8 ms·

I wouldn't want to hire the person you describe. This is simply a more visible indicator that a person doesn't care about the company they work for. That's fin

I wouldn't want to hire the person you describe. This is simply a more visible indicator that a person doesn't care about the company they work for. That's fine for giant corporations, but amazingly deadly for startups.

tim_h 15y ago
Just curious, what specifically is the indicator that a person doesn't care for the company? I didn't get that impression from reading the GP. Is it not paying attention to the news cycle? Or knowing that the company is on a bad trajectory but still working there? Surely it's not the focus on work-life balance. I could see myself working at Yahoo. I bet they still have interesting problems to work on. Yahoo Research does awesome stuff with computational advertising. Hypothetically speaking, would this opinion disqualify me from your hiring consideration?
- subwindow 15y ago
  It's not this particular issue. I don't care all that much about patents. It's mostly that Yahoo has been a zombie corporation for a long while and has key symptoms of not being able to foster creativity or innovation. There may be interesting things going on inside Yahoo, but I'm not aware of them. Every single thing that I found interesting about Yahoo has withered or completely died in the last 5+ years.
tptacek 15y ago
The nicest thing Patrick McKenzie ever said about us was: If I were looking for a day job, I wouldn't be looking for a day job any more: they're friendly, happy people who get social license to join the Dark Side, do smart stuff all day, and then go home while it is still light out. I have a set of things I need to get done. It is my job as a company owner to help constrain and groom the subset of what's getting done every day so that the business prospers without burning through people like charcoal briquettes. And In my experience doing that, the lifestyle that team members want to lead hasn't proven to be correlated at all with what's actually getting done. You can hire however you want. It is, I sincerely believe, your loss. If you can code, particularly in C, are interested in software security, are good at learning lots of things very fast, and get rejected from whatever job "subwindow from Hacker News" was hiring for because you aren't startup-y enough, please consider dropping us a note. We don't think like him.
- larrys 15y ago
  "please consider dropping us a note" People in the startupsphere (who in many cases have been doing things since, what, 2007?) fail to understand the amount of capable accomplished people there are that have never read HN or know who Arrington or Wilson or Graham are. In their mind these people simply aren't cut from the right bolt of cloth to work at a startup. I mean they don't know what the word pivot means and god knows they might actually waste time doing sysadmin work themselves on a server. And wow it actually took them like 10 or 20 years to learn what some young hotshot learned in 1 year. I happened to mention sometime over the last year to my "go to" guy (who happens to run a security team of 17 at some major consulting company and who flys around the world on assignments so, um, I guess he knows what he is doing which is why I rely on him) anyway I told him he might find HN interesting to read. He took a look and said he had been reading PG's essays "for years" but never knew about YC or HN.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Yup. Give those people 2 days to learn a new instruction set for an architecture that's only ever synthesized onto an FPGA, then reverse firmware compiled to that architecture back to an exploitable overflow. They'll do it. And they won't even use Mongodb to do it.
    - daeken 15y ago
      You're simply measuring passion in a different way. The (very, very small number of) people who can do this are very passionate about the work, as we both know, and this shines through in the work they do in and out of the day job. But let's say you saw someone that was coming from a security consultancy that started doing interesting, challenging work and then turned into a shop doing nothing but the same web pentests day in and day out. Don't you think you'd seriously question whether they're capable of doing the challenging work, or still hungry for that kind of work? I know I'd think twice about it. I think that's why people are so against the people left at Yahoo; it's a company that's been on a downward trajectory for a long while, and is actively doing Bad Things (TM). It's not unreasonable to expect that someone that's ok with that (or blind to it) isn't going to be a fantastic hire, but that doesn't mean there aren't certainly exceptions.
temphn 15y ago
Exactly. It's amazing how many people are saying "well, there are lots of programmers who don't pay attention to the latest technology, you can't just refuse to hire them". But you can and you should. Anyone at Yahoo/MS today is (on average) already under suspicion of being 2nd tier and a notch below a Facebooker/Googler. And those Yahoo engineers who stick through this one will tend to be the 3rd tier. They aren't going to see this Yammer thread and they sure aren't going to get hired by a good startup. So why even bring them up in this thread? We're talking about the good folks left at Yahoo, the guys who are like Jeremy Zawodny and Prabhakar Raghavan, who want to leave before Jerry Yang's company completes its transformation into SCO. Not the time punchers who don't know what the clock says.
- subwindow 15y ago
  To be fair to MS, there's lots of interesting stuff going on there. I have a friend who's working on the .NET CLR, and it would be foolish to think that he's not working on extremely awesome stuff. At the same time, I don't know of anything like that at all going on at Yahoo. And he doesn't go home at 5pm.
- ryanhuff 15y ago
  You misinterpreted and/or mischaracterized what was said. Paying attention to new software development practices has nothing to do with reading tech news. Additionally, your perspective seems grossly shallow.
- moocow01 15y ago
  Im sorry but this is an incredibly sad and dehumanizing way of perceiving people and their skills. Can you make us a full list of all SV companies so we all can know where we stand on your tiered list and accordingly, what startups will and won't hire us?
  - temphn 15y ago
    SELECT * FROM companies WHERE field='tech' ORDER BY growth_rate, market_cap; That will roughly correspond to a rank ordering of companies that are both growing and big. Apple and Facebook will be near the top of that list. Yahoo and Microsoft much lower. You could also do it Turing style, analyzing LinkedIn data to see which company is raiding which for talent. Very few Googlers are going to MS. And very few Facebook people are going to Google. Like PageRank, these migration signals give you a rank ordering of desirability. You can rank colleges the same way, which is why people from Stanford and MIT are usually in the headlines for technological breakthroughs and why people from Directional State are not.
tobtoh 15y ago
This is simplistic binary thinking - life is not black and white. Judging people by ticking boxes on a checklist shows a lack of understanding of people and the complexity of motivations. Maybe the employee feels the project they are working on is worthwhile, maybe they thinks that if they can get their project to succeed, it will negate the need for Yahoo to pursue patent litigation, or maybe, the employee has loyalty and passion for Yahoo and will stick with it through thick and thin to try and turn it around. They sound like qualities any startup would benefit from in an employee. Yet, you judge all employees on a single issue made by someone else at the company.
kamaal 15y ago
I don't get the start up hype. Start ups are great. But not all start ups are great. Similarly not all big companies are bad. There are a certain things only a big companies can do, Big companies put man on moon, put satellites into orbits, invented the first mobile phone, build mainframes, manufacture drugs that save billions of lives on planet etc. Minus some very bad places, if you can't do great work where your are now. You won't do it any where else. There are a lot of brilliant people who work in big corporations on things that are important. You may not see them or their work as upfront as Google's homepage. But every time you take your medication, every time you swipe your credit card. Some one some where is building stuff that makes such a thing possible.

