Well-capitalized Seattle start-up seeks Unix developers | Hacker News Reader

Well-capitalized Seattle start-up seeks Unix developers

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160 pointsswombat82 comments

[quote from link] Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership. [/quote]

Yes, but will it ever be worth anything? ;-)

If you have to ask then maybe it's not worth. I think that wherever you go you have the chance to make something meaningful if you really want to.

Edit: I didn't realize the date at first, so the downvotes are in order. I still believed in what I said tough.

You got downvoted for accidentally raising the very good point that the e-mail does not contain enough information to allow a prospective candidate to decide what equity would be worth? I don't know who gets downvoting power around here but they sure do not have much of a sense of humor.

what does an email that has sufficient information to valuate a company look like?

That email has more than enough information to tell me that its probably a good candidate to find out more about.

An email only has sufficient information to gauge the future value of some startup if that email has been sent back in time from the future. Preferably it is still smoking and glowing blue and placed in your hands directly by Christopher Lloyd himself.

1) You get to downvote when you have enough karma.

2) Humorous comments do get upvoted here, but they have to be a) funny and b) intelligent. Take, for example, this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1225654

I'm not saying that was terribly intelligent or funny (hence only 3 upvotes), but yeah.

[Edit] Two far better examples would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268430

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1268430

And right in this thread! I am humbled by their wit. :)

fyi: Those who have at least 200 karma points get downvoting power.

On a serious note, this is exactly how you should write job ads if you want exceptional hackers, imho.

Perhaps minus the degree requirement though.

True. I disagree with degree requirements for hacker jobs too.

so, we always say this... but doesn't the success of amazon, and other "degree" driven companies mean we are wrong??

maybe having a degree does matter?

Correlation does not imply causation. That said, I won't say that a degree is worthless. I will say that too often we think of a degree as a bullet point on a resume or a job listing rather than thinking of it as a means to actually learn something.

That is the trick to admissions at elite colleges. They admit people who would succeed regardless. Sure the name brand and the alumni you know helps, but it helps by saving time, you don't need to prove yourself so much. You still need to be you tho'.

There are many counter-examples. What about the success of non-degree-driven companies like Microsoft, where the founder dropped out before completing school? Does that prove that degrees are silly and worthless?

The thing is that degrees might mean something or they might not; it's not too hard to get through higher education without retaining anything or even learning anything relevant in the first place, but by the same token, some people do some really cool and meaningful work at college and it means a lot. You just have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

No, it's a false dichotomy to say that because Bill Gates dropped out of college that all degrees are therefore "silly and worthless". He dropped out of Harvard (where simply being accepted is an achievement in itself) in order to found the the company that would eventually make him the wealthiest person in the world. There is no doubt that he would have been capable of completing his degree had he chosen to.

For regular people who need to persuade someone else to hire them, having a degree certainly helps and is often a requirement.

That is the point. Not having a degree doesn't imply that one wouldn't be capable of completing a degree. Bill Gates is an example of that. People here also aren't saying that that a degree isn't "often a requirement" in job listings — they're saying it shouldn't be, not that it isn't.

Incidentally, I would bet most people who don't have degrees could have one if you gave them a full free ride. Getting a degree these days requires several years of your life and huge gobs of money, but that's pretty much it.

If degrees "might mean something or they might not," then they don't mean anything. In order for a predictor to be useful, it has to be reliable. If I have to take it on a case-by-case basis anyway, why would I bother looking at the degree itself? That puts it on the same level as the applicant's star sign and blood type.

I wouldn't go that far. A star sign and blood type are almost never relevant. A degree might be relevant, but it might not. You're correct that it's not a good way to filter resumes, but that doesn't make it completely useless.

I got hired there in '97 without one, so it wasn't a hard and fast requirement.

Nearly every job I've gotten past the age of 17 listed a degree as a requirement. I have about as much college now as I had when I was 17, which is to say, almost none.

Considering that I've never had trouble finding employment, I think that a degree being listed as a requirement in the job ad is quite often another meaningless bullet point that will be overlooked if you are attractive enough otherwise.

