9 ms·

Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you?

• greenagain 18y ago
  I can see them poring over their US News and World Report rankings right now. Might I suggest another requirement? * Expert at tying a full-Windsor knot
  • mixmax 18y ago
    Expert at tying a full-Windsor knot That would be me. I do a decent bowtie too... aah the advantages of a classical education come to bear once again...
    • rrival 18y ago
      but what of the old boy network, sir? I am aware only of the PayPal mafia in these surrounds.
      • mixmax 18y ago
        I wouldn't worry too much about those young chaps, I do hear they are quite civil once they've had a good talking to. The boys from the club are the ones giving them money to play with after all. I'll take it up with them next time we take tea at the countryhouse.
        • rrival 18y ago
          Righto, old sport. Where do you summer?
          • evilneanderthal 18y ago
            My villa over on Port-au-Patois, don't you know.
    • tomjen 18y ago
      Out of curiosity, were does one obtain a classical education?
      • narag 18y ago
        Not where but when.
      • maxklein 18y ago
        If you need to ask, then you don't need to know.
        • tbeseda 18y ago
          He means "... you needn't know."
      • davi 18y ago
        I've just heard about this place, don't know anyone who went there: http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/ http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/
      • gtani 18y ago
        i think that means you read philosophy, math, Latin and Greek: Homer, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Pascal, some Whitehead, Russell. Some Sartre and Camus and Nietzsche, Heidegger if you want a tortured existence. You want to go to St Johns college, i think, maybe Univ of Chicago . With a rigorous math background and some linguistics , you have the foundation of a good programming career.
        • yters 18y ago
          A classical education is more about technique than material or school. The standard education model is that students are told what is true and what is not, and then they need to regurgitate what they've been told. The classical approach is for a student to try to understand the material themselves, then interact with a teacher and fellow classmates through a discussion format based on the Socratic method to develop their understanding. Here is an example of this technique at work with elementary school children, teaching them binary numbers: http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
  • noodle 18y ago
    juding by the job posting, they also might want to include: * graduation from Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, or Durmstrang at the Ordinary Wizarding Level or higher
    • MicahWedemeyer 18y ago
      Hufflepuff need not apply
      • rantfoil 18y ago
        Hufflepuff is the best, are you kidding? They are kind of just a vocational magic school though.
  • LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
    Full Windsor, Half Windsor, Four-in-hand, and Shelby. Do I get the job?
    • huhtenberg 18y ago
      Hehe ... NO, over-qualified.
  • run4yourlives 18y ago
    Okay, there is a level of pomposity that has become associated with the full Windsor, I'll give you that. The half Windsor, however, makes you look like a douche. If you can't be bothered, go buy a clip on. :-)
    • hugh 18y ago
      I'm with the Magnificent Bastard on this one -- the full Windsor is overrated. http://magnificentbastard.com/posts/ask-the-mb-windsor-knot http://magnificentbastard.com/posts/ask-the-mb-windsor-knot
    • maximilian 18y ago
      I Tie the Half-Windsor because I'm too tall to tie a Full. All my ties are hand-me-down so getting longer ones ain't gonna work for me.
• smoody 18y ago
  The guy who started Tumblr, the leading tumblelog, didn't even go to college. I guess he'll be working the fry machine.
  • rantfoil 18y ago
    Hey man, not at our restaurant. ;-) JK, I kid.
  • apgwoz 18y ago
    Tumblr also had that severe security hole back a few months ago that allowed anyone to go to /admin and see everything.
    • johns 18y ago
      Yeah, that was definitely because the founder didn't go to college!
      • apgwoz 18y ago
        I can see how my comment comes off as that, but in actuality, the question to ask is, "Does going to college give you the knowledge to forsee a situation like that?" Or, "does one acquire this knowledge only from experiences in the real world?" I was trying to imply that maybe going to college makes you more aware, but I have no clue if this is really true or not... (my assumption is no)
        • johns 18y ago
          Your assumption is right
        • william42 18y ago
          At the very least, very stupid people tend to have trouble getting into college. Except maybe if you're rich and go to Yale.
    • run4yourlives 18y ago
• rokhayakebe 18y ago
  You just wasted 15 seconds of my life that I will never get back. But somehow you still made me laugh in the morning.
