boring line-of-business languages that just work. And the frameworks you already know matters very little.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - deepGem 9y ago
    I think you have the option of taking the test in Java, C++ or Python. I hadn't heard of the C# option. Thank you for mentioning the same.
    - zem 9y ago
      ruby too; it's not a language used at google, but it's available as an option to interview in
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      JacaScript is another frequently used language. It along with Python are typically what I see new grads using. More experienced interviewees tend to use Java/C#/C++. I interviewed in C# despite most of ,y interviewers not knowing it (though any dev can figure C# out well enough to evaluate algorithm correctness). I've also interviewed one person in Go ... despite me not really knowing Go. That's when it's really helpful to have written down every character during the interview for writing up the evaluation afterwards.
    - cableshaft 9y ago
      At my in-person interview at Google, they told me I could use whatever I felt most comfortable with, which at that point in time was Objective-C. In retrospect it was a terrible idea. That language is stupid verbose, and I ran out of whiteboard for every single question I had there. They were mainly interested in me for iOS development though. They did not give me an offer, although I don't think it was for that reason (I was a little nervous and two interviewers gave me some major head-scratchers).
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        It's definitely true that some languages are better than others, because the types of problem and time limitations are the same regardless of the language chosen. Lower level languages tend to be worse because they take longer and there's more ways to trip yourself up. Personally, I think that C# is the ideal language for interviewing in, as the .NET standard library is very powerful. SortedDictionary alone can easily polish off entire classes of interview questions, and the same can be said for pretty simply LINQ statements. I actually solved one problem so trivially using a combination of the right data structure and LINQ that the interviewer asked me to provide an alternate imperative implementation of the LINQ statement, just so he could see that I actually knew how to implement something like that rather than just use it. You can approach similar levels of power with use of Java 8's Streams APIs and a good collections library like Guava, but Guava is only likely to be understood by a majority of interviewers at Google, whereas the C# standard library should be understood by a majority of C# interviewers everywhere. It's absolutely worth spending a few hours brushing up on a "better" interviewing language and then using that rather than using a less optimal language just because it happens to be all you've used recently.
CoolGuySteve 9y ago
It’s funny you use Renaissance as an example. They won’t give me the time of day because they “don’t hire people from finance”. Which is just as much of a bullshit reason as the ones from the start of the article.
- cheez 9y ago
  Sure they may lose some great candidates that way, but the reality is that they don't want people in finance because: 1. They have preconceived notions about how finance "should" work 2. People not from finance are driven by other things This is not to say that there aren't people from finance who don't fall under this, but it's a good way to weed them out without inviting a billion applications from people in finance.
  - CoolGuySteve 9y ago
    So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only loosely correlated with profitability. So I wouldn't conflate Renaissance's success with their hiring practices.
    - kchoudhu 9y ago
      Message me. I'm looking for other finance refugees to do tech things with.
    - triplesec 9y ago
      Two things: 1. what was more or equally important than technical ability for HFT programmers' success in increasing profitability for the company? That was an interesting statement: can you elaborate? 2. That fun might have these heuristics that GP talks of, and for them, the people they hire may well be the best for them. As in, motivated and attitudinally oriented towards what they want, and more able to work free from the assumptions of _knowing_ how it's done in finance. They may be wrong in your case, but that's how heuristics work. To me, that's less of a bullshit case than trendy languages etc.
gt_ 9y ago
You seem to be not exactly disagreeing with the article, but maybe tightening the slack on what we would call a “trendy company.” The author did not specify any successes of the “trendy companies” being discussed(I’m not including fundraising as a success of the company), but they did speecify some failures, and left the options open for more. The author, like you, praised Google for not hiring on basis of “trendiness.” I think you’re in more agreement than disagreement. The article’s title/headline could be adjusted to more accurately represent the claims made in it.
driverdan 9y ago
Except all of those companies put an unreasonable amount of weight on degrees. Good luck getting Google to talk to you if you didn't graduate a top collage, let alone not having a degree.
- Delmania 9y ago
  There are advantages to going to college over a boot camp or self learning. In fact, CS and SE degrees are ones that pay for themselves. If you're not willing to put in the work, that tells me you won't last long at Google.
