“Facebook turned me down” (2009)
twitter.com
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I regret nothing.
edit: Worth noting I was a 22 year old self taught programmer that hadn't experienced addressing O(log n) in a CS course, working with massive amounts of data, or large scale Linux sysadmin stuff. I wasn't fit for the ranks when compared against ex Yahoo! and Google people running for the same positions. So at least I made the most of it.
edit2: I got the interview after finding a bug in their authentication system that would allow a password hash collision to spit out the e-mail of the user that the collision occurred with. Meaning I type in a bogus email, and a password, after the post the login form would come back with the email pre-populated of the user that the hash collision had happened on, I type in the password again, and I was logged in as said user. It was a small bug I found by accident and then afterwards asked if they were hiring...
Telling the story now is an interesting historical anecdote, but you probably didn't blog or tweet about it in 2007, right?
I can't quite understand why Brian Acton was so public about the companies that turned him down. Isn't this bad for him if he's in a job search? Doesn't this send out a negative message (assuming any employer bothered to look)?
Then, a few months later I got another recruiting call from them. Then another. It didn't stop until I suggested they create some sort of engine for searching potential candidates to make sure they weren't wasting anyone's time tba the calls stopped. Once again, they didn't seem to like my idea ;p
I think this persistent inquiry from the large companies is an attempt to gauge the market and basically waste peoples' time. They interview in the hopes that the person will fit enough to slot into an available headcount, but it's pretty generic and highly unspecific. It's something like, hey, if you're looking to change jobs, come spend a day and take a chance that we'll be able to find something for you. I think it biases toward cookie-cutter employees and is by no means an indication of real interest.
It was in Switzerland though, and I'm not, my ethical qualms about working for Google aside (and I know I wouldn't be hired as I could never bring myself to lie about their privacy invasion, Google Glass being a stupid idea, Google+ being hideously invasive and useless, etc.).
It was a case of "if you work here, you're certified as knowing your shit" and "it's not what you know, it's who you know."
As said, I was self taught programmer, so for me this was a type of validation which meant the job had more significance for me at the time. If I could make it onto the Facebook staff, I was legit. It took me a lot of hard work and dedication to overcome that mental set back. I think all of us self taught devs have a lingering suspicion we're not good enough, not vetted enough, not seasoned enough, etc. Having a major life goal (@ 22yo) sitting at your doorstep and missing it due to your own shortcomings pretty much brought those back of mind doubts to the forefront and crushed my self worth, for me.
Luckily I'm not a "ah well, guess I'll go cry" kind of guy and adhere more to the "oh yeah?! well fuck you too!" attitude and having this happen to mean early in my career did nothing short of light a fire under my ass to be better than I was and better than I think I need to be. The salary offered for the position was about $28k more than I was making at the time and through a lot of self teaching, negotiations, and job jockeying I was making more than that position offered by about $5k within 1 year.
Despite all of this, that FB denial still has a tinge of "you suck, give up, go home, raise rabbits or something... you'd be a good ditch digger..." that still sits in the back of my mind reminding me constantly that some goals just aren't achievable... even if I don't want them at this point in my life anyways.
/rant
Personally, the weeks following my interviews with one of those big players saw me approached by a couple of established start-ups and a major financial company - far more attention than I'd ever received previously.
The word you're looking for is "company".
I have come to think that pushing code to production when your person is noticeably compromised in some way should be prevented thorough technical means. Perhaps a CAPTCHA is an acceptable solution (which probably should also get more difficult the later the hour).
;)
http://www.wired.com/business/2008/10/googles-mail-go/
edit: As an aside, it was entertaining watching a drunk man use Emacs under the gun.
Certain categories of US visas can basically be bought, but it is not cheap.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h...
NBD is H1-B fails.
The middle-class doesn't benefit Silicon Valley. Cheap nannies on the other hand...
Here's one: What if you wanted to move to another country? Don't assume that everything will always be going super great in your current country. Other countries will be more likely to accept you if your current country accepts citizen of the other country. Free trade!
???
I hope this is sarcasm.
