ammon

21 ms·

181.
by ammon 11y ago
You're not being compared to people who lack hundreds of hours of programming projects. You're being compared to people who have that same experience, either at a worse school, or on their own. Credentials correlate with being goo
182.
by ammon 11y ago
Thanks. Fixing!
183.
by ammon 11y ago
So, I see where you are coming from (I actually love academic CS). But the VAST majority of the programming work out there does not require any Big-O analysis. It just does not. It's used as a tool in interviews to (essentially) look f
184.
by ammon 11y ago
We've not seen very much focus on design in interviews (very few companies talk about this when telling us why they like/dislike candidates). We do see a lot of focus on interest in what the company does. I think that pitching des
185.
by ammon 11y ago
A large number of bad things influence interview decisions (credentials, targeted practice, how well you know the specific algorithms that come up again and again in interviews). I hope that more programmers getting better at interviewing s
186.
by ammon 11y ago
Early startups can do this. The problem for larger (valuable) startups is that the grant of stock would be taxed (as income). Options get around this. (The tax law makes the rather dubious claim that options granted at the market value of t
187.
by ammon 11y ago
Sure it will. Keeping options is strictly better (for the employee) than not keeping options. Vested options are compensation for work that has been done. Everything you say can be true, but that does not mean that companies should not let
188.
by ammon 11y ago
We moved the blog to medium about a month ago. Since writing this, we've tested a bunch of new things, and now have about 20% better precision on the quiz (20% increase in the percentage that we predict will pass and go on to pass). Th
189.
by ammon 11y ago
Interesting follow up to our blog post! This goes into a lot more details about why startups might prefer product-focused people, and larger companies might need technical people. The discovery of product motivation in interviews is limite
190.
by ammon 11y ago
So, we ask at the beginning to talk about a programming project that you've done it in past, but not about where you've worked. We don't ask for a work history until the end (by which point the notes and scoring that go into
191.
by ammon 11y ago
I can't give company names, but we've not seen much of a pattern. It really seems to have to do with the backgrounds of the founders, and who the early successful hires were. This sets an engineering culture going forward.
192.
by ammon 11y ago
We asked about visa sponsorship. We did not ask about salary. The general pattern with visa sponsorship was that small companies don't want do it, out of concern about the success rate (only 30% of H1B applications last year won the lo
193.
by ammon 11y ago
I think this is the best solution. It does raise issues of how you keep a consistent bar between the various options, but I think it's better than the alternatives. Currently we let people do a project track where they do a project on
194.
by ammon 11y ago
Several reasons: 1) people who go through us skip the screening steps and go straight to a on-site interview at the YC companies. 2) We've sent a bunch of people to most of these companies, and have a good idea what they are looking
195.
by ammon 11y ago
Good point. There is a short list of big companies that are taken as positive signals (Google tops the list), while most others are negative. I think that this gets at a contradiction.
196.
by ammon 11y ago
I think that recruiters do make sense (clearly). I hope that we can use our position as recruiters to be better than most companies at figuring out who's a good programmer, and better than most candidates at figuring out which companie
197.
by ammon 11y ago
EDIT: I thought that sillysaurus3 was talking about a work trial period (days or a week), but it seems they are talking about asking question during that interview that are similar to actual work. I retract me objection :) If only it were t
198.
by ammon 11y ago
Yeah, I totally agree. We actually asked YC Companies about their fire rates. The fire rate at most of the companies was under 6% (documenting a high false negative rate approach)
199.
by ammon 11y ago
Precisely. It's a flaw (shortcut) in the human brain, with effects far beyond programming interviews. This is why structuring interview evaluation is so important
200.
by ammon 11y ago
The cost of a real work test is much higher, both to the company, and to the applicant. Some companies take that approach (weebly for one), but it means that some of the best programmer will not apply, and it only makes worse the problem of
201.
by ammon 11y ago
Well, they sort of are, just not explicitly. The standard process is to have 2 to 5 interviewers, each asking their own question, and pass everyone who get at least one strong yes, and no strong noes. This ends up with a random factor, but
202.
by ammon 11y ago
We will be doing this analysis
203.
by ammon 11y ago
Great advice! Mind if I add this to the blog post?
204.
by ammon 11y ago
Author here. Ageism is real, and we'll be analyzing it in a future post. But in this case I don't think it's ageism. I think it's big-company-ism. Startups define themselves in opposition to big companies, and take signs
205.
by ammon 11y ago
Author of the post. We did not distinguish by experience level in the question that we asked about tech / product. But experience is VERY helpful in a job search, so an experienced ML/AI person would almost certainly have more int
206.
by ammon 11y ago
This is definitely true. The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads. But this fact does nothing to help the
207.
by ammon 11y ago
Author of the post. I think that this is exactly right. I don't know what motivated the companies to put that policy in place (they just told us that they had this preference). But I can speculate. There is an epidemic of interest in M
208.
by ammon 11y ago
Yeah (author of the blog post here), I think it's a powerful idea. I don't know of any other public attempts to do this (most ideas about hiring stay locked up inside companies). I'd love to hear any ideas you have. Email me
209.
by ammon 11y ago
Yes, we do
210.
by ammon 11y ago
Less experienced programmers are definitely over represented in engineers adversely affected by stress. This could be because people get better at interviewing at they gain experience, or because the people who can't perform under inte

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