• shafqat 18y ago
  Thats the one line that stood out in the Posterous job announcement. Sounds pretty elitist to me. I went to one of those schools, but I can tell you that I've met far many brilliant hackers who didn't go to these schools.
  • wheels 18y ago
    Here's I think a much better way of saying it: "Awesome at what you do and have some way of showing it." I personally prefer links to past projects and code samples. Whether or not somebody knows their way around theory you can sort out in an interview (and having a degree from a top university is unfortunately a frustratingly bad indicator of such). Figuring out if they can code is a lot harder.
    • rantfoil 18y ago
      Agree 100%. We want projects and code samples... the school itself doesn't matter.
• diggydo 18y ago
  Are they serious? To parse an email and post the contents to a web page?
  • babul 18y ago
    Maybe for today. But what about tomorrow as the product grows and they start to tackle other verticals?
    • shadytrees 18y ago
      I dunno; I don't feel comfortable working for a company that assaults tall people.
    • nailer 18y ago
      They might need someone with practical experience, rather than an academic.
      • brent 18y ago
        Those sets are not necessarily disjoint.
    • run4yourlives 18y ago
      You mean like posting stuff to servers on Mars?
    • diggydo 18y ago
      I'm sorry, good point. Replace "web page" with any of the following: Facebook, friendfeed, myspace etc
  • huhtenberg 18y ago
    > Are they serious? To parse an email and post the contents to a web page? With this company name ? But seriously, regardless of how irrational it is to consider the name of the company when accepting their offer, I bet a lot of people actually do that.
• cowmoo 18y ago
  Like a true hacker, hack the system. I agree, the company HR and recruiting are totally arbitrary and incompetent - most recruiters don't come from a technical background, and will only match up the buzzwords from their position requirement with those on your resume + the "name" of where you got your education (bingo! we have a winner!!) But there are ways to get around to it: a) Do a lot of open-source projects; it's actually not very hard to get involved in some of the top-tier projects. This spring, I was applying for jobs at hedge funds and investment banks. Before I put on my resume: "Google Inc. - Summer of Code," none of them wanted to talk to me. After I did, I re-sumbitted my resume to all of the same banks, suddenly, everybody wanted to talk to me. The world is a prestige whore. b) Do a demo project specifically tailored for the job that you were shooting for. Send it along with your resume/CV from the get-go. This shows even to the HR people, extra-enthusiasm for the job - and might even get forwarded to the technical hiring manager, who's the person that's going to matter the most anyway. c) F the system. Apply to YC. Corporate Serfdom is only a temporary sinecure for starting your company anyways. It's a means, not an end.
  • rantfoil 18y ago
    +100 points if I could. This is the most constructive comment in this entire thread.
  • jhancock 18y ago
    "The world is a prestige whore."... ...you said it. If you have lots of funding you can afford to pay the price premiums for people with resumes with prestige shwag on them. If you don't have that kind of funding and need to pay lower rates and are outside of the valley, you are better off being able to identify great programmers in other ways (which has been written about much). I am a startup founder, http://shellshadow.com http://shellshadow.com. I'm in Shanghai. Even if I had the funding to throw at prestige resumes, the supply of such isn't available in Shanghai. I have to rely on the fact that I maintain my own deep programming skills as a 40 year old programmer and therefore have the ability to identify and manage top developers without the aid of keywords on a resume. But hey, if you've got the cash, go ahead and pay the price premiums...it can't hurt, right? ;)
• KirinDave 18y ago
  Soooo.... politics is not "things hackers would find interesting" and causes numerous histrionic fit news items, but some random guy begging for a job gets 16 points and numerous discussion comments?
  • MicahWedemeyer 18y ago
    Random guy? I'm offended sir! I graduated top of my class at etc. Could any random Joe do that?
    • KirinDave 18y ago
      Geez, these lines of inquiry are murder on my karma. But I'll continue because I'm hardheaded, and because I'm not nickb with a bazillion points to lose. Micah, that's fine and congratulations. But, uh, do you really think that your request for a job deserved >30 points and a hit on the first page? Meanwhile the very interesting Project 10^100 link has 19 points and is falling off rapidly? And this isn't the first time Posterous-related contentless posts have shown up on the first page: http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/50264813/the-problem-tm-with-hacker-news http://kirindave.tumblr.com/post/50264813/the-problem-tm-wit... I don't have anything against you, but if everyone did what you just did, Hacker News would be worse than useless. And crazily enough we can't seem to flag your post down. I'm baffled why so many vote for this story, but your job hunt is not "news" nor is it something that a vast majority of hackers should care about.