  - dimman 9y ago
    Because life can't happen? I don't agree with money > people
    - Delmania 9y ago
      Where exactly did I say that was not the case? There are plenty of options for getting a college degree, and there are way to get a job at these companies with needing. However, if you're going to try to get one be sending in your resume, expect to get turned down without a degree. Beyond that, software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless and that only self taught people are worth looking into. I've worked with many college educated people who can't write good code, and I've worked with many self-taught people who really don't understand what they're doing. The best has always been a person who went to school and then continued on learning after the fact.
      - DarronWyke 9y ago
        >Beyond that, software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless and that only self taught people are worth looking into. Ugh, yes. I've worked for a leading SIM and smart card manufacturer and they required a 4-year degree to even get in the door. I interviewed countless people, including some who were able to answer some quite technical questions that others couldn't. And many of those had to get disqualified since we found out during the interview process that they didn't have a degree. There were so many degree holders there that didn't know what the hell they were doing, and it was obvious.
wtetzner 9y ago
> The most robust, relevant and profitable companies out there basically say, 'F* trends, show us your worth in salt'. It took me few tries to understand this, after reading about F*: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15582969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15582969 I think you're mostly right, though. I think the article is probably right that companies who _say_ "we only hire the best" don't necessarily even hire good programmers. I don't think the companies you mentioned really care if they have the best, especially since that's pretty hard to measure anyway. They want people that are going to do great job in the area they were hired to work in.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
alexasmyths 9y ago
I think you have a valid point. Also I think you mean 'hipster' instead of 'hippie'. But - there are a lot of said 'hipster companies' in the Valley, moreover, the cult has spread beyond: it exists even in the copycat cities of Montreal, Van, NYC, Austin, Boulder, yada yada. I'm well into my 30's an the last few start ups I've consulted with - both in the Valley but not well known - were undeniably trying to be too hip. I'm as cool as late 30's something can try to be without losing any dignity :) but I felt like Grampa Simpson (not my antiquated pop culture reference)
- cableshaft 9y ago
  As far as I can tell it's spread across the whole country. At the very least, it's definitely present at startups in Chicago, where I'm at, and Chicago doesn't have that strong of a startup scene (it does have one, but it's pretty small compared to other metro areas).
ProAm 9y ago
You have never worked with someone from Oracle. They do not try to hire remotely the best, they hire cheap. Anyone that can churn out barely functional code, use their customers to functional test it, and take often half a fiscal year to provide a bug fix for you. Oracle is now more of a technical holding company than a software company, aside from their db, they merely pickup/purchase new companies and wring them out for revenue. Anything Oracle writes themselves is usually terrible.
- koolba 9y ago
  > You have never worked with someone from Oracle. They do not try to hire remotely the best, they hire cheap. Anyone that can churn out barely functional code, use their customers to functional test it, and take often half a fiscal year to provide a bug fix for you. They have a huge services division and that's the same formula used by all the big players. It's a numbers game for billing and they shoot to make it work by having a few highly competent people cover up for the C- players. > Oracle is now more of a technical holding company than a software company, aside from their db, they merely pickup/purchase new companies and wring them out for revenue. Anything Oracle writes themselves is usually terrible. Spot on. The database is incredible though the use cases I'd recommend it for over open source alternatives has shrunk to nearly nothing. Outside of that, the Oracle App landscape (Financials, HR, ...) are hilariously terrible, especially factoring in the prices paid for it.
  - stefantheard 9y ago
    I noticed you said "nearly nothing", what are some exceptions? I'm curious why anyone would start using Oracle now. The only reason I would see to use it is because you are reasonably dependent on it already and cannot migrate easily.
    - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
      It's telling there are no dissenting replies to this in a thread approaching 200 comments.
    - 9y ago
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
I wanted to post a snarky response to your comment, and so I went to the Rennaisance web page to look at their vacancies. And lo and behold, no Keras or Kafka in sight. I'm impressed. That's certainly not true for the Facebooks and the Apples of the world.
- tim333 9y ago
  There's also a Wikipedia section on their hiring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#.22Quants.22_with_non-financial_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#.22Qu...

