abhiv

Companies in Silicon Valley seem to approach interviews with the idea that the candidate is a blank slate. There isn't a lot of discussion about things you've done in the past; the general approach is to ask you to design for hypothetical scenarios, or to write code on the whiteboard for algorithmic problems.

The Silicon Valley approach seems to throw out a lot of good information that could indicate a candidate's quality by focusing only on the now, rather than any historical data. One of the reasons given for this is that a lot of people are good at talking about stuff when they haven't actually implemented anything, but it seems to me that an in-depth conversation about someone's background followed by coding exercises would provide a better indication of their quality than abstract questions in a vacuum.

I think another reason why interviewers don't ask a lot of questions about candidates' backgrounds is to avoid potentially hearing something that the candidate's previous employer might consider confidential information. This is a fair concern, but it does lead to what seems to me to be a sub-optimal evaluation process.

There also doesn't seem to be as much urgency to hire someone now as the author indicates -- companies can and do take time to schedule interviews and make up their mind. Perhaps it's different in NY.

Where can you find prep questions for technical interviews? Glassdoor or somewhere else?

I'm in the early stages of setting up a "proper" working environment for my startup (office space, health insurance etc), and would love to hear about people's experiences, costs etc.

The idea of a game company that's venture-backed before shipping anything seems odd to me.

The startup world in general is moving toward a hits-driven model, but a game company whose product is only used for entertainment takes this to an extreme. A game like Glitch doesn't solve any problem, and it's not even a generalized tool like Twitter where the problems it enables solving become apparent later. It's simply a game, that will live or die based on how well it entertains people. It's very hard for me to understand how investors evaluate an idea like this before anything has shipped. (Of course, Stuart Butterfield probably raised money based on past success alone.)

It doesn't even seem like the company had plans to build a portfolio of games like a Zynga or EA. So they raised a bunch of money before they had even a glimmer of product-market fit, hired a bunch of people, and then figured out that their game wasn't good enough.

The only strategy that seems to work in the game business is to be a low-budget, low-profile indie developer for a few years till you have a portfolio of titles that you've developed yourself or for a publisher, then raise financing (debt or equity) to develop a larger project on your own steam. Raising money from the start for a single high-profile, whimsical product seems destined to fail.

Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that.

Any data on how this works for kids apps? It seems like there's something of a backlash against IAP for kids-targeted apps. Paid kids apps also have the benefit that parents pay when they install the app on the device -- rather than a pay prompt coming up while a child is playing the game, which would require them to seek out their parent(s) and have them enter their password.

It seems to me that it makes more sense to make app selection and payment be a single action at the point when the payer (the parent) is looking at your app, rather than at a later point when the user is a child.