4 ms·

I had a bad interview experience with Oculus. This was fairly early on in their history, before the acquisition and before Carmack joined. First interview was

by throwaway001923 9y ago

I had a bad interview experience with Oculus. This was fairly early on in their history, before the acquisition and before Carmack joined. First interview was scheduled at a not-so-great time (I was in a different timezone, which they knew, but didn't seem to care enough to pick a less inconvenient time). My interviewer never showed up on skype. They apologized, rescheduled (I insisted on a more reasonable time). The interviewer showed up quite late, and only one of the two showed up. It went well, but had to schedule a follow up with the other one. That one went well also. We eventually got to the point where I was talking to HR about specifics of the offer, and everyone went completely silent. I tried to follow up a few times, but never heard back. I assume they found someone else, but have the respect to write back. Years later, I watched one of Carmack's talk and one of his complaints was just how bad they (he had joined Oculus at this point) were at stores infrastructure, discovery and payment and all of that. Seems pretty clear to me there's problem inside the non-core engineering aspect of the company.

bitexploder 9y ago
This is easy. Business is hard. Hacking is fun. As a founder you desperately don't want to deal with all of the annoying parts of being a business owner. You just want to hack and do the point of your place, not deal with pesky "business" things. I am talking simple things like taxes, etc. If you let that mentality bleed into things like setting up every part of your organization to be awesome you get this siloing effect. If you are a ONLY HIRE A-PLAYERS type company, that doesn't mean only hire great engineers. It means everyone needs to be great at what they do. Including HR, operations, etc. A lot of companies with super smart guys miss this. They still go on to success but I know from experience and at least a couple of friends that went very large in valuation and growth on the typical startup path that not taking more time on their company culture and instilling their values in ALL of the organization before it went meteoric caused them no end of grief and made them dislike their company, even though they built awesome engineering organization at the end of it all. (edit: sample size of two from personal experience, but based on observation, this seems almost axiomatic based on how so many startups go when you read their stories)

bitexploder 9y ago

This is easy. Business is hard. Hacking is fun. As a founder you desperately don't want to deal with all of the annoying parts of being a business owner. You just want to hack and do the point of your place, not deal with pesky "business" things. I am talking simple things like taxes, etc. If you let that mentality bleed into things like setting up every part of your organization to be awesome you get this siloing effect. If you are a ONLY HIRE A-PLAYERS type company, that doesn't mean only hire great engineers. It means everyone needs to be great at what they do. Including HR, operations, etc. A lot of companies with super smart guys miss this. They still go on to success but I know from experience and at least a couple of friends that went very large in valuation and growth on the typical startup path that not taking more time on their company culture and instilling their values in ALL of the organization before it went meteoric caused them no end of grief and made them dislike their company, even though they built awesome engineering organization at the end of it all. (edit: sample size of two from personal experience, but based on observation, this seems almost axiomatic based on how so many startups go when you read their stories)