by chirau 9y ago

Boothroid 9y ago

I want to believe this is true.

CydeWeys 9y ago
Most SWE interviews at Google take place in either Java or C#. These aren't sexy, trendy languages. They're boring line-of-business languages that just work. And the frameworks you already know matters very little.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deepGem 9y ago
  I think you have the option of taking the test in Java, C++ or Python. I hadn't heard of the C# option. Thank you for mentioning the same.
  - zem 9y ago
    ruby too; it's not a language used at google, but it's available as an option to interview in
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    JacaScript is another frequently used language. It along with Python are typically what I see new grads using. More experienced interviewees tend to use Java/C#/C++. I interviewed in C# despite most of ,y interviewers not knowing it (though any dev can figure C# out well enough to evaluate algorithm correctness). I've also interviewed one person in Go ... despite me not really knowing Go. That's when it's really helpful to have written down every character during the interview for writing up the evaluation afterwards.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    At my in-person interview at Google, they told me I could use whatever I felt most comfortable with, which at that point in time was Objective-C. In retrospect it was a terrible idea. That language is stupid verbose, and I ran out of whiteboard for every single question I had there. They were mainly interested in me for iOS development though. They did not give me an offer, although I don't think it was for that reason (I was a little nervous and two interviewers gave me some major head-scratchers).
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      It's definitely true that some languages are better than others, because the types of problem and time limitations are the same regardless of the language chosen. Lower level languages tend to be worse because they take longer and there's more ways to trip yourself up. Personally, I think that C# is the ideal language for interviewing in, as the .NET standard library is very powerful. SortedDictionary alone can easily polish off entire classes of interview questions, and the same can be said for pretty simply LINQ statements. I actually solved one problem so trivially using a combination of the right data structure and LINQ that the interviewer asked me to provide an alternate imperative implementation of the LINQ statement, just so he could see that I actually knew how to implement something like that rather than just use it. You can approach similar levels of power with use of Java 8's Streams APIs and a good collections library like Guava, but Guava is only likely to be understood by a majority of interviewers at Google, whereas the C# standard library should be understood by a majority of C# interviewers everywhere. It's absolutely worth spending a few hours brushing up on a "better" interviewing language and then using that rather than using a less optimal language just because it happens to be all you've used recently.

CoolGuySteve 9y ago

It’s funny you use Renaissance as an example. They won’t give me the time of day because they “don’t hire people from finance”. Which is just as much of a bullshit reason as the ones from the start of the article.

cheez 9y ago
Sure they may lose some great candidates that way, but the reality is that they don't want people in finance because: 1. They have preconceived notions about how finance "should" work 2. People not from finance are driven by other things This is not to say that there aren't people from finance who don't fall under this, but it's a good way to weed them out without inviting a billion applications from people in finance.
- CoolGuySteve 9y ago
  So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only loosely correlated with profitability. So I wouldn't conflate Renaissance's success with their hiring practices.
  - kchoudhu 9y ago
    Message me. I'm looking for other finance refugees to do tech things with.
  - triplesec 9y ago
    Two things: 1. what was more or equally important than technical ability for HFT programmers' success in increasing profitability for the company? That was an interesting statement: can you elaborate? 2. That fun might have these heuristics that GP talks of, and for them, the people they hire may well be the best for them. As in, motivated and attitudinally oriented towards what they want, and more able to work free from the assumptions of _knowing_ how it's done in finance. They may be wrong in your case, but that's how heuristics work. To me, that's less of a bullshit case than trendy languages etc.

gt_ 9y ago

You seem to be not exactly disagreeing with the article, but maybe tightening the slack on what we would call a “trendy company.” The author did not specify any successes of the “trendy companies” being discussed(I’m not including fundraising as a success of the company), but they did speecify some failures, and left the options open for more. The author, like you, praised Google for not hiring on basis of “trendiness.” I think you’re in more agreement than disagreement. The article’s title/headline could be adjusted to more accurately represent the claims made in it.

driverdan 9y ago

Except all of those companies put an unreasonable amount of weight on degrees. Good luck getting Google to talk to you if you didn't graduate a top collage, let alone not having a degree.

