2
points
renegadesensei
Joined 537 karma
- It's a fine line companies walk. They want to build a cohesive company identity with aligned values and goals, but they also want diversity, which makes all of that harder. So you have these "culture fit" interviews which are really just conformity checks. "Are you going to get on people's nerves?" is really what they want to see, and the right answer varies by environment. They're asking, "Are you one of us?" No surprise people on the spectrum struggle reading that and end up being either too honest or just too awkward.
"Be yourself" is terrible advice if you want to work at a startup and you're at all out of step with their culture and worldview. As one such person I have learned to mask whatever needs masking.
- It's very difficult unless the entire company is remote. It's a very simple human bias. We feel greater connection and trust with people physically present, which naturally makes remote workers less likely to seem like a good choice for a promotion or leadership role. If it's something you really want you need to explicitly start working for it. Talk to management, explain your career goals, determine what it is they are looking for in a higher level position, and then become it. Make it obvious that you can do that job and keep revisiting the issue.
Even if you do this you may find that they still just prefer promote someone on site. It happened to me after 2 years with a small startup. It wasn't personal; they just preferred someone who could be there for social outings, in-person standups with other managers, and other obligations at the office. You have to be ready for that outcome and plan your career accordingly.
- Pretty crazy Saturday evening! Got some friends crashing with me since they were in an evacuation zone. Fortunately we didn't lose power. Just enjoying a windy night.
- 40 points
- I took it to be a comparison to Netflix. Cloud gaming is analogous to streaming movies with similar tradeoffs, the difference being that games are interactive.
- DevOps/Infrastructure Engineer with machine learning experience Location: Tokyo, Japan Remote: Yes, many years remote experience Willing to Relocate: No but I can travel and work onsite occasionally Resume: https://www.toptal.com/resume/jonathan-bethune Email: therenegadeoffunk@protonmail.com
I'm looking for part-time or consulting gigs mostly. I have a day job in Tokyo but it doesn't involve a lot of hands on coding. To stay sharp I like to do side jobs. I'm particularly versed with Apache stateful technologies like Cassandra, Kafka, and Spark. I'm expert in AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure / devops generally. Shoot me an email if I might be of service.
I work mostly through TopTal (see resume link) but I also have my own personal site. Can probably offer a better rate if you contact me through there: https://www.bethuneconsulting.com/
- I love this and can relate to it so much. This is very similar to how I ended up in the Japanese matchmaking industry. Noticed a good domain was available and ended up going on an odyssey of sorts.
- Must suck to have your sensitive information taken and used without your permission.
- Agreed. Avoid Google services. Wrote a post about how to do it: https://righteousruminations.blogspot.com/2018/09/migration-...
- Move to Tokyo!
- I miss variety in smartphone design.
Everything looks the same these days. Samsung and Apple endlessly copy each other and virtually every smartphone has the same phablet aesthetic now. I miss the variety in shapes, sizes, physical keyboards, gaming features, operating systems, etc.
- 2 points
- They're fine but they need to be understood properly. Whiteboard interviews don't really capture how well someone codes. They are better at capturing thought process, high level understanding, system architecting ability, and a candidate's communication skills.
If you want to see how well someone codes, look at their code. Or ask them to write something for you. Don't do a whiteboard interview and think it is the end all be all. Take it as a data point.
- Yakukon | Tokyo or Remote | Contract | $60 an hour / Negotiable | Designer with programming knowledge | https://yakukon.com
Small marriage matchmaking startup based in Japan. We need a designer to overhaul our crappy wordpress site. Happy to do an hourly contract or pay a set amount for about a week of work. We need someone who can help implement their design - someone who can at least translate their ideas to CSS or something easy to implement on wordpress. May lead to more jobs or even a steady position. Email therenegadeoffunk[at]gmail[dot]com if you're interested.
- I do the same thing all the time. It's one reason I tend to buy very large laptops.
- Rejection is part of life. You lick your wounds and move on.
My cofounder and I don't regret applying. We did it mostly for publicity. We already have pretty good traction and funding so the rejection doesn't really slow us down. I never thought we had much of a shot getting accepted anyway just because our team and product are really out of the norm.
Let your haters be your motivators.
- Haven't heard anything yet either. Crossing my fingers :)
- I went through the same issues with friends and loved ones wanting me to create a Facebook account. I resisted for years with the same arguments you made. It had some unfortunate consequences: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=16675681
- Updated to reflect that I wrote this in 2015. Still feel raw about it.
- 263 points
- This is an important point that people defending the author need to consider. I agree that hiring is a two-way negotiation. Flexibility is great. But there is a significant moral (and legal!) hazard when you let some people skip the code test because they have an amazing Github and others get rejected for not passing the screen. You're filtering out everyone who isn't privileged with the free time to build up an amazing portfolio. People will argue that this disproportionately hurts minorities, women, and lower income people.
- I'm a little biased as a devops guy and former SRE. When you're on call dealing with strict SLA's, your ability to make intelligent technical decisions quickly is important. I expect the guy I hire to not have to Google how to check CPU load or how to pipe tail output from log files into a grep function. At the very least a timed coding exercise tests their nerve.
For other development jobs I generally agree with you. The coding screen will not tell you much. Particularly for a mid-level or senior role. In those cases I am way more interested in their portfolio and in having a long casual technical discussion.
- It's an interesting idea. Phrased politely I think it's fine to suggest. Still I can understand why people would refuse your approach. There's an obvious risk involved letting the applicant dictate the terms of the evaluation. The point of coding tests is that you can't prepare or easily Google an answer. The employer wants to gauge your unscripted in the moment programming knowledge. Also as someone else said, you need a way to compare apples to apples. Not everyone has an amazing Github to show off.
Still I wish employers would better understand the limitations of automated coding tests. Pair exercises where I can use my own environment and think out loud with an interviewer aren't so bad. Fully automated stuff like HackerRank often make simple things overly complicated because they expect answers to be written a certain way. I think those sorts of tests are only suitable for really low level screening - ensuring a sysadmin can use basic bash for example.
- Great read. I am in a similar place with a small business. We have a commercial and animation and are considering doing YouTube ads. It sounds like it might be worth doing if the service is profitable enough per user. Really appreciate this detailed writeup of his experience.
- 2 points
- Totally agree with this. Been bootstrapping my own thing for a while. If it hits $5k MRR I'll be more than satisfied and probably never raise money.
- I had a similar experience a few years ago.
https://righteousruminations.blogspot.jp/2015/06/hating-face...
- Thanks!
Sheesh. What's the point then?