      • Locke 18y ago
        Okay, so there's a large number of people here who have opinions on, or an interest in, the hiring of hackers. This seems natural -- this is after all "Hacker News" and a large number of hackers will at some point or another participate in the hiring process. This is a recurring discussion here, so we should not be surprised to see the topic come up again. Curiously enough, there's also a large number of people who have an interest in YC and companies that have received funding from YC. Bizarre, I know. So, is it really a surprise that people would want to discuss a controversial job advert posted by a YC funded company? The only disappointment is that these comments couldn't have been added to the advert posting itself. As to your karma, I think people get tired of meta-discussions / whining about why one item gets more points than another. At the very least it's off topic here.
• babul 18y ago
  When reading that line, I too thought it was somewhat elitist but if you are hiring you want the best talent you can get and more often than not this means people who went to an elite school. Most of the early hires in all the outstanding tech companies followed similar pattern. However, if you can prove strong or exceptional skill and achievement in whatever you have done tech related, I am sure it won't matter if you went to an elite school or not (and if it does, you probably won't like it there anyway). For most businesses (startups in particular) that do not have the time or resources to filter candidates, an elite school is a general simple quality filter, but the world is full of examples of people who did not go to school let alone an elite school, from Richard Branson to Dyson to Jobs to the mass of not-so-famous. Worry not, shine and hopefully you will be noticed.
  • jfarmer 18y ago
    You can probably still get hired, I'm sure, but it reflects poorly on the culture there.
    • rantfoil 18y ago
      a) It was a typo to put it under 'requirement' (see above) b) Joining Posterous is actually a cool way to avoid bad culture because you'd have a key hand in creating the what the culture would become. Say if you joined us at Posterous -- it would be you, me and Sachin, making great software and building a great company. So, how about it? =)
      • jfarmer 18y ago
        No.
  • scott_s 18y ago
    "... more often than not this means people who went to an elite school." I'm not convinced of that. Sure, you can create an argument for the point that sounds good, but that doesn't mean it's actually true. What I think that really does is get the person doing the hiring off the hook. If you hire a dud from MIT you'll get less flak for it than if you hired a dud from an unknown school. (Or someone without a degree.) It's the same idea as "No one gets fired for buying from IBM."
• time_management 18y ago
  The one that always makes me laugh is when a job spec asks for a "PhD from an Ivy League university". Apparently, no one only told HR that: (1) "Ivy League" means absolutely nothing in the context of graduate programs, as the rankings are discipline-specific and many Ivy League grad programs are mediocre. For example, Harvard's computer science program is strong, but not remotely in the same league as CMU or UIUC. (2) In any case, "Ivy League" is not a synonym for "elite college"; well-regarded universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Michigan are (surprisingly?) not Ivy League. (3) Related to (2), emphasizing "Ivy League" pisses off nearly everyone who went to a good college. Those who went to non-Ivy elites (like me) consider themselves excluded when they see these ads. Those who went to Ivy League colleges generally dislike the snooty, stuffy connotations of "Ivy League" and don't like the sorts of people who emphasize "Ivy".
  • nostrademons 18y ago
    Eh, I never feel excluded when a job ad says "Ivy League" (I went to a top liberal-arts college). If I like the company, I'll just apply anyway. Most job ads are more like guidelines, anyway.
    • time_management 18y ago
      Perhaps I was exaggerating the sentiment, as one generally applies to a company and not HR. :) I find it amusing rather than vexing, seeing as it's socially quite gauche to make any reference at all to "the Ivy League" among educated people (regardless of whether or not they attended Ivies). What college did you go to?
      • nostrademons 18y ago
        Amherst College. Also, I use the degree requirement as a filtering mechanism on the jobs themselves. I figure I don't want to work for anyone who cares more about titles and appearances than ability, so if that's a disqualification, I don't want to work there anyway. There are plenty of startups around - more than there are skilled developers, actually. And if you are a skilled developer, you can always start your own.
• hooande 18y ago
  Whatever dude, everyone knows Etc U was a total party school
• calvin 18y ago
  I became an expert at queuing theory during a summer of employment at McDonald's.
  • brk 18y ago
    I hear the Starbucks program is a little more advanced though.
