35 ms·

An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at G

by tjr 13y ago

An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at Google, or that YCombinator believed you would be successful at developing your company product. Interesting. Because I have no intention of moving to a Google or YCombinator location, I never applied to either, but this makes me wonder if merely having been offered an opportunity at such a place could have value. Even if one never intended to follow through. Which might not be a great thing for the folks reviewing applications...

agilebyte 13y ago
In which case you move to #2 which (to me) seems much easier to get: A Github or other online repository of your source code demonstrating contributions to open source projects or impressive projects of your own.
- jrs99 13y ago
  if you do that you might as well forget the PhD. Schools don't want to teach you, they want to accept the best applicants. Applicants who work on open source projects and can get a job anywhere. Applicants that became great learning from somewhere that is not the school that he is applying to. Whereas as a post doc you'll be someone's bitch working for 40K per year. Screw the PhD and whatever it is supposed to mean--that you did all your stupid homework assignments and kissed people's asses for three letters of recommendation and that you "gamed" the GRE.
  - pnathan 13y ago
    Sarcasm detector might be failing, but PhD work has very little to do with homework....
    - jrs99 13y ago
      to get into a phd program, i mean. a phd from a "top school" means you did your homework in college and high school.
      - HarryHirsch 13y ago
        But to make it a meaningful experience (and get out of it with a PhD) you need a wholly different skillset. It's clear that you have never seen a kid who destroyed the productivity of a whole office because he treated his colleagues Just Wrong, and that you have never seen a fellow who just couldn't transfer what he learned in class to real-life application.
        jrs99 13y ago
        i've seen people who didn't know what a lac operon was get a PhD in biochemistry.
        lambdaphage 13y ago
        What.
        HarryHirsch 13y ago
        That's harmless. But if you have someone who continuously messes up shared equipment, leaving it for the next person to fix, and who won't improve their attitude, no matter how often you tell them, that's deadly for morale.
        jrs99 13y ago
        then you should leave your phd program for a garage.
      - pnathan 13y ago
        That is an interesting dilemma, yeah. To be a sharp homework-hammering undergrad is not to be a good researcher & fuzzy situation manager. It's why there's such focus on undergrad research these days, it helps identify the capable people and build their skills (as well as getting some amount of budget help). The professor at Brown clearly enunciates some of the issues with the current system quite well.
      - _delirium 13y ago
- btown 13y ago
  True - if the open source project you've contributed significantly to is, say, a well-acclaimed machine learning library, and you're applying to a machine learning Ph.D., then the sum of your accepted pull requests might be a reasonable proxy for a recommendation letter from the (presumably well-acclaimed) maintainers of said library.
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    It does not seems so to me. To show that your interests align, you do one of the challenges that Jeff lists in part 2. Part 1 is only to show you are a strong programmer/ambitious so your projects can be in anything it seems.
chrisseaton 13y ago
In the UK in some areas such as finance and business there are many people who apply to be an Army officer, and go all the way through selection, but never intend to join up. They do it just so that they can put on their CV (resume) that they've passed Army officer selection.
- elemeno 13y ago
  Not to say that it's not true, but in a decade in finance I've never heard of anyone having gone through Officer Selection to help their career prospects. If you want to have a good start in finance, having a degree (preferably a 1st) in Maths, Physics or Economics from Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is probably the most useful thing you can do!
- arethuza 13y ago
  Isn't Officer Selection where candidate for officer training are selected, not after the full training? According to this link it looks like a ~5 day process: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm [NB Not sure I approve of people using up forces resources just to pad their CVs]
  - chrisseaton 13y ago
    I think the Army likes it because it reinforces the idea that Army officers are an elite, and it exposes more future leaders to a little bit of Army life, so they're more positive about the Army when they make decisions when they're running a business or a government department.
segmondy 13y ago
Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"
- mcguire 13y ago
  Possibly better: you don't have to actually work at Google. 80% of the benefit minus 1% of the opportunity cost.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - skj 13y ago
    That's a very interesting perspective on working for Google. That is, that it's a waste of time. In my experience, working at Google is a blast both in terms of compensation and exciting projects.
    - timburus 13y ago
      If you were luckier than others it doesn't necesserily make you an example to be followed.
      - yetanotherphd 13y ago
        I wouldn't call it luck. Google is consistently ranked as one of the top workplaces. Out of a large number of my co-workers at Google, almost all of them seem to enjoy their work. Very few people are unhappy or seeking to leave. The main difficulty is getting in.
    - mcguire 13y ago
      Depending on what you want, what you can do, and from a certain perspective, any job is a "waste of time". For one thing, you will almost certainly spend the majority of your time working on someone else's grand idea. (By necessity, most of the people working at Google are doing the same kind of things that everyone is doing everywhere. The environment may be better, but it's the same stuff.) As one of my favorite supervisors said, repeatedly, "It's not supposed to be fun. That's why they call it a 'job'. Now get back to work."
mathattack 13y ago
I'd be curious if the folks at Google and YC would be flattered by this, put off, or both.
- robrenaud 13y ago
  If it works, it's clever. But I am definitely not flattered and wouldn't be personally happy about knowing someone did it. The 45 minutes I spent interviewing you and the more than an hour I spend carefully writing up my interview feedback is totally wasted. Well, that sucks for me.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I think you hit the main point - it winds up wasting a lot of people's time, and also gives short shrift to others in the process. In a sense I put this up with the moral equivalent of practice interviewing with real companies. It's not illegal, but it isn't behavior one would advertise, and it's hard to call it ethical. It would be different if the answer were, "You've worked 2 years for Google or started a company that went through YC" because that's no different than a company asking for Big 4 Accounting experience when hiring a controller. (Having a Big 4 offer letter wouldn't suffice)
latj 13y ago
The other question is- if you have an offer letter from Google or YCombinator in hand, would you really want to go to Brown? At Google it will be like going to grad school except you will be better funded, working with more consistently smarter people, and you will be getting paid instead of racking up debt. As a YCombinator founder you'd basically already be in the position that a Brown computer science graduate hopes to one day get to. I like universities. I hope they figure out how to stay relevant.
- pinhead 13y ago
  How exactly would you be racking up debt as a computer science Ph.D student? You don't pay for tuition, you get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance and you probably will do many industry/research internships (where you get paid very well). I say this with experience, as I am a CS Ph.D student and make more than enough to live on with a modest lifestyle and I have no debt. Plus if you get an outside fellowship, which most successful students do, you'll essentially be able to work on just about anything you want (I don't think this can be said for a random Google employee, however this is probably true for a YC founder). The Ph.D lifestyle is pretty great imho...at least in CS (non-CS, that's a whole other story).
  - flyrain 13y ago
    Get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance? Most Ph.D student got less than $2000/month before tax, even less than $1500/month and should pay for health insurance by themselves. OK, decent, how to define decent.
    - pinhead 13y ago
      The NSF GRFP provides ~3k/month plus tuition and health insurance are covered. If you do a 3-month internship each summer on top of that you can get an extra $20k-30k easy. I am not saying you'll have the same lifestyle as a Google employee but I think it's hard to argue that you will go into debt. Maybe I live a more modest lifestyle than others. Also all the schools I got into when I applied to grad school would pay health care/tuition, that's standard.

