Most popular tech companies in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Most popular tech companies in Silicon Valley

hackerrank.com

30 pointsrvivek20 comments

Slightly off topic.

I work in an office that uses IE7. About half the internet is broken for me. I have no options to upgrade or use chrome frame. I completely understand not supporting older browsers, but please please PLEASE don't block me from your site. I don't care if the formatting is completely borked or unusable. I expect that to happen a lot and would never blame a site for it. Giving me a warning that my experience will be degraded is okay too, but keeping me off your site is rather frustrating.

For an article like this, if the formatting sucked, I might view source and at least see the text. Until the comments get going, I have no way to gather anything about the article.

I'm truly sorry for that. I'll get that fixed. Meanwhile, I took a full-page screenshot (http://awesomescreenshot.com/04614cty4c). This is the best I could do for a quick turnaround.

Links [1] Six programming challenges: https://www.hackerrank.com/backtoschool/challenges [2] Quora traffic: http://thenextweb.com/in/2013/02/26/india-passes-the-us-to-b... [3] Monthly contest: https://www.hackerrank.com/monthly

Thanks for the reply. You guys certainly aren't the only site that does this, and I know I'm in an increasingly shrinking demographic (thankfully).

Unfortunately, in many large organizations with strict information access policies, it's very difficult to get progress done on the technical side. I need someone to break cnn.com or another heavily trafficked site, and then maybe the big wigs will throw a fit.

So my first question when clicking through was what do you mean by popular:

Popular by number of applications they get.

I understand that this sort of post is promoting the underlying service blogging about the topic. I know it's a fairly common approach on Hacker News, and it's fine, I discover a lot of great blogs and interesting stuff that way. Not sure this really tells me much though. The statistical validity of this sample is definitely questionable so I am not sure it even works on its own terms.

Also, I suspect "Quora is basically an Indian site" might be seen as contentious, though I found the traffic stat interesting.

Hi Richard, I wrote the post, what would you like me to clarify?

Oh I don't think it was unclear. It's nicely written. I am just not convinced that it tells us a whole lot, if you know what I mean. The over-representation of Quora in your sample's applicant behavior being the exception.

Yeah I know what you mean. I'd love to talk off the record, but since I have to balance between the companies and user's privacy that is the most I could disclose.

One thing I can disclose, the shotgun style of applying to all the company works. Out of all the cohorts, by percentage, more interns were hired than full-timers because they were open to applying to "lesser known" companies. This is also advantageous because the interns could pick which companies they wanted to work with. The intern cohort might have also had better success because there is no barrier to entry with H1Bs.

offtopic: while I'm sadly not surprised by yet another page that takes js gymnastics to load simple text after loads of time staring at a blank page, could somebody explain what's going on in that source code? o_0

    <span id="manifestyml" style="display:none">
      ---
    FB-PaulG.jpg: FB-PaulG-68c51e61990724176b68959e2e686ce8.jpg
    FB-PaulG/index.jpg: FB-PaulG-68c51e61990724176b68959e2e686ce8.jpg
    HR-codeeditor-screenshot.png: HR-codeeditor-screenshot-859996176c0a9ce1b8e4f1e8622128a0.png
    HR-codeeditor-screenshot/index.png: HR-codeeditor-screenshot-859996176c0a9ce1b8e4f1e8622128a0.png
    HR-homepage-screenshot.png: HR-homepage-screenshot-bce0c47541de64b962c50001bb0fce04.png
    HR-homepage-screenshot/index.png: HR-homepage-screenshot-bce0c47541de64b962c50001bb0fce04.png
    ...
    </span>

This block keeps track of assets and their hashed paths. We makes sure all our (hackerrank) assets are being pulled in from cloudfront without any need for path invalidation after each "assets compiled" production push.

but why do you push 1200 lines of this to the client? and why do you display a simple article with js?

It is wrong. It should be removed. On it.

Page takes several seconds to load and then just shows a header?

Not just broken on IE7, apparently . . . .

Sorry about it. Could you please check now?

>My hypothesis is that a majority of CS4 applicants came from India and Quora has 30.8% of their traffic from India.

Wow, I wonder what the ratio of Page hits vs posts is like for Indian IPs and how that compares with other geographic regions.

This might shed a little light: http://blog.hackerrank.com/day/2013/02/06

How can you guys be so dumb to expose this in your blog ? https://www.hackerrank.com/rest/contests/master/challenges?_...

Anyone else surprised to see Facebook/Twitter amongst the most popular for the B2S cohort? I would have guessed more of their allure to college-aged applicants had worn off and transferred elsewhere by now.

I have always wanted to work for Mozilla. Are they not that popular among graduates or are they not in the survey for some other reason?

Hey Brianeatworld, these are a few companies which participated in the hackathon as sponsors. Mozilla wasn't in it.

I also have this inexplicable desire to work for Mozilla, albeit on the PM/Business side of things (and more importantly, to help contribute to its success).

Maybe Mozilla isn't as visible on campus in their recruiting efforts?

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