(obviously, there's some pretty strong observer bias here; the companies where that really was a hard and fast rule wouldn't have approached me, or wouldn't have given me an interview if I approached them. Still, I find that 'required' doesn't actually mean 'required' in many cases.)

Yes, but it might be a bit deceptive if I started signing my recruitment ads as "Jeff Bezos."

True, but the ad is from 1994. I doubt many people had heard of Bezos at that point. :-)

I'm not sure the ad as it stands quite convinces me I'd be doing interesting work (though it is possible I'd have thought of "commerce on the Internet" as pretty interesting at the time).

At the time, e-commerce pretty much didn't exist, so it would at least be a novel and unsolved problem if nothing else.

At the time, e-commerce had only just become legal.

To be honest if I ran across this ad in the wild it would turn me off. Maybe I've just been burned too many times, but when someone suggests things like "do it in one-third of the time competent people think possible", that is a huge red flag to me.

Every time I've taken a gig with someone who has said this I've found it to be at least literal, though often you have even less time than they list. It's not just a fancy way of saying "can do work quickly" in most situations, it's more a declaration that "ignorant people are going to constantly and unreasonably hound you regarding completion of the project and they won't be satisfied when you get it done". I once had a guy who was looking for "rockstars" expect me to finish what is reasonably about a month of work in four days.

Aside from that, it's typical corporate-speak: "excellent communication skills", etc. Not very attractive as a whole imo.

While real communication skills are valuable, 'excellent communication skills' is certainly vague corporate speak implying whoever wrote the add doesn't even understand precisely what communications skills they need and why. Try this instead:

Wanted: The ability to explain complex technical problems and concepts clearly and concisely, to make things as simple as possible but no simpler (a la Einstein), so that the group can make sound, correct judgements and choose the best solutions.

"do it in one-third of the time competent people think possible", that is a huge red flag to me."

I think your response is wise. That sort of statement usually means that it's a sweatshop.

Except the part about building in 1/3 the time...to get away with that you need to have some kind of reliable reputation so it is interpreted correctly.

If anyone doesn't recognize the name of the poster (like me), this is what ended up happening:

http://amazon.com/

Looks like an interesting start-up, but with the IPO market still frozen, how will they ever exit? Their investors will clearly never get their money back. Maybe Google will buy them to hire their engineers.

Electronic books? I have no time for such nonsense.

This part is cute:

"Familiarity with web servers and HTML would be helpful but is not necessary."

Shows just how new the web was in '94.

Most software engineers at a company like Amazon or Google never start Apache or see a line of HTML. Bezos knew exactly what he was looking for.

A great contrast to all the other job openings in 1994 that required five years of Java, HTML, and Linux experience.

Wow, that's a really tough requirement. Java was first publicly announced in 1995.

You get one point for being smart enough to notice that Java wasn't announced til 1995. You lose two points for not being smart enough to realize he was joking.

It may not be obvious that it was a joke, given that impossible requirements have been asked of before. Case in point: requiring 3 years of rails development when it had only been in existence for 2 or so years.

..that was the joke

I saw a post on one of the usenet forums from an HR guy looking for someone with 10 years of Java experience... in 1995.

Touche. Brain's a bit foggy this morning.

Maybe this guy Larry should apply.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/msg/88fa108450...

Hmm.. I didn't know their original name was Cadabra.

Bezos changed the name from Cadabra to Amazon because Yahoo would return search results alphabetically.

Holy shit.

No, that's alphabetically worse, but good suggestion.

Next time I catch heat for it, I'm going to fire back with "So what, Jeff Bezos is an SEO, too."

I can't verify your claim one way or another.

Humourly, Amazon themselves don't seem to have a clue, giving both answer plus lots of spam: http://askville.amazon.com/Bezos-changed-cadabra-amazon-soun...

I'm not sure if this is true, but I was told that it was because Cadabra sounds too much like "cadaver".

Fun fact: it was changed because of concern people might hear 'cadaver' instead of 'cadabra'.

(or so this book said: http://www.amazon.com/amazon-com-Inside-Revolutionary-Busine...)