by tjr 13y ago

agilebyte 13y ago

In which case you move to #2 which (to me) seems much easier to get: A Github or other online repository of your source code demonstrating contributions to open source projects or impressive projects of your own.

jrs99 13y ago
if you do that you might as well forget the PhD. Schools don't want to teach you, they want to accept the best applicants. Applicants who work on open source projects and can get a job anywhere. Applicants that became great learning from somewhere that is not the school that he is applying to. Whereas as a post doc you'll be someone's bitch working for 40K per year. Screw the PhD and whatever it is supposed to mean--that you did all your stupid homework assignments and kissed people's asses for three letters of recommendation and that you "gamed" the GRE.
- pnathan 13y ago
  Sarcasm detector might be failing, but PhD work has very little to do with homework....
  - jrs99 13y ago
    to get into a phd program, i mean. a phd from a "top school" means you did your homework in college and high school.
    - HarryHirsch 13y ago
      But to make it a meaningful experience (and get out of it with a PhD) you need a wholly different skillset. It's clear that you have never seen a kid who destroyed the productivity of a whole office because he treated his colleagues Just Wrong, and that you have never seen a fellow who just couldn't transfer what he learned in class to real-life application.
      - jrs99 13y ago
        i've seen people who didn't know what a lac operon was get a PhD in biochemistry.
        lambdaphage 13y ago
        What.
        HarryHirsch 13y ago
        That's harmless. But if you have someone who continuously messes up shared equipment, leaving it for the next person to fix, and who won't improve their attitude, no matter how often you tell them, that's deadly for morale.
        jrs99 13y ago
        then you should leave your phd program for a garage.
    - pnathan 13y ago
      That is an interesting dilemma, yeah. To be a sharp homework-hammering undergrad is not to be a good researcher & fuzzy situation manager. It's why there's such focus on undergrad research these days, it helps identify the capable people and build their skills (as well as getting some amount of budget help). The professor at Brown clearly enunciates some of the issues with the current system quite well.
    - _delirium 13y ago
btown 13y ago
True - if the open source project you've contributed significantly to is, say, a well-acclaimed machine learning library, and you're applying to a machine learning Ph.D., then the sum of your accepted pull requests might be a reasonable proxy for a recommendation letter from the (presumably well-acclaimed) maintainers of said library.
- agilebyte 13y ago
  It does not seems so to me. To show that your interests align, you do one of the challenges that Jeff lists in part 2. Part 1 is only to show you are a strong programmer/ambitious so your projects can be in anything it seems.

