What it's like to start work at Quora | Hacker News Reader

What it's like to start work at Quora

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51 pointskahseng38 comments

One thing I've always wondered about with companies that provide free food is are you considered an outcast or thought of not being a team player if you bring your own food or don't eat with the team?

Sometimes I'm on a very specific diet, and I do like getting out of the office from time to time, so I'd hate to feel like an outcast for not eating with everyone everyday.

I doubt anyone would be offended, but I consider breaking bread with the rest of the company part of the job and corporate culture especially if folks not directly working together get together. It is an effective tool for informal interaction which helps folks adapt to each others unique communications styles.

I think it might be more in keeping with the spirit to suggest group lunch outings just to get out of the office. My old team at IBM used to take our lunches to the park across the street by the Charles River when the weather was nice or take lunch bicycle rides.

Not everyone eats together everyday. And no one will be considered outcast if so. There are many ways we interact on a day to day basis besides meal times, and we're all in the same room.

Folks also bring their own food sometimes. I'm sure something can be worked out for you too if you have special dietary needs and what we have isn't appropriate.

I worked for 3 years at a company with free food.

Our dept was 7 people at it's largest and it had always had a tradition of ordering from one restaurant together. It was a very tedious process to get everyone to agree and hellish for people with dietary restrictions. As for being seen as an outcast if you brought your own food, or didn't eat with the group, yes , the manager tended to read you the riot act if you tried to go out for lunch or brought your own.

I'm surprised by how unappealing and depressingly earnest it all sounds.

Yes, this reads an awful lot like an optimistic (and naive) kindergartner's first day at school. Interesting look inside nonetheless.. I enjoyed it. But, indeed, I too felt kinda odd after reading all of it.

Thanks for enjoying, do you have a suggestion on how to improve it? Not sell hiring at the end perhaps?

Likewise - this reminded me a lot of bubble 1.0. Time will tell, I suppose, but it does all feel very "me too"...

Unless your going to a company doing something really unique or gimmicky, I think sounding very normal is appealing. Far better than getting thrust in with little to no process set up around you.

I thought it sounded pretty low key and nice. I'm not sure I like the team lunch, and team Yoga as much...my inner introvert needs some time "not with the team"...but I can see an appeal (now team Kung Fu might work better for me).

For some reason I like it a heck of a lot better than dropbox's http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/inside-the-psychobox-a-tour...

Not everyone goes for yoga. It's not mandatory for all. There are times when only a handful of the team goes. Same for team lunches together.

Thanks for the compliment!

Sure thing! I can tell you've spent a lot of time thinking about the new hire experience...something lots of places don't really spend a lot of time on.

Sorry to hear that. What would appeal to you? This is just a single post. Maybe you'd like to come by :)

It's a mix of things. For one, I'm kind of allergic to marketing-speak, and the relentlessly positive and enthusiastic tone typical of it grates after a while.

But the other is that I'm not currently the kind of engineer who would want to work at Quora. Right now, I'm more of a tools / low-level guy than a web guy, and I'm pretty close to the machine (at this very moment, I'm writing an x86-64 disassembler). Doing development (rather than testing or debugging) on an EC2 instance is not something I would like to do; nor would I like being more or less forced (via peer pressure if nothing else) to use a Mac (I run Windows almost exclusively on my 2nd gen Mac Air) and develop with vi, Emacs or TextMate. I far prefer a powerful desktop with multiple monitors to any laptop + external monitor, and I like and appreciate what an IDE with integrated debugger does for productivity (though that's much more the case in non-dynamic languages).

There's no forcing done here actually. I worked on a Windows stack for many years (including loving the Visual Studio IDE). Eclipse or other IDEs would not be counter-cultural at all, it's just there isn't a need for that given the languages we work in. I also have 2 Windows machines at home, 1 Ubuntu VM, 2 Ubuntu machines (although one died), access to CentOS, and recently got an MacBook Air for home too. I thought I would be best at my work with a MBP and chose that among my options between a Mac/PC.

It's true that we don't have that many requirements at that low-level right now, but we certainly do have some work done lower than the web-stack -- we even got an ex-Ksplice engineer joining us to help with that.

But maybe I could also have included some of the deficiencies too, to make it a little more balanced--I agree with you it does seem too rosy with what I had mentioned, but overall the experience has been really positive. I've tried to keep things as real as possible, no-holds barred, instead of being filled with corporate imagery. So you can see the messy desks, cardboard boxes, boring food, lack of 6-core Xeons with 12GB RAMs :)

At the end of the day, I got to pick up cool employee schwag to show off to friends that I'd just joined one of the coolest places to work for. That's my story so far. Oh and if you're interested, we're hiring! :)

This made me feel.., strange.