• nostrademons 18y ago
  It's funny, almost the exact same conversation is going on at Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72uv9/want_to_work_at_reddit/c05j8hi http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72uv9/want_to_w...
  • pius 18y ago
    I found this comment particularly interesting from the Reddit thread: I think it's interesting that I see a lot of people saying that computer programmers don't need degrees, but I rarely see anyone saying the same thing about physicists, biologists, mathematicians, or zoologists. I wonder why that is. Maybe there really are people decrying degrees in those other fields and I just don't hear about it because I'm a computer programmer. But I suspect that degrees are actually required and respected in those fields. What is it about Computer Science that makes people think you can read a few books on your own and you are qualified? What is it about the other fields in math, science, and engineering that make that not the case?
    • yan 18y ago
      I think the case here is also what got me into computers at a young age. What makes computers, and software specifically, so appealing is its accessibility and control. To feel a sense of true accomplishment as an architect, physicist, or biologist you generally need something to happen that can be completely out of reach: erect a building or collide particles. Writing code had a profound effect on me when I was eight. I realized that me, sitting at home and banging away on my keyboard, I had potentially the same power as scientists and corporations with much, much larger resources than me. The fact that a few guys in their early twenties can compete with multi-billion dollar corporations is not to be taken lightly, and isn't exactly shared by many other vocations and industries. Not to mention the existence of an open community, willing to share methods and hacks. Also, when someone codes a very cool tool or program, many can appreciate it; even if they don't understand it. It's hard to say the same about math or physics theorems. Basically, the notion of an ivory tower is less evident in programming than in other fields.
    • run4yourlives 18y ago
• jfarmer 18y ago
  If I were interviewing there I'd just ask straight-up, are there any major universities, elite or otherwise, whose graduates you wouldn't consider?
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• dpapathanasiou 18y ago
  If you had graduated top of class from /etc that would be a different story...
• pius 18y ago
  Haha, I found that part of the job posting to be a joke for multiple reasons. For example, given that their enumeration of the top CS schools doesn't include the best computer science program in the world, I wouldn't worry too much about being in the "etc." :P * http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/comp http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad/eng/c... * http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/spec-doct-engineering http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/college/spec-d...
• Maro 18y ago
  "Yeah, I went to Stanford and got the $200k education so I can work as a JavaScript+HTML+CSS coder at Posterous.com. I'm a real genius."
  • rantfoil 18y ago
    Haha, no you can't -- we want people who can do that and Ruby on Rails too. ;-) I know you were just trying to be flip, but JavaScript is a pretty amazing language for writing frontend code.
    • wheels 18y ago
      Well, but if you got a PhD from Stanford with aspirations of being a Javascript developer, it would seem a bit like killing a mosquito with a thermo-nuclear warhead.
      • comatose_kid 18y ago
        I guess it depends on what you're doing with the Javascript.
        • Maro 18y ago
          "I'm writing code that takes pictures from email attachments and displays them as web pages. I did the theoretical research for this at Stanford under Prof. Lewis."
          • marketer 18y ago
            Blogging is a huge market. And it's growing. And the big players are making tons of money. Seems like a great thing for a couple Stanford grads to be doing. If you want to trivialize creating a successful blog platform, I suggest you try it, and let us know how it's doing in 6 months.
            • skalpelis 18y ago
• webwright 18y ago
  I love the Posterous guys (and their product), but I think they are wrong to require this. It would disqualify everyone on my team (which hurts my feelings) and also disqualifies some of the most brilliant/hardworking geeks I know. If it's a buyers market for employers and you're buried in candidates, it's a great line to throw in to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. In a market like this (where every good coder I know is buried in job offers), you're not going to be too buried in candidates.
  • rantfoil 18y ago
    Mistake! Sorry! =/
• rantfoil 18y ago
  This was a total oversight by us -- we didn't really mean "REQUIREMENT" in the sense. Of course that's insane. This is something that we actually discussed with our friends (some of them from Hacker News too). The top CS school discussion DID come up. Here was our thinking: the true hacker badasses out there will see that and not really give a crap. They know they're good, and will just glide over that line. What we really mean is: we want people who are smart and amazing. I can show chat transcripts with dcurtis if you care to follow up with me directly (we really did discuss whether that line should stay or go). garry@posterous.com But the point is: Mea culpa, we posted it at 2 AM and it was a mistake to put this down as a "requirement". It's absolutely a 'plus'.
