5 ms·

- Are we supposed to prepare an answer for that question now as well? Nope. I don't want a prepared answer. I want an honest answer. Hence throwing them a roug

by beat 8y ago

- Are we supposed to prepare an answer for that question now as well? Nope. I don't want a prepared answer. I want an honest answer. Hence throwing them a rough, non-technical question that absolutely will not be on the resume, but has been part of the career of any experienced candidate. "Autocratic management" isn't a good answer, because it's too general. What did autocratic management do? Were the requirements incomplete? The schedule unrealistic? Beaten by the competition? Depended on unproven technology? Sometimes, everyone does everything right, and a project fails anyway. There's still a reason it failed. But when I hear a candidate talk about failure in the form of "I was a hero, but my idiot co-workers and malicious bosses ruined everything", I hear them finding someone to blame, rather than a problem that didn't get solved correctly. And that tells me a lot about what working with them will be like, when we have our inevitable failures.

HarryHirsch 8y ago
How would a life scientist coming from Theranos before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham talk about their experience in a culturally acceptable manner? Developing reproducible blood tests from tiniest samples was never going to work, and upper management was actively malicious at that company. We now know where the blame was (with Holmes and Balwani), but if you started there because their projects sounded exciting and then were looking for a new job because the task was impossible and management was crazy you had a problem, and you can't say that in an interview.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  "I worked on an awesome project and just kept my head down and worked like a good employee. Then one day I read the WSJ one day, and what do you know, my boss was getting investigated for fraud! Then the company shut down! I had no idea, because the sub project I was on worked perfectly. I heard people complain about managers, but they were on other teams and I didn't see them very much."
  - reificator 8y ago
    > before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  how do you know that "reproducible tests from small samples " would never work? Is there an equivalent of Shannons law that you could prove this.
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    Venous blood is simply venous blood. But capillary blood from fingertip samples contains variable amounts of interstitial fluid, and cell lysis is another issue there. There are tests where it doesn't matter - consider the blood glucose - the variability of capillary samples vs venous samples is well understood and the introduced error sufficiently small compared to reference range. But Theranos also tried electrolyte panels, and there you have a problem because the concentrations of ions in blood plasma are very different from the concentrations of ions inside cells. Both are tightly controlled in the healthy body. Slightly less than 50 % of blood is cellular matter, and even small amounts of lysis are sufficient to distort the numbers to render them clinically meaningless. You inevitably have lysis in capillary samples. Carreyrou talks about that in his book.
- beat 8y ago
  I'm not worrying about corner cases here. Theranos is an exception. But someone coming from a startup that died? Yeah, they can talk about it, and I'd like them to talk about how they saw it in an honest way.
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    Theranos was founded in 2003 and when people first started asking hard questions in 2012 or thereabouts they were marginalized. Holmes was the darling poster woman of Silicon Valley until the WSJ started investigating in October 2015. They were very much alive for over a decade. Startuplandia has a way of attracting hucksters, unscrupulous businessmen and crazies with a firm disregard for what is physically possible. I notice that Ubeam was founded in 2011 and they are still around! I once worked for an outfit where one founder was named party to an investor suit (he had awarded himself stock options after a clinical trial came out favourable) and the other was frankly incompetent and afflicted with cluster B personality disorders. It ended as well as one would have predicted. Failing startups because of founder personality and founder competence issues are unfortunately common, they are not corner cases at all, and for the person coming out of one the incidence is 100 %, but discussing such matters in an interview will torpedo your chances. No honesty for you, it's counterproductive for the jobseeker! Seriously, Dave, if you were interviewing a candidate that had been working on the gluebot that Carreyrou mentioned in Bad Blood, how would he have to spin the story to get an offer out of you?
    - beat 8y ago
      How to describe that? Simple, describe how management was setting up cage matches between competing development teams. I'm not saying "Don't blame management", not at all. I'm saying "bad management" is an insufficient answer. How did they go wrong? Playing dev teams off one another is a different problem than, say, insisting on using tech that isn't up to the task (a situation I've been in before), or an unwillingness to say no to the customer (a situation I've been in before, too). Hell, I've talked openly in interviews about the problems with a project that I got fired from, and blamed both management and the customer in no uncertain terms. I fault myself mostly for not walking out on it. I still get job offers when talking about how I got fired by incompetent management of an out-of-control project. But part of that is that my story leads somewhere - it leads to my lessons learned, conditions I will no longer tolerate in a workplace, #1 of which is the bottomless budget. So I care less about how you screwed up, or who or what you blame, and more about what you learned from the failure. Tell me that, and you win my heart.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by beat 8y ago