Everything from sneaking around pop-up blockers (sorry everyone) to video chat applications to real time messaging platforms to media conversion clusters to penetration testing (I use that term very lightly, but correctly... I wasn't cracking WPA or trashing stacks to pop boxes, just abusing poorly designed systems with permission and stuff with a touch of forensics and systems hardening).
I think back at the opportunity and I was devastated that I didn't make the cut, but honestly, I'm pretty happy I was left to find my own way... it's lead to a lot of great experiences over the past 7 years and I wasn't able to just slide by on resume fodder and has left me the freedom to live in MIA, NYC, and LA... cross the country via road trip multiple times (once on motorcycle!), and met a lot of very talented peers along the way. Not all of the best and brightest are in the Valley... just the chest thumpingist.
Koum: No-nonsense immigrant from group persecuted in home country, family emphasis on education, using computers since a teen, drops out of college when career responsibilities grow.
Acton: Early employee at one of the most-successful companies of an era, lots of deep systems experience, takes time to consider "next adventure", cofounds with prior coworker and leans on other colleagues for seed funding.
That's about as stereotypical as real Valley founders get.
http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon...
Over 30's programmers raise our glasses to Acton and Koum.
While it is true that GREAT developers can also be young, they are not magically getting dumber when they age. Also it may be easier to be disruptive if you're young (meaning you are naïve enough to think you can change stuff, most of the times you'll be wrong, though) but smarter? Really?
I find this a quite stupid statement, to be honest...
Someday it will be a elderly woman, a kid, etc.. The Ocidental culture has a severe problem dealing with the impermanence and the unpredictable.. we need to get over it.. more zen-budhism, please?! :)
The Ocidental culture has a collective neurosis toward objectivism (eg. Kant, Descartes ...) and trying to measure and antecipate everything, and put everything under control, because of its constant fear in dealing with the uncertainty in life.. which is unavoidable..
I have cited buddhism, because its a great philosophical umbrella for subjectivism and uncertainty.. a medicine we need badly over here.. given(over-objectivism) its a common root for a lot of stupid reasoning.. so that was really what i was talking about
Note: I have a ocidental tradition
Note II: Objectivism can be great when used in the right way (lead invention of Calculus, Computers..) but can be a poison if used everywhere
It then states that "despite this, various forms of the caste system are practised in several Buddhist countries".
"Buddhist" countries having castes is not the same as Buddhism being a caste religion. Buddhism is not a caste religion.
The practical effect is largely the same though surely. Like a majority Christian country having racism.
How does a caste system survive in a country where the majority of adults oppose it?
I suspect the answer is "it doesn't". People who label themselves proponents of a particular religion often don't follow it's precepts, traditions or philosophies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_society#Four_class_order https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kegare
...and don't forget Hinduism.
It's very frustrating when people try to portray Hinduism as a single, monolithic religion - it's like talking about Catholicism, Baptism, and Mormonism (in the US) as if they were the same entity.
Despite what /r/worldnews might have one believe, the caste system is by no means universally followed. It varies greatly by region and other demographic factors.
In some parts, the caste system is virtually nonexistant, or is (at most) a more formal codification of the same socioeconomic-racial social discrimination that exists everywhere.
"I’m 42, essentially married with a kid. I don’t give a shit about this. I’m not sexting with random strangers."
This brings up a question: Is it even possible to make a prenup that covers future windfills? E.g., a prenup that protects your wealth in a company that hasn't yet been founded.
Editorializing: Why would a spouse be no less entitled to reap the rewards generated by the other spouse's start-up? A relationship, especially a marriage, is inherently two people acting as a unit, so just because one spouse didn't sling PHP and research lambdas all night doesn't mean that either spouse's contribution is more or less valuable. If my spouse accomplished something like this, I'd be thrilled at the success and genuinely looking forward to our life together with much less time and stress investment from both of us, since that means that I was also picking up a lot more of the "home life."
OK, I'll bite. What if one of these situations:
1) What if the spouse was dead set against the start-up, and did everything possible to dissuade you, but you succeeded anyway.