  • fallentimes 18y ago
    I know this whole situation has pissed some people off. But what's sort of hilarious is that until today I had no clue (or I just forgot) that Garry and maybe Sachin went to Stanford. That part of the job posting, as interpreted by many of the people here, felt like reading a torture manual by the Dalai Lama - it just isn't their style at all. Regarding college: I know Sachin sold computers and had a hell of a time dealing with Paypal as a fledgling entrepreneur and Garry...umm Garry was in chess club? I don't know - college discussions just didn't come up much. The Posterous guys certainly don't "act" (and by act I mean the generalizations spelled out in these comments) like they went to one of those schools, let alone "elitist". Besides, most of the time when we hung out, they were more interested in talking about ideas or learning about my boring Ohio background. So if you're hesitant to apply because of this situation, don't be. And if you do not want to take my word for it, I'd be more than happy to email you a list of references of my friends & family that have dealt with Garry and/or Sachin including my parents and a girl friend in Chicago that had problems setting up her Posterous. Or just ask Livingston - she loooves Garry. As always dan at the domain for ticketstumbler.
  • lemonysnicket 18y ago
    at least now you have your iterative feedback...
    • rantfoil 18y ago
• ced 18y ago
  It works in the same way as the Google Minimum GPA. The probability that you are wasting your time reading/interviewing a candidate from Etc. U. is simply higher. Is it a better criteria than other bits of info on the CV? I don't know, but I wouldn't dismiss it offhand. If you get a very large number of candidates and time is short, why not? Everything you have on your CV is ground for similar discrimination. Judging from the response, this is a politically incorrect statement around here (cf.: What You Can't Say). Maybe they should have silently trashed all documents, if !doc.contains(topUni) Before anyone points it out, yes, this line of reasoning supports gender and racial discrimination. Indeed, anti-discrimination laws make hiring a less efficient process. We have them because discrimination against gender leads to other social evils. Can anyone make such a case for university-based discrimination?
  • run4yourlives 18y ago
    >Can anyone make such a case for university-based discrimination? That's not too much of a difficult case to make. You'd do it the same way you highlighted gender and racial issues: measure levels of income, access to schools for their children etc etc. I think that those that don't have university degrees are "discriminated" against is an accepted given. This is why you see such an uproar over tuition fees and the like.
• menloparkbum 18y ago
  What I want to know is how to get the telecommute job working on Final Cut Pro from my NYC apartment, now that you guys are working on Posterous...
• a4agarwal 18y ago
  relax guys. we just want smart people. that's all. if you are smart, please apply. simple as that. why all the fuss? stanford has an amazing cs program and has been where some of today's greatest companies started (google, yahoo, etc). But of course not all of the great engineers out there go to these schools. maybe this was all a test. do you only apply to jobs where you fit the description perfectly? When it says 3-5 years experience, do you skip over it? if i had followed all the rules, i wouldn't be where i am today. "video experience required" - ok so much for final cut pro. "discounted computers 1 per person only" - gee, i paid for college by selling many of those on ebay since I couldn't afford it otherwise. "cs degree required" - my cousin didn't even get a cs degree (he's EE from UCSB) and now he's a director at yahoo. some people want to be challenged. they want to take positions that are above them, and then work hard.
• andy 18y ago
  maybe you could, but why in the hell would you want to?
• menloparkbum 18y ago
  This one's funny. In 1998 I built an app that does maybe 80-90% of what Posterous is doing under the hood. That is, a huge multiuser system that parsed incoming email, ripped out what's inside, stuffed that into the right places in a database, and displayed the right stuff to the right users via the web. The experience at the time, dealing with email parsing, buggy DB drivers and crazy deadlines was so horrible that when it was finished, I specifically went back to school to finish my degree so that I would never have to work on an application like that again. That said, I love Posterous - just wanted to suggest that degree from Stanford or not, one man's dream job can be another's worst nightmare. :)
• gojomo 18y ago
  Maybe they were expressing an extra preference for CMU's Entertainment Technology Center grads: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/ http://www.etc.cmu.edu/
• icey 18y ago
  I can't think of any real hackers who honestly think that this is required to be good at the art of writing software. That being said, I'd imagine that a number of very highly skilled software people probably have an interest in NOT working somewhere that fosters such blatant snobbery.