I guess too quick a tie-in to a recruiting sell?

Okay here's my honest yet skeptical question:

Reddit is down to running with only one developer (and surviving fine).

How many people does it take to run/develop for Quora and why?

Isn't Quora "simply" a feature-rich forum system like Stackoverflow (with a different layout) ?

ps. why are we not allowed to see when a question was asked on Quora?

Presumably, Quora is still actively growing its feature set, whereas Reddit is mostly in maintenance mode technology-wise.

Quora is growing and the more people we hire the more we can do.

You can actually seem when a question was asked on Quora, if you click on the last activity timestamp on the question. It's just not that easily accessible because we want to emphasize the fact that each Quora question page is something that will last over time and not be transient. The page should mean the same when the question was first asked and when others visit any amount of time later.

As an outsider, I can't give Quora's opinion on how many people it takes to run/develop Quora.

I would say that given their ambition, it'd be a big mistake to ever look at its current state, as if it were a finished product, and then ask exactly what it would take to make/maintain that visible feature-set. That's leaving out everything that led to that point – which is not a clone of any other site – and all the options they've created for next steps, and all the hidden expertise/systems for keeping it vital.

You can get a superficial clone of lots of sites by treating their current instantiation as a frozen spec, and bidding it out. But you can't discover new constellations of winning features, and adapt the site endlessly to new problems and opportunities, without staff that knows and likes the codebase as if it were an appendage of their own bodies.

P.S.: Regarding your PS, click the timestamp representing 'Latest Activity' on the bottom of the right column; you'll see a dated log of all question-activity, back to when the question was initially asked.

You must have been typing while I was. Yes, thanks for providing that perspective. I echo your thoughts too.

I worked for a company that used remote instances to do development, the latency was terrible and everything took much longer to get done. We eventually switched to local dev environments and saw a big boost in productivity.

the 13inch macbook pro also surprised me, what about when you want to work away from the desk with the 30inch monitor?

I have a 28" external monitor at home for myself. I also value portability more if I want to work away from the desk. Vim tabs and navigation is okay on small screens too. Works for me :)

Makes me wonder if Quora was set up for continuous deployment from the beginning? The systems used for this type of thing (tracking pushes, tests, start/end times etc) always seem to be highly custom-built. I imagine it'd be a lot easier to build this as you build you site from the ground up, rather than retrofitting it in afterwards.

Quora has taken code quality very seriously. And yes, it was setup for CD pretty much near the beginning.

commit 9bcf5be94a6ce3efac5fda8de342a476af52d231 Author: Adam D'Angelo <dangelo@ugcs.caltech.edu> Date: Tue May 19 15:28:20 2009 -0700

    autotest work

commit 9da3069015ec3b2821f9825eb100a62dcedf70f3 Author: Adam D'Angelo <dangelo@ugcs.caltech.edu> Date: Tue May 19 14:04:43 2009 -0700

    add after_git_update.py

I'd like to hear more about this line from their job listings:

http://www.quora.com/jobs

"You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"

That could mean a wide range of things - from social engagement and occasional dinners at work (as described in the post) to

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html

http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

It's harsher than it sounds (Adam admits that too), but I think that's been up there since forever. If you come by (maybe interview?), you can find out for yourself if you'll be a good fit.

It's harsher than it sounds? Or it sounds harsher than it is? These are two very different statements.

Apologies, it's sounds harsher than it is :) I misspoke.

That statement can't quite get any harsher I would think :)

I didn't apply a few months ago (when I was looking) because of that one line. I'm glad to hear that you're not becoming burnt out!

One thing you'll notice is that Quora doesn't really give its employees any desktops. Instead, all development is done in the cloud with Amazon EC2 instances, provisioned specifically with custom software scripts.

So are all team members using the same EC2 instance? Or they each get their own different cloud-machine?

(Do EC2 instances support persistence in the file system anyway?)

We all get our own. Mine was named "devkahseng" if you saw that :) Yes EC2 supports persistence in the file system with Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes.

They have code review post-commit? It seems like a very dangerous practice. How do you guys feel about it?

With a team this size, I think it's spot on given their caveats: http://www.quora.com/Does-Quora-engineering-use-a-code-revie...

I assume they have a culture of shame and pride for power and responsibility afforded to each developer.

We also do pre-commit reviews for the important stuff, especially things related to privacy and anonymity. We know when to do them pre-commit or post (which is the norm).

Did they sponsor you on a Kinesis keyboard, or did you brought that from home?

It was sponsored. I have my own too at home. Others use other keyboards. Whatever makes you productive.

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