2) What if you used your own money and assets from before the marriage to finance it? And what if those monies and assets were covered by the prenup; the company financed by those investments would or wouldn't be covered?
3) What if you founded the company when the marriage was in obvious decline and you both knew you'd eventually get divorced? What if you founded it when you were already separated?
4) Many companies with 2 founders don't have a 50:50 split. Why does the split with the spouse need to be 50:50 in the case of a company? Why shouldn't it be 60:40 or 90:10 assuming we accept the notion that the spouse must have been contributing something and is entitled.
Because just sitting around giving emotional support to someone doesn't entitle you to half of everything they get. It doesn't work that way with any other relationship (parent, friend, etc), so why should a marriage? This is especially true if both partners are working.
To answer your point more directly, one difference is that a marriage tends to produce children in a way that platonic friendships tend not do. My sense is that equal division of significant income and equity post-marriage will help, not hurt, children.
To answer your point a different way, the default marital property settings tend to work well for most people. Of course you can change those defaults to some extent with prenups, postnups, trusts, and so on. If you're still dissatisfied with your ability to alter those defaults, well, nobody's forcing you at gunpoint to marry someone you like to live with, have sex with, and even raise kids with.
>If the concept of sharing your life with another person sounds weird - just don't do it.
Sharing your life with another person doesn't imply sharing property.
Yes. It's a contract; you can do what you like within the normal legal boundaries (although certain provisions, e.g. child custody are likely to be thrown out if ever challenged).
So it's not like Facebook (or Twitter) was overlooking a diamond-in-the-rough. More likely, it was some other key-role/compensation/fit mismatch.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...
Unless he's the one who started WhatsApp, it would have been developed and successful anyway and Facebook would have to buy it for the same amount of money.
The reality is that product/market fit is much more powerful force than programming capabilities of any single engineer.
Or something else?
Can those traits be identified and valued in the hiring process?
There are much more good programmers out there than break away products like WhatsApp.
You can't create successes like WhatsApp just by hiring good programmers. There are plenty of great teams that didn't achieve product/market fit and failed.
There are plenty of great programmers at Facebook or Google that do important but not wealth creating work (not on the scale of WhatsApp wealth).
In cases like this most likely the reason why WhatsApp is popular is that there was a person in charge who had the right vision for the app and came up with just the right set of features and a little bit of luck.
But even that person isn't valuable per-se in the sense that you should hire him for your company at all costs hoping that he will create similar wealth for your company.
I'm sure I'm butchering the analogy, but those are Schrödinger's successes: you can only tell they're successful at the time of the exit, but not at any time before that.
The key here is 'gumption'. Raw enthusiasm, high spiritedness and child like courage in approaching ideas and implementing them. To work on projects that kill you. To take routine, crippling failure and weather and grow stronger every time that happens. Most companies have processes to avoid hiring these kind of cowboys. Companies have processes to exactly avoid hiring these kind of people.
You see bulk of these things have nothing to do with skills, or genius or talent. If fact these skills can build other skills.
The problem is most companies check problem solving skills. Do these companies test problem identification skills? Do they check how a person can take failure? Do they measure how hardworking a person is?
If you see it in a way, we don't seem to check the actual skills at all.
LOL!
Do these companies test problem identification skills?
On the mark. Maybe it's because the problems prefer not to be identified.
'Happened to work on' makes it sound accidental. Maybe he's a good programmer and a good businessperson?
They're working on "something worth $200 an hour always" extra bonus features and bug fixes and getting paid $100 an hour compensation for it.
I'll start using this quote! May I know your full name for proper attribution? :)
Are you Kacper Kowalczyk of https://github.com/kkowalczyk ?
Do you test a person's ability to mug up algorithm puzzles?
Or
Do you test a person's ability to build a $16 billion company?
Sounds like the latter is a more result oriented goal.
This is called "being a VC"
WHOA, talk about extremes
(have been calling me back in since 2012. Haven't gone (yet). Currently laughing all the way to the bank NOT rendering ads in every place imaginable).