chrisseaton 13y ago

In the UK in some areas such as finance and business there are many people who apply to be an Army officer, and go all the way through selection, but never intend to join up. They do it just so that they can put on their CV (resume) that they've passed Army officer selection.

elemeno 13y ago
Not to say that it's not true, but in a decade in finance I've never heard of anyone having gone through Officer Selection to help their career prospects. If you want to have a good start in finance, having a degree (preferably a 1st) in Maths, Physics or Economics from Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is probably the most useful thing you can do!
arethuza 13y ago
Isn't Officer Selection where candidate for officer training are selected, not after the full training? According to this link it looks like a ~5 day process: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm [NB Not sure I approve of people using up forces resources just to pad their CVs]
- chrisseaton 13y ago
  I think the Army likes it because it reinforces the idea that Army officers are an elite, and it exposes more future leaders to a little bit of Army life, so they're more positive about the Army when they make decisions when they're running a business or a government department.

segmondy 13y ago

Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"

mcguire 13y ago
Possibly better: you don't have to actually work at Google. 80% of the benefit minus 1% of the opportunity cost.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- skj 13y ago
  That's a very interesting perspective on working for Google. That is, that it's a waste of time. In my experience, working at Google is a blast both in terms of compensation and exciting projects.
  - timburus 13y ago
    If you were luckier than others it doesn't necesserily make you an example to be followed.
    - yetanotherphd 13y ago
      I wouldn't call it luck. Google is consistently ranked as one of the top workplaces. Out of a large number of my co-workers at Google, almost all of them seem to enjoy their work. Very few people are unhappy or seeking to leave. The main difficulty is getting in.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    Depending on what you want, what you can do, and from a certain perspective, any job is a "waste of time". For one thing, you will almost certainly spend the majority of your time working on someone else's grand idea. (By necessity, most of the people working at Google are doing the same kind of things that everyone is doing everywhere. The environment may be better, but it's the same stuff.) As one of my favorite supervisors said, repeatedly, "It's not supposed to be fun. That's why they call it a 'job'. Now get back to work."

mathattack 13y ago

I'd be curious if the folks at Google and YC would be flattered by this, put off, or both.

robrenaud 13y ago
If it works, it's clever. But I am definitely not flattered and wouldn't be personally happy about knowing someone did it. The 45 minutes I spent interviewing you and the more than an hour I spend carefully writing up my interview feedback is totally wasted. Well, that sucks for me.
- mathattack 13y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I think you hit the main point - it winds up wasting a lot of people's time, and also gives short shrift to others in the process. In a sense I put this up with the moral equivalent of practice interviewing with real companies. It's not illegal, but it isn't behavior one would advertise, and it's hard to call it ethical. It would be different if the answer were, "You've worked 2 years for Google or started a company that went through YC" because that's no different than a company asking for Big 4 Accounting experience when hiring a controller. (Having a Big 4 offer letter wouldn't suffice)

latj 13y ago

The other question is- if you have an offer letter from Google or YCombinator in hand, would you really want to go to Brown? At Google it will be like going to grad school except you will be better funded, working with more consistently smarter people, and you will be getting paid instead of racking up debt. As a YCombinator founder you'd basically already be in the position that a Brown computer science graduate hopes to one day get to. I like universities. I hope they figure out how to stay relevant.

pinhead 13y ago
How exactly would you be racking up debt as a computer science Ph.D student? You don't pay for tuition, you get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance and you probably will do many industry/research internships (where you get paid very well). I say this with experience, as I am a CS Ph.D student and make more than enough to live on with a modest lifestyle and I have no debt. Plus if you get an outside fellowship, which most successful students do, you'll essentially be able to work on just about anything you want (I don't think this can be said for a random Google employee, however this is probably true for a YC founder). The Ph.D lifestyle is pretty great imho...at least in CS (non-CS, that's a whole other story).
- flyrain 13y ago
  Get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance? Most Ph.D student got less than $2000/month before tax, even less than $1500/month and should pay for health insurance by themselves. OK, decent, how to define decent.
  - pinhead 13y ago
    The NSF GRFP provides ~3k/month plus tuition and health insurance are covered. If you do a 3-month internship each summer on top of that you can get an extra $20k-30k easy. I am not saying you'll have the same lifestyle as a Google employee but I think it's hard to argue that you will go into debt. Maybe I live a more modest lifestyle than others. Also all the schools I got into when I applied to grad school would pay health care/tuition, that's standard.