I find it even more amusing that his one other newsgroup posting is on finding a good dog obedience school in the Seattle area: http://groups.google.com/group/seattle.general/browse_thread...

Funnily enough, it's not even him posting, it's his wife, Mackenzie, posting under his account.

Ah yes, the good old days of sharing email accounts with your spouse/partner. When I search for my name on Google, most of the results are for recipes my now-wife posted to rec.food.cooking back in the early 90's.

My wife did that for a while on a bunch of amazon forums bashing the Twilight series.

It was one of the driving factors for me buying her a laptop of her own that I never log into. I really need a prospective employer or friend Googling my name and seeing that I not only read Breaking Dawn, but that I felt strongly enough about it to bash it with a bunch of other ladies.

EDIT: Just to clarify: the forum was 99% women according to my wife. I am not implying that Real Men don't read Twilight, just that I'd feel like less of a man if I read it. To each his own.

Note the signature on his message.

"It's easier to invent the future than to predict it." -- Alan Kay

Saw it, and to be pedantic, isn't that a bit of misquote? I've always seen it as:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

Heh.. I was actually job-hunting about that time. Wish I'd seen it....

I like how he says "you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible"

My first thought was "How do I become someone who designs and builds large and complex (yet maintainable) systems in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible?"

The best way is to have done it before. Its easy to implement something in 1/3rd the time as someone else, if you've done it before and they haven't.

Drop the "maintainable" part.

Does anyone know if Amazon's tech has been developing at 3x the speed that most competent people think possible?

Having worked there, I'd say that's a resounding NO.

yeah, only issue is it might skew towards the egomaniacs. some of the best hackers are very humble

... and very pessimistic, if they've actually built a complex system or read The Mythical Man-Month, which saw its first edition in 1975.

In "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister, they report the results of various studies on programmer productivity that showed that the best are an order of magnitude more productive than the average. Similar results hold for companies as a whole.

Bezos was not being unrealistic in seeking programmers who could do things in 1/3 the time of what most competent people would think is possible. They are out there.

That's true. But due to the Dunning-Kruger[1] effect, it's more likely to recruit less than competent people.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I disagree with your observation, since the truly elite tend to have been singled out for their singular achievements. (e.g. winning a putnam, or the USACO, etc)

Dev #1, Highly productive developer, careful and detail oriented: "Well, I can probably only build a large system in about half the time that a competent developer would think possible. Better not waste my time with this one."

Dev #2, Highly distracted developer, careless and sloppy: "I can put something together 5 times faster than that old guy down the hall who's always reshuffling his paperwork. Hey, I'll give it a shot. They're always hounding my case here anyway."

Result: Cadabra HR had too much to drink on the weekend with not enough sleep and Dev #2 is hired monday morning.

Amazon is still hiring ;) www.amazon.com/jobs

I don't know if we're developing 3 times faster than possible, but from the inside it's amazing to see how many projects launch on any given week without any part of the machinery ever stopping.

There's a bug with my amazon prime account. Every time that I pay, I have to manually select "use my amazon payments" balance. I can't save this preference, in a payphrase or just as a normal cookied setting. Thanks!

If Google offered its first public services in '98, where did these posts originate from? Did Google merge an existing message board system into Groups when it was released?

Usenet. They bought Dejanews and have archives back to the early 80s.

Dejanews had been archiving usenet as far back as the mid-90s but they (now google) actually have usenet archives donated by others dating back to 1981.

Yes. Groups mirrored the newsgroups which have existed for a number of decades.

Google's servers achieved sentience in 2002, traveled back in time and saved all the previous Usenet threads.

Sadly, the logo no longer contains capitals.

why would that make anyone sad?

(1994)

poorly-Capitalized uk Start-up seeks Money

Only very tangentially related, my scrappy, not-too-well capitalized (from Founder's Co-op: http://www.founderscoop.com) Seattle start-up (AppStoreHQ: http://www.appstorehq.com) is also seeking developers:

http://blog.appstorehq.com/post/482789903/appstorehq-is-look...

EDIT: Err, why the downvotes?

Inappropriate. There are better way to announce jobs on HN.

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