(Not that Twitter was a giant company in 2009, and Facebook was just getting there)
I think ultimately the problem is that you end up lacking a competitive advantage against startups, who are more highly incentivized to take risks and under fewer constraints (legal, PR, infrastructure, etc.) Most of the ideas that Google put out during that 2004-2011 period were really stuff that could've been done as startups and would've probably been even better products as such, but because Google was able to put them out for free they basically "strangled" the startup ecosystem. Witness how the much-decried Reader cancellation has opened the door for Feedly to really take off.
One of the biggest lessons for me, having worked at Google from 2009-present, is just how context-dependent strategy is. It's been really interesting to see Larry make (or try to make) certain changes in company culture, understand why they're being made and that Google and the world as a whole is probably better off for them, and yet also realize that they aren't very good for me as an entrepreneurially-minded Google employee.
Better to let the market sift out the successful founders than to payroll a hundred of them, hoping for a big win. Think of how many unsuccessful founder types that Facebook didn't hire too.
Also if this guy was working for Facebook, odds are he would have ended up on messenger, and someone else would have filled the SMS market need for Whatsapp in India. Then Facebook would be acquiring that company instead.
Sorry, I can't help myself, but at a salary of $160k a year, payrolling "a hundred of them" per year would only cost 1/10th of what FB just paid for whatsapp.
It's too bad companies like FB and Twitter would rather let the 'founder' types slip by than to take more chances. When Facebook last tried to recruit me, they described themselves as "a bunch of startups that just happen to work under the same company." Yeah, right.
Stated in a different way - Facebook could have paid 1,000 teams of 10 (founders + engineers) at 160k/yr per person, for 10 years... for what they just paid for whatsapp. The collective diversity of products developed by said teams would probably be worth more than whatsapp.
The problem with PARC and AT&T labs wasn't that having a bunch of really smart people doing interesting stuff failed to produce brilliant, world changing ideas, it was that the companies in question weren't always good at capitalising on them (arguably for the better, in the case of Unix).
There's lots of fun evidence for this - AT&T had an answering machine 1934 but shelved it for 60 years.
>AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.
http://thinkofthat.net/2010/12/03/no-answer-how-and-why-att-...
Did WhatsApp make a profit?
There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it supports the idea that not only do you let the market pick the winner, but that once the market HAS picked a winner, sometimes you have to buy that winner partly as a defensive strategy; it's not enough to find a cheaper way to "play offense".
Sure, of course that's exactly what they're doing.
But just giving up on being able to identify these sorts of people when there's tens of billions of dollars at stake seems like an irresponsible business decision.
At these acquisition prices, it's worth putting a great deal of effort and money into alternative processes.
Yeah and this is why Valve is a struggling company. Hiring really smart people and letting them make whatever products they want is doomed to failure.
Oh wait...
> But beyond the tactics, Donahoe realized there was a deeper issue bedeviling eBay. It had stopped innovating. [...] eBay also had a problem attracting and retaining innovative, entrepreneurial people into its executive ranks ...
> Andreessen’s second theory of innovation is that the people who are the very best at it are the people who create successful technology companies — founders. They are the people who have a proven ability to develop a concept and bring it to fruition.
> For this reason, Andreessen believes that tech companies should be run by their founders.
> The problem for eBay is that its founder, Pierre Omidyar, had no interest in running it. And Donahoe, a talented manager, had the wisdom to know he was not the kind of visionary who could found an innovative tech company.
> So he decided he was going to have to go after the next best thing. He was going to have to build a team of founders, or founder-types, and give them the run of the place.
Easy, do what you want.
P.S. Care to hire me?
I think that's especially true for people who, like WhatsApp, do things that are different than the common wisdom [1]. I had dinner recently with a friend who worked for Jeff Bezos years ago. She remembered Bezos coming into a meeting in something like 1999 excited about eInk and how it was the future for electronic books. Everybody single person in the room thought he was crazy. They didn't get the Kindle out the door until 2007, and most people thought it was crazy then. But it worked.
You could call that pure luck, but I think that's only true in the most abstract sense, where everything we are is luck.
