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I've worked at a company that generally hired extremely good engineers - much better than average and they were very successful because (1) doing that was actua
by ljw1001 9y ago
I've worked at a company that generally hired extremely good engineers - much better than average and they were very successful because (1) doing that was actually important to the very hard problems they were solving, and (2) every other company in the world wasn't trying to take the same approach to hiring. Today, everyone thinks they should hire like google, even though they're building a mid-sized web or phone app.
- qaq 9y agoThat's not a problem, the problem is they want to hire like Google yet they do not provide equivalent level of compensation.
- stevenwoo 9y agoHow did they interview these engineers to hire them in the first place?
- ljw1001 9y agoReally hard puzzles that you had to submit a solution to if you wanted an interview. This was very rare in those days. The problems were original and clever, not pulled from a book or website. Also, the company was in Cambridge, MA and had very close ties to MIT so they could find people like that. If you got an interview, and did well you got another challenging programming problem to solve on-site. You were given a computer with the programming environment of your choice and as much time as you wanted, as well as someone to ask questions from. I think it was also important that the company solved hard graph problems in Lisp, with a lot of macro-driven code. If you were a Lisp programmer, you generally wanted to work there.