HarryHirsch 8y ago

How would a life scientist coming from Theranos before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham talk about their experience in a culturally acceptable manner? Developing reproducible blood tests from tiniest samples was never going to work, and upper management was actively malicious at that company. We now know where the blame was (with Holmes and Balwani), but if you started there because their projects sounded exciting and then were looking for a new job because the task was impossible and management was crazy you had a problem, and you can't say that in an interview.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago
"I worked on an awesome project and just kept my head down and worked like a good employee. Then one day I read the WSJ one day, and what do you know, my boss was getting investigated for fraud! Then the company shut down! I had no idea, because the sub project I was on worked perfectly. I heard people complain about managers, but they were on other teams and I didn't see them very much."
- reificator 8y ago
  > before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham
C1sc0cat 8y ago
how do you know that "reproducible tests from small samples " would never work? Is there an equivalent of Shannons law that you could prove this.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Venous blood is simply venous blood. But capillary blood from fingertip samples contains variable amounts of interstitial fluid, and cell lysis is another issue there. There are tests where it doesn't matter - consider the blood glucose - the variability of capillary samples vs venous samples is well understood and the introduced error sufficiently small compared to reference range. But Theranos also tried electrolyte panels, and there you have a problem because the concentrations of ions in blood plasma are very different from the concentrations of ions inside cells. Both are tightly controlled in the healthy body. Slightly less than 50 % of blood is cellular matter, and even small amounts of lysis are sufficient to distort the numbers to render them clinically meaningless. You inevitably have lysis in capillary samples. Carreyrou talks about that in his book.
beat 8y ago
I'm not worrying about corner cases here. Theranos is an exception. But someone coming from a startup that died? Yeah, they can talk about it, and I'd like them to talk about how they saw it in an honest way.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Theranos was founded in 2003 and when people first started asking hard questions in 2012 or thereabouts they were marginalized. Holmes was the darling poster woman of Silicon Valley until the WSJ started investigating in October 2015. They were very much alive for over a decade. Startuplandia has a way of attracting hucksters, unscrupulous businessmen and crazies with a firm disregard for what is physically possible. I notice that Ubeam was founded in 2011 and they are still around! I once worked for an outfit where one founder was named party to an investor suit (he had awarded himself stock options after a clinical trial came out favourable) and the other was frankly incompetent and afflicted with cluster B personality disorders. It ended as well as one would have predicted. Failing startups because of founder personality and founder competence issues are unfortunately common, they are not corner cases at all, and for the person coming out of one the incidence is 100 %, but discussing such matters in an interview will torpedo your chances. No honesty for you, it's counterproductive for the jobseeker! Seriously, Dave, if you were interviewing a candidate that had been working on the gluebot that Carreyrou mentioned in Bad Blood, how would he have to spin the story to get an offer out of you?
  - beat 8y ago
    How to describe that? Simple, describe how management was setting up cage matches between competing development teams. I'm not saying "Don't blame management", not at all. I'm saying "bad management" is an insufficient answer. How did they go wrong? Playing dev teams off one another is a different problem than, say, insisting on using tech that isn't up to the task (a situation I've been in before), or an unwillingness to say no to the customer (a situation I've been in before, too). Hell, I've talked openly in interviews about the problems with a project that I got fired from, and blamed both management and the customer in no uncertain terms. I fault myself mostly for not walking out on it. I still get job offers when talking about how I got fired by incompetent management of an out-of-control project. But part of that is that my story leads somewhere - it leads to my lessons learned, conditions I will no longer tolerate in a workplace, #1 of which is the bottomless budget. So I care less about how you screwed up, or who or what you blame, and more about what you learned from the failure. Tell me that, and you win my heart.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]