[1] http://sequoiacapital.tumblr.com/post/77211282835/four-numbe...
I'd say on the order of 1. 1 in a billion 2. 1 in 100 million. 2. 1 in a million.
Sure he is smart and driven and has had every opportunity available to the one guy on planet earth who will achieve what he has. But that doesn't mean he's qualitatively different than the millions of others equally intelligent and talented who didn't buy the winning ticket.
Your problem is that you're associating the biggest most overhyped entrepreneurs as being the typical entrepreneur. And they indeed do hit huge luck. So you're right there.
What the media doesn't talk about -- are the thousands of founders running profitable companies in the tens of millions or even low hundreds of millions.
If you do something of value to society, the world will make you rich with a smile on its face.
Said no teacher, cancer researcher, etc. ever
Yes, he got lucky. (Which I already acknowledged.) But successful founders aren't "just lucky".
If you look back at his history, he had a string of very college-student-useful projects before Facebook. He knew he was onto something. Assuming that he would have the same kind of curiosity/initiative/wtv in 2014, chances are he would find new problems to solve.
It kind of puts in perspective that blog post from yesterday that claimed companies in Silicon Valley can't find rock star ninja engineers ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7259845 ).
The recent work on how SAT scores don't predict college success is similar. There is a huge amount of influence around 'fit' and environment. Some people just "click" and some people don't. Genius rock star programmers that don't click are poor employees, and some times former washouts that do click are your key hires. Hard to predict.
"EMPLOYERS: avoid employing unlucky people by immediately tossing half the CVs in the bin" - Viz top tip.
Things like the Stripe CTF contests are good recruiting tools, hackathons kinda sorta, resume scanning and the 5 - 10 person interview panel? Hard to get repeatable results.
Also hilarialously wortwhile is the C. Northcotte Parkinson take "The Short List, or Principles of Selection" (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=c.+northcote+parkinson+candi... )
What do you mean? SAT predicts GPA pretty well and it predicts it better for harder than easier subjects.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090148/
SAT predicts GPA better for high ability subjects: Implications for Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns Thomas Coyle,a, Anissa Snyder,a David Pillow,a and Peter Kochunovb
Abstract This research examined the predictive validity of the SAT (formerly, the Scholastic Aptitude Test) for high and low ability groups. SAT scores and college GPAs were obtained from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Subjects were classified as high or low ability by g factor scores from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. SAT correlations with GPA were higher for high than low ability subjects. SAT g loadings (i.e., SAT correlations with g) were equivalent for both groups. This is the first study to show that the predictive validity of the SAT varies for ability groups that differ in g. The results contradict a presumption, based on Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns, that a test’s predictive validity should be lower for high ability subjects. Further research is needed to identify factors that contribute to the predictive validity of the SAT for groups that differ in g.
"Hah! Yeah, we hire them to answer our phones." - Them
What code does Zuckerberg write? I've seen the film and googled "mark zuckerberg". From what I gather, he did some programming in Atari BASIC, and he's just another perl hacker. Common sense would conclude that he is multi-lingual (yeah, I'm aware he was rusty a year or two ago), but does anyone know any specifics?
Rasmus Lerdorf, http://www.sitepoint.com/phps-creator-rasmus-lerdorf/2/
"totally agree with Vinod Khosla. people starting companies for a quick sale are a disgrace to the valley... 3:47 AM - 17 Jul 2012"
[0] https://twitter.com/jankoum/statuses/225134737285578752
edit: I am not criticizing Jan at all and would gladly do the same given the same position.
I use it myself, but not sure about the 5 years wager. One of the main reasons quite a few people I know use it is precisely because it wasn't Facebook. My bet is FB guts it and tries to {force, gently-push} everyone to switch to their well-designed app. But the FB app is probably too bandwidth-hungry for most WhatsApp users.
http://instagram.com Ctrl-F Facebook
And I have 'immortalized' this using...surfmark http://www.surfmark.com/viewsm/GzFRmNKFeUqCGZBiZRzChw#page1
That's the sign of a smart person in my book.
See you in a few years suckers!