Delmania 9y ago
There are advantages to going to college over a boot camp or self learning. In fact, CS and SE degrees are ones that pay for themselves. If you're not willing to put in the work, that tells me you won't last long at Google.
- dimman 9y ago
  Because life can't happen? I don't agree with money > people
  - Delmania 9y ago
    Where exactly did I say that was not the case? There are plenty of options for getting a college degree, and there are way to get a job at these companies with needing. However, if you're going to try to get one be sending in your resume, expect to get turned down without a degree. Beyond that, software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless and that only self taught people are worth looking into. I've worked with many college educated people who can't write good code, and I've worked with many self-taught people who really don't understand what they're doing. The best has always been a person who went to school and then continued on learning after the fact.
    - DarronWyke 9y ago
      >Beyond that, software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless and that only self taught people are worth looking into. Ugh, yes. I've worked for a leading SIM and smart card manufacturer and they required a 4-year degree to even get in the door. I interviewed countless people, including some who were able to answer some quite technical questions that others couldn't. And many of those had to get disqualified since we found out during the interview process that they didn't have a degree. There were so many degree holders there that didn't know what the hell they were doing, and it was obvious.

wtetzner 9y ago

> The most robust, relevant and profitable companies out there basically say, 'F* trends, show us your worth in salt'. It took me few tries to understand this, after reading about F*: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15582969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15582969 I think you're mostly right, though. I think the article is probably right that companies who _say_ "we only hire the best" don't necessarily even hire good programmers. I don't think the companies you mentioned really care if they have the best, especially since that's pretty hard to measure anyway. They want people that are going to do great job in the area they were hired to work in.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

alexasmyths 9y ago

I think you have a valid point. Also I think you mean 'hipster' instead of 'hippie'. But - there are a lot of said 'hipster companies' in the Valley, moreover, the cult has spread beyond: it exists even in the copycat cities of Montreal, Van, NYC, Austin, Boulder, yada yada. I'm well into my 30's an the last few start ups I've consulted with - both in the Valley but not well known - were undeniably trying to be too hip. I'm as cool as late 30's something can try to be without losing any dignity :) but I felt like Grampa Simpson (not my antiquated pop culture reference)

cableshaft 9y ago
As far as I can tell it's spread across the whole country. At the very least, it's definitely present at startups in Chicago, where I'm at, and Chicago doesn't have that strong of a startup scene (it does have one, but it's pretty small compared to other metro areas).

ProAm 9y ago

You have never worked with someone from Oracle. They do not try to hire remotely the best, they hire cheap. Anyone that can churn out barely functional code, use their customers to functional test it, and take often half a fiscal year to provide a bug fix for you. Oracle is now more of a technical holding company than a software company, aside from their db, they merely pickup/purchase new companies and wring them out for revenue. Anything Oracle writes themselves is usually terrible.

koolba 9y ago
> You have never worked with someone from Oracle. They do not try to hire remotely the best, they hire cheap. Anyone that can churn out barely functional code, use their customers to functional test it, and take often half a fiscal year to provide a bug fix for you. They have a huge services division and that's the same formula used by all the big players. It's a numbers game for billing and they shoot to make it work by having a few highly competent people cover up for the C- players. > Oracle is now more of a technical holding company than a software company, aside from their db, they merely pickup/purchase new companies and wring them out for revenue. Anything Oracle writes themselves is usually terrible. Spot on. The database is incredible though the use cases I'd recommend it for over open source alternatives has shrunk to nearly nothing. Outside of that, the Oracle App landscape (Financials, HR, ...) are hilariously terrible, especially factoring in the prices paid for it.
- stefantheard 9y ago
  I noticed you said "nearly nothing", what are some exceptions? I'm curious why anyone would start using Oracle now. The only reason I would see to use it is because you are reasonably dependent on it already and cannot migrate easily.
  - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
    It's telling there are no dissenting replies to this in a thread approaching 200 comments.
  - 9y ago

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago

I wanted to post a snarky response to your comment, and so I went to the Rennaisance web page to look at their vacancies. And lo and behold, no Keras or Kafka in sight. I'm impressed. That's certainly not true for the Facebooks and the Apples of the world.

tim333 9y ago
There's also a Wikipedia section on their hiring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#.22Quants.22_with_non-financial_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#.22Qu...