Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangoor | Hacker News Reader

Khan Academy is still hiring, though our focus is backend and full-stack engineers right now[1]. I hope you're able to find new work soon!

This is an odd time for us. We're an online education non-profit. With all of the school closings[2], we're seeing a huge spike in traffic. Fortunately, our infrastructure can handle it, but we are still spending some effort staying on top of the rapidly changing traffic patterns.

Simultaneously, we're in the midst of a huge project to rebuild our backend (porting from Python 2 to Go)[3]. So we're juggling a lot right now, but will be fine.

If there are folks out there with backend skills in particular, we're hiring and our engineering team is half remote (all in the US/Canada).

[1]: https://www.khanacademy.org/careers

[2]: https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/6117702550643507...

[3]: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm

View on HN

Say, maybe you could pass this along to the design team:

My kids all reject the current interface. They loved the interface it had a few years back. In case you need more info to identify what I refer to, I'll describe it.

I'm pretty sure there was nothing but math. Each topic was represented by a circle, and each circle was connected to prerequisites. Kids would earn points in a simple way. Kids would also earn various astronomy-related badges.

The new system simply doesn't motivate any of my kids. It isn't a change in my kids; I have enough kids (twelve) to average that out. Kids who liked Khan Academy before now don't, complaining about the interface. Younger siblings, now the age at which the older siblings liked Khan Academy, also don't like it.

Also, a completely different matter: Last time I checked, which was some time ago, the video required YouTube. If I need to block YouTube, the video can't play. Hopefully you found a solution for that long ago.

Thanks for the input! I can pass that along. I'm not as connected to the user research and design teams, so I don't have any helpful insights to provide about the evolution.

We _do_ serve the video through YouTube by default, but we have a fallback video player that should kick in if YouTube isn't available.

Always been a fan of Khan Academy, I'll try to step up the monthly donations I've been making.

Out of curiosity, are you looking for any python dev's or people more familiar with Go?

> Always been a fan of Khan Academy, I'll try to step up the monthly donations I've been making.

Thank you!

Prior familiarity with Go is not required, and Python experience is still particularly valuable because we still have vastly more Python than Go.

Just came here to say big thanks to you and everyone else at Khan Academy for the tremendous work you're all doing. As a working parent who has now been thrust into the role of teacher, it's been incredibly helpful. Thank you!

Thank you! I'm happy that we're able to help.

I have over 30 years of dev experience, full-stack with a focus on backend and preference for Go, and am currently in the progress of wrapping up a project with nothing in the pipeline.

But I'm unfortunately stuck in Sweden.

Yeah, unfortunate for us that you're stuck in Sweden, but I hope you're able to find a good next project!

Curious why you can't hire world-wide for remote workers.

A couple of things: one is that there is additional legal/compliance stuff to deal with for each additional country (EU might count as one, when it comes to that), but the bigger reason is that we wanted more overlap in working times. It's also less expensive when we do get together in person at headquarters in California (which has typically been 3-4 times a year).

As far as overlap goes, I strongly prefer working nights anyway. And you could get around a lot of legalities by hiring as a consultant and billing per hour, a friend of mine runs a company that I've occasionally worked through.

I honestly don't know why I even bothered to answer, but something about your post felt right and my intuition has served me well so far.

I'm afraid I don't have much backend stuff to show, as most of it is owned by respective customers. Privately I've mostly been designing my own scripting language embedded in Go [0] lately.

[0] https://github.com/codr7/gfoo

Neat language. Looks like a fun project, and I totally get that your previous work is generally owned by the folks you did the work for and therefore non-public.

I can ask when I next meet with my manager, but I can say from my nearly 5 years at Khan that engineering has not desired to spread out beyond the timezones we're in. I did work for Mozilla for 4 years, so I do know that it can be done and what the tradeoffs are like. This is just not a step we've wanted to take at Khan.

I did speak to my manager about hiring from Europe. She said that in order for us to ensure legal compliance, we work through a particular company. Doing so covers our legal bases, but also means it's very expensive for us to hire elsewhere.

Hiring remote workers at scale is super complex if you want to comply with local laws (and you must). Hiring contractors is easy but if your contractor should be indeed classified as an employee you will be in trouble one day or the other. You have to set up a legal entity in that country/state, provide workers' comp, health benefits, unemployment, comply with various laws on leave, vacation, medical, etc... This is quickly a nightmare and it is why true good remote companies hire only in handful of states/countries.

> but if your contractor should be indeed classified as an employee

What would be the reasons for that?

Many countries have laws that allow them to reclassify consultants who look like employees (ie the client dictates how to do the work, work conditions, hours of work, etc) as de-facto employees. This is why Professional Employment Organizations (PEO) have increased in popularity. They employ the 'consultant' and thus handle all local labor law, but send the consultant to the client. Typically a consultant will negotiate the hours and bill rate and the PEO will add some extra for the overhead costs.

Any Junior or non senior roles for full stack engineers?

Unfortunately, no. Just what's listed on the site.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com