Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by starnix17 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

starnix17

What happens when the last one leaves?

Is Conde just going to run off to Elance or something?

I can't even find a jobs page on Reddit.

At least it's open source.

View on HN

Ironically, a month ago they were looking for devs and asking them to invest considerable time writing demo apps (front end engineers, for example, were tasked with writing an Javascript Reddit clone using HTML5 storage to keep track of votes, etc.) to prove their worth:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/fjgit/reddit_is_doubli...

My guess is this may have repelled some experienced devs that, otherwise, might have applied.

Wow, sometimes companies are just out of their minds with the hoops they put up.

I would definitely not invest that much time into a job application, especially before an initial interview to know if I even want to work there.

This application is the initial interview. You now know that you don't want to work there. Saved both you and Reddit a lot of time.

From the application:

Well, first off, it's supposed to be fun. If you don't see the joy in either of these puzzles, please don't apply.

Seems fair to me.

Set high standards. You can always lower them later.

> You now know that you don't want to work there

If the filter were genuinely indicative of that, that would be great. However, my guess is that working there is quite different from doing makework puzzles for no pay (I hope, at least!).

I don't think you get a good idea of what a place is like until you sit down and talk to the people involved and see the code. At least that much is possible.

> If the filter were genuinely indicative of that, that would be great. However, my guess is that working there is quite different from doing makework puzzles for no pay (I hope, at least!).

The puzzles are in the links provided, why didn't you just go read them?

Because I have more interesting puzzles to work on: my own projects, many of which are available on the internet for potential clients or employers to look at should they wish to hire me.

Let me recap:

* You have the time to post on HN strongly implying that these "puzzles" are likely not that great (they're not even puzzles to start with)

* You have the time to purposefully misread replies (I suggested that you go read them before judging them, not that you go work on them) and reply yourself

* But you don't have the time to click on a link and read 20 lines of text?

I actually had a look before, and they confirmed my impression that they're pretty much a waste of my time.

The point is not whether I clicked through or not, the point is whether I'm going to spend my free time on my own projects, or completely useless projects for some company - they're not even things the company needs!

I'm more than happy to be judged on the merits of what I've produced, both proprietary and open source, rather than fooling around with invented puzzles.

If the tasks were things the company needed directly, they'd be accused of trying to get people to 'work for free'.

This is the wonderful thing about Homininae. I also have lots of my own work and at this very minute I have a ton of outstanding issues to close on the Faux framework alone.

Nevertheless, programming puzzles are like catnip to me, so I don't mind solving them as part of a job interview process (or at least, I didn't mind the last time I was actually looking).

I would NEVER say that I have a superior strategy to you, or that you have a superior strategy, or that programming puzzles are an excellent filter, or a terrible one. Just that some people will like them, and some not.

You don't, that much is obvious. Or at least, you don't in the context of a job application. Fair enough, and nobody should ever suggest that (a) This is a bad idea on your part, or (b) on the basis of your anecdotal evidence, this is a bad idea on Reddit's part.

That's exactly right. I did a similar quiz for my current job, and now I administer something similar when I look for new hires. It's amazing how many people with solid-looking resumes flub basic questions once you ask to see actual code they wrote.

The problem with this approach is that you never see the code of those not interested in jumping through your hoop.

I think its completely fine to have quizzes as part of the process but asking people to spend several hours on one before they´ve even talked to the company is a bit much IMO.

Ah, thanks. A while ago I was interviewed by the SpiderOak team, who asked me to make a FAQ system with commenting and CAPTCHAs in Django to prove I could write code. This would only take one or two hours, but I've already developed countless web apps in Django so I felt rather bad that they wanted me to pass some arbitrary test before even talking to me (as you say).

I thought it was just me being a primadonna, but I'm glad to find someone else thinking the same way. After all, my resume (which is full of all the things they ask) should be enough for at least an initial impression on their part.

They never did bother to reply after I sent them the code. I actually now see that they have deployed a new FAQ system with commenting and CAPTCHAs, although it was simple enough that I don't think they'd just use my code.

That's how you reach out to inexperienced devs. And frankly, if they're posting on Reddit, they know what they're getting into. They have to set up a pretty serious mediocrity filter.

If your resume identifies you as a badass programmer, you just toss them a copy of your resume. You know how it works, and they know that insisting that you do a programming challenge before setting up an interview hurts their chances of landing you, so they'll give you an in-interview test instead.

It's the same with Facebook and all the other places that have programming challenges -- they're there to qualify leads.

>That's how you reach out to inexperienced devs.

Not sure why an org like Reddit, which maintains a small team, would be interested in hiring inexperienced devs.

Nobody from the original team had any experience before they started there, to my knowledge.

...and now, one of the most popular sites on the internet has 6-hour outages.

Coincidence?

Outage, singular. You are talking about the 6 hour outage, not the 6 hour outages. Reddit is prone to go down more than some other high profile sites, but you are talking about a single occurrence of it going down due to a known issue that is explained in the article this thread links to.

No, it is not a coincidence. Please don't sensationalize a comment about an article that clearly explains what went wrong. Go to Reddit for that.

As someone who hangs around in the reddit dev and downtime IRC channels, several-hour outages do happen on a monthly basis, as well as loss of some features more e.g. commenting. Reading between the lines on each outage, it was due to building the site on shaky hardware foundations. It just wasn't explicitly mentioned until now.

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/g66f0/why_reddit_was_d...

Forgive me for the hyperbole, but I've been getting timeouts and extremely slow page loads from reddit daily for at least six months.

They always seem to have an excuse (usually about something being screwed up with Amazon), but frankly "not my fault" only works so often.

Yes. The outage was due to an Amazon EBS hardware failure.

Developing a brand new startup is a different challenge than maintaining a site that has a billion page views a month.

Also, they really need to weed people out. They were swamped with thousands of applications the first time around.

>My guess is this may have repelled some experienced devs that, otherwise, might have applied.

I told them as much too.

I thought their backend challenge looked reasonable, though: given a timestamped log file, return all entries since a certain time (efficiently!)

With a couple of caveats, iirc. There were a few idiosyncrasies with the log files that needed to be dealt with.

Reddit is definitely not a fun code base to go mucking around in. I wrote about this here: http://www.deserettechnology.com/journal/reddit-the-open-sou... . I think the amount of effort necessary to grok reddit's codebase would be pretty large, and I can't imagine many people doing that without getting paid or having a ton of extra time and a lot of love for reddit. The code needs a lot of work before it's ready for anything besides reddit.com.

My experience is that most people that try to get reddit running in the first place give up because it's such a gargantuan monstrosity. reddit will take any reasonably-sized personal VPS entirely over -- I was running on a 1GB slice and had to login every few days to restart Cassandra and paster (after the Oct. push). Reddit is just not well-suited for anything except reddit.com, and I think new developers would have some difficult maintaining that, and that most people aren't going to do it without getting paid. It's a big, ornery project, certainly not easy to jump into.

I think this is close to the truth. Even from the outside Reddit seems a tangle of functionality.

My guess is that there are leaks that have lingered for quite some time.

It is a fantastic site, but I have the feeling that leaving it has been a relief for those that have. I might be wrong. A bit drunk.

Lesswrong.com is built on reddit's codebase. I guess that's a hurray for Tricycle (http://tricycledevelopments.com/) beating it into submission.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com