3 ms·
I'd like to, but I feel like I've exhausted my options. I've interviewed all over the place, and I'm generally a nice guy and I think I'm pretty smart, but peo
by shawnps 16y ago
I'd like to, but I feel like I've exhausted my options. I've interviewed all over the place, and I'm generally a nice guy and I think I'm pretty smart, but people seem to never want to hire me, I dunno why.
I forgot to add this: the most recent interview that was discouraging was with a large travel-related company. A recruiter reached out to me (so, I didn't even apply), gave me a few questions to complete that I spent hours on. I worked super hard, typeset it in LaTeX, and figured it was way beyond what they normally receive from candidates. The recruiter even told me they were very impressed. I went in to interview, chatted with some engineers (and I even taught the second guy a few things, like the rename command), and never heard back. I emailed the recruiter and asked why. The recruiter said that the team simply needed to hire a senior candidate. I felt stupid for wasting my time.
Something similar happened with Jane Street; they wanted solutions to questions in OCaml. I spent a long time on the problems, submitted them in Scheme, Python, and OCaml, all using recursion, higher order functions, etc. After submitting the code, they turned me down.
Yelp also turned me down after I spent a long time on the problem they gave me. I did what the problem asked, including writing unit tests. It was fun to write since it was in Python, and I like Python. But again, turned down after submitting the code.
Also, I figured it wasn't a problem with the code, as I had friends who were hired by Amazon and Google review it and they said it looked fine.
These are the types of things that are making me want to stop interviewing.
What I'd like to do is become more active in the HN community, and eventually start working on projects related to studying Japanese or learning about Japan. I'm working on a small project now that will show a new Chinese character per day, because kanji-a-day.com is currently the top result in Google for "kanji of the day", and it's not nice looking.
- nola 16y agocontact info?
- shawnps 16y agoshawnpsmith@gmail.com, http://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnps http://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnps and thanks for taking an interest in me
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- matwood 16y agoWhere was a person like you the last time I was milling through resumes?
- shawnps 16y agoThanks, it helps to see a comment like yours when I'm in this kind of slump. Next time you mill through resumes, keep me in mind :)
- ekanes 16y agoHey Shawn, a couple pieces of admittedly unsolicited feedback in case it's helpful. a) It'd be great to check out your website rather than a linkedin page. People want a sense of who you are as a person rather than just a resume. b) Building something (anything) will give you more credibility as a doer. c) re "First place in National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, 2010" -- Congrats! That's pretty amazing.
- shawnps 16y agoI always welcome feedback, thank you! I didn't realize how important a personal site is. I actually recently bought the smallest Linode available, so I'd like to get shawnps.net up soon. I've been doing schoolwork and working on the Kanji website, but I'll try to get a personal site up soon. And thanks, my team and I worked hard at the competition. I always thought it was kind of cool that had a post about us on the White House blog. The website is down now, so here's a cached copy: http://tinyurl.com/5uzs5yp http://tinyurl.com/5uzs5yp
- robyates 16y agoHi Shawn, have you heard of this: http://developersdevelopersdevelopersdevelopers.org http://developersdevelopersdevelopersdevelopers.org? Startups and small companies like Twitter, GitHub and Heroku are going to be there. I think registration is already closed, but maybe you take down the list of companies and apply to a few specific ones you like directly. Yeah, I know how the job market is, but often there are many cool companies that are overlooked because they don't have the 'brand names' like Google or Microsoft.
- shawnps 16y agoThanks, I did hear about this yesterday, but it's too late to register. They're allowing people who can figure out how to insert themselves into the database to register (the code for the site is open source and has hints on how to do it), so I'm about to clone the git repo and look around.
- robyates 16y agoActually I might be interested in hacking their code as well. I just sent you an email now. Feel free to reply back if your interested.