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Comment by xupybd | Hacker News Reader

Any tips on how you've found that work?

Is it all a local network of people that you've worked with or have you gone out and found clients?

I have never had to seek work. It has always been from people I knew or people who knew my coworkers. If one has good skills, the work will speak for itself and lots of repeat business/new customers will come knocking on the door.

Exactly. That's the reason why I don't understand that reasonably senior people ever have to go through that whiteboarding crap (or actually through anything more than a friendly chat).

Not everybody has done as good a job maintaining their network. I'm really bad at that sort of thing.

And for regular jobs (permanent or a long 6-12m contract), you might get referred by your network, but the company needs to whiteboard you all the same (it's policy!). The referral probably prevents your CV getting binned at least.

If you apply where you have no clout; if I get an invite from my network I assume no hurdles aka based on that they know what I can do for them and that the CTO (in my case) simply removes this requirement.

Interesting. Honestly that feels alien to me, and it might be for a number of reasons, including inadequate networking, not "selling" myself well enough, or being too much of a team player to not stand out as the 5X-er or 10X-er who you just have to hire to solve those tech issues that will double your business or whatever.

To counter this, my experiment at the moment is in freelancing at moonlight, but where the client is non-technical and so getting a non-tech to non-tech referral means the client couldn't whiteboard me* if they wanted to, no more than I can white board my dentist. They will base their decision on the trust of the referral, and the fact they can try me out first / easily fire me anyway.

My question to you, is what sort of companies let you skip the hoop jumps? Would Google / Netflix etc allow this, or are they too standardized? I can see a startup allowing this or even needing it as an early employee is much more than just an algo remembering machine. What about a medium size co?

* I just noticed how similar "whiteboarding" and "waterboarding" sound. :-/

> My question to you, is what sort of companies let you skip the hoop jumps?

Hard question as I did not apply to many, but the largest offer I had was a company with some 150k+ people and I could just go in and start. I knew the CTO from a project in another company (he was the CTO there and we were contractors); the project failed but we kept in touch. I find (my prejudice) that kind of scale very much not interesting to work for; I like companies < 500 people.

For Google/Netflix(/Facebook/...) I definitely cannot answer as I never wanted to work for those companies and my network is local so I am nothing to them. In working for a very-large-company I think I would only consider microsoft research as I really love what they are doing [0] (and would work there almost for free), but like said, my network is far more local.

[0] https://www.rise4fun.com/

You're a CTO at a banking startup. Your experience does not apply to most programmers.

Would also be interested!

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