tim_h 15y ago

Just curious, what specifically is the indicator that a person doesn't care for the company? I didn't get that impression from reading the GP. Is it not paying attention to the news cycle? Or knowing that the company is on a bad trajectory but still working there? Surely it's not the focus on work-life balance. I could see myself working at Yahoo. I bet they still have interesting problems to work on. Yahoo Research does awesome stuff with computational advertising. Hypothetically speaking, would this opinion disqualify me from your hiring consideration?

subwindow 15y ago
It's not this particular issue. I don't care all that much about patents. It's mostly that Yahoo has been a zombie corporation for a long while and has key symptoms of not being able to foster creativity or innovation. There may be interesting things going on inside Yahoo, but I'm not aware of them. Every single thing that I found interesting about Yahoo has withered or completely died in the last 5+ years.

tptacek 15y ago

The nicest thing Patrick McKenzie ever said about us was: If I were looking for a day job, I wouldn't be looking for a day job any more: they're friendly, happy people who get social license to join the Dark Side, do smart stuff all day, and then go home while it is still light out. I have a set of things I need to get done. It is my job as a company owner to help constrain and groom the subset of what's getting done every day so that the business prospers without burning through people like charcoal briquettes. And In my experience doing that, the lifestyle that team members want to lead hasn't proven to be correlated at all with what's actually getting done. You can hire however you want. It is, I sincerely believe, your loss. If you can code, particularly in C, are interested in software security, are good at learning lots of things very fast, and get rejected from whatever job "subwindow from Hacker News" was hiring for because you aren't startup-y enough, please consider dropping us a note. We don't think like him.

larrys 15y ago
"please consider dropping us a note" People in the startupsphere (who in many cases have been doing things since, what, 2007?) fail to understand the amount of capable accomplished people there are that have never read HN or know who Arrington or Wilson or Graham are. In their mind these people simply aren't cut from the right bolt of cloth to work at a startup. I mean they don't know what the word pivot means and god knows they might actually waste time doing sysadmin work themselves on a server. And wow it actually took them like 10 or 20 years to learn what some young hotshot learned in 1 year. I happened to mention sometime over the last year to my "go to" guy (who happens to run a security team of 17 at some major consulting company and who flys around the world on assignments so, um, I guess he knows what he is doing which is why I rely on him) anyway I told him he might find HN interesting to read. He took a look and said he had been reading PG's essays "for years" but never knew about YC or HN.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Yup. Give those people 2 days to learn a new instruction set for an architecture that's only ever synthesized onto an FPGA, then reverse firmware compiled to that architecture back to an exploitable overflow. They'll do it. And they won't even use Mongodb to do it.
  - daeken 15y ago
    You're simply measuring passion in a different way. The (very, very small number of) people who can do this are very passionate about the work, as we both know, and this shines through in the work they do in and out of the day job. But let's say you saw someone that was coming from a security consultancy that started doing interesting, challenging work and then turned into a shop doing nothing but the same web pentests day in and day out. Don't you think you'd seriously question whether they're capable of doing the challenging work, or still hungry for that kind of work? I know I'd think twice about it. I think that's why people are so against the people left at Yahoo; it's a company that's been on a downward trajectory for a long while, and is actively doing Bad Things (TM). It's not unreasonable to expect that someone that's ok with that (or blind to it) isn't going to be a fantastic hire, but that doesn't mean there aren't certainly exceptions.

temphn 15y ago

Exactly. It's amazing how many people are saying "well, there are lots of programmers who don't pay attention to the latest technology, you can't just refuse to hire them". But you can and you should. Anyone at Yahoo/MS today is (on average) already under suspicion of being 2nd tier and a notch below a Facebooker/Googler. And those Yahoo engineers who stick through this one will tend to be the 3rd tier. They aren't going to see this Yammer thread and they sure aren't going to get hired by a good startup. So why even bring them up in this thread? We're talking about the good folks left at Yahoo, the guys who are like Jeremy Zawodny and Prabhakar Raghavan, who want to leave before Jerry Yang's company completes its transformation into SCO. Not the time punchers who don't know what the clock says.

subwindow 15y ago
To be fair to MS, there's lots of interesting stuff going on there. I have a friend who's working on the .NET CLR, and it would be foolish to think that he's not working on extremely awesome stuff. At the same time, I don't know of anything like that at all going on at Yahoo. And he doesn't go home at 5pm.
ryanhuff 15y ago
You misinterpreted and/or mischaracterized what was said. Paying attention to new software development practices has nothing to do with reading tech news. Additionally, your perspective seems grossly shallow.
moocow01 15y ago
Im sorry but this is an incredibly sad and dehumanizing way of perceiving people and their skills. Can you make us a full list of all SV companies so we all can know where we stand on your tiered list and accordingly, what startups will and won't hire us?
- temphn 15y ago
  SELECT * FROM companies WHERE field='tech' ORDER BY growth_rate, market_cap; That will roughly correspond to a rank ordering of companies that are both growing and big. Apple and Facebook will be near the top of that list. Yahoo and Microsoft much lower. You could also do it Turing style, analyzing LinkedIn data to see which company is raiding which for talent. Very few Googlers are going to MS. And very few Facebook people are going to Google. Like PageRank, these migration signals give you a rank ordering of desirability. You can rank colleges the same way, which is why people from Stanford and MIT are usually in the headlines for technological breakthroughs and why people from Directional State are not.

tobtoh 15y ago

This is simplistic binary thinking - life is not black and white. Judging people by ticking boxes on a checklist shows a lack of understanding of people and the complexity of motivations. Maybe the employee feels the project they are working on is worthwhile, maybe they thinks that if they can get their project to succeed, it will negate the need for Yahoo to pursue patent litigation, or maybe, the employee has loyalty and passion for Yahoo and will stick with it through thick and thin to try and turn it around. They sound like qualities any startup would benefit from in an employee. Yet, you judge all employees on a single issue made by someone else at the company.

kamaal 15y ago

I don't get the start up hype. Start ups are great. But not all start ups are great. Similarly not all big companies are bad. There are a certain things only a big companies can do, Big companies put man on moon, put satellites into orbits, invented the first mobile phone, build mainframes, manufacture drugs that save billions of lives on planet etc. Minus some very bad places, if you can't do great work where your are now. You won't do it any where else. There are a lot of brilliant people who work in big corporations on things that are important. You may not see them or their work as upfront as Google's homepage. But every time you take your medication, every time you swipe your credit card. Some one some where is building stuff that makes such a thing possible.