bhuga

One general rule: avoid binary/rating questions. So not:

"Do you like working at X?"

This question has a "right answer" (yes), and you'll always get it. Instead:

"What's your least favorite thing about X?"

Phrase all of your questions as free-form responses instead of multiple choice. This is very helpful to get interviewers talking.

For specific questions, there's a lot of good ones on this thread, so the only specific question I'd add is this one, which I found very helpful for startups and fast-growing companies:

"It's 2 years from now, and X has failed. What happened?"

Well-run businesses had a well-understood answer about their biggest risks; poorly-run places had platitudes and "it could never happen."

For many utilities, it's not as simple as that. They're heavily regulated and their prices are generally set, capped or otherwise limited to give them a certain percentage profit. They often have to get price increases approved by their regulators. If they have debt outstanding on underperforming gas power plants, they may need to make this argument publicly so they can adjust pricing.

This is the model that Lambda School is using. It's early yet, but they're having some success.

I just finished a job search 6 months ago and it came down to comp. The earlier-stage companies I talked to seemed much more fun, but my life has some problems that money solves, and comp was very important.

The base comp was lower at the early-stage companies, but not critically so. The problem is that ~half of an engineer's comp these days is equity, and startup equity offers were far, far, far lower. My best startup equity offer implied ~2M for a 100M exit. If it takes 5 years to pull that off, I'm better off not just at FAANG, but any number of established companies.

> I think the next phase is to move the needle in favor of early employees.

I would love to see this happen. I like my new gig but I'm not scratching the entrepreneurial itch like I could if I were employee # less than 50. My life can handle the chaos of something failing in 24 months; FAANG will always be there if it doesn't work out. But I'm not in a position to be a founder, and I can't roll the dice for 5 years for the chance at 1/100th of the payday of a founder. But maybe 1/10th the payday?...

Crystal looks great in many ways, but it's hard to go all-in with a new language that lacks parallel processing. Go, Elixir, and Rust all have great concurrency stories, and their adoption has a lot to do with that.

It is a gorgeous language, though, with a very easy to read syntax. I'd love using it if it had something like goroutines, which would look great with its block syntax. Good luck to the team working on it; I hope it's a contender.

You're not wrong for the individual laptop case. But there's a lot of systems out there that download code, inspect a text, YAML, Dockerfile, or whatever kind of file, then sandbox it to run it. That's more or less how most CI systems work, and this vulnerability happens before the sandbox.

This is a good idea, although the focus on 'anti-whiteboard' is a bit limiting. It's a shame it's its own site instead of a feature on other sites.

There's no interview process that works best for every candidate; some prefer whiteboards or homework or practical debugging on their on computer or hand-wavey design or whatever. Candidates (and companies!) could save a lot of time by letting applicants filter their searches to companies using methods that will let them put their best foot forward.

There's some assumption here that there's a reason for the account blocking, and if only a human could be reached, it could be explained in detail. But that may not be true. ML systems usually don't explain themselves by default; it's possible there's simply no further information available for a support agent to give.

This is a fun talk about post-hoc explanations from ML systems. It's possible, but it takes real work: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2017/just-so-stories-for-ai-e...

What a cool way to learn. I've been doing this 20 years and it never occurred to me to just unravel some of the basic tools I use every day and see if it matches my expectations.

> Leakers do not simply lose their jobs at Apple. In some cases, they face jail time and massive fines for network intrusion and theft of trade secrets both classified as federal crimes. In 2017, Apple caught 29 leakers. 12 of those were arrested.

This is an email they sent to employees? It sure doesn't sound fun to work there.

I had a great experience with Triplebyte as a candidate (now hired employee), but I'd love to see them expand to other categories. Remote-friendly companies is a big one, but even more important is different skill levels. Right now triplebyte is oriented around finding the best, instead of finding everyone and helping employers get a candidate whose career path matches their needs.

Their process is fantastic. I can see them replacing first round interviews entirely at some companies if they can look for all the candidates companies need, not just the most senior.

I'm glad to hear they're expanding.

What is "centralized globalization?" The top google result for this term is a paper talking about the Vatican; results quickly seem to become less relevant (for example, talking about "globalization, centralization, ...").

From the response steps:

> Our first action, which began immediately after the incident concluded, was to implement a 24-hour cooldown on republication of any deleted package name.

This is a good post-mortem with clear, policy-based remediations. Nicely done.

I wonder why they are only preventing republishing for 24 hours. Is there a good reason to allow a package namespace to be recycled with less than, say, a week? Is it based on the assumption that the only case where it comes up is during an incident, and 24 hours is enough time to assume an incident will be resolved? I'm curious what went in to that number.

Is the Model S/Pilot comparison useful here? Wouldn't most of the weight of a semi would be in the trailer? It doesn't seem intuitive to me that increasing the weight of the cab, even by several multiples, would meaningfully increases the weight of the semi.

Radiolab did a great summary of this just a couple of months ago: http://www.radiolab.org/story/sun-dont-shine/ You can skip the parts about the time capsule if you want.

tl;dr: it's not clear what defines the edge of the solar system, there's interesting reasons to want to know where it is, and voyager taught us a lot about it.

You're right, but both the MIT and the non-commercial portion of this new license explicitly grant the right to sublicense. It's not obvious to me that a free use case can't sublicense its use to a huge organization.

I can absolutely imagine this being an effective strategy for companies hiring for high-talent jobs.

I have 15 years experience, and there's competition just to interview with a company. In my last job hunt I talked seriously to maybe 10 or 11 places. I did 7 onsites, two work-weeks of interviewing. But picking the ones I wanted to do on-sites with was close to random. All I usually had to go on was a 15-minute call with a recruiter.

I'm quite happy with where I've landed, but in the end I just didn't have time to talk to every company that sounded interesting. Who's hiring is a smorgasbord and lord help you if you do well on Triplebyte's second round and have 30 companies willing to do an on-site. I had to pass on interviewing with several companies that are quite interesting just because I couldn't be interviewing forever.

At some point, you just have to pick a few to dive deeper with, and it's obvious that it's random. If one had been willing to pay me to go through their process, that would have affected my odds of doing an on-site with them quite a bit. And isn't getting people in the door part of the process for recruitment?

I just went through a round of interviews and came away with a better opinion of these "toy" interviews than I started with[1], so I'll play devil's advocate here: these questions have a place. The main reason to use these questions is that they're studyable.

Google and Facebook both put out content that walk you through how to solve problems like this. When you get an interview, you can delay it as long as you want, they can tell you the sort of problems to study: go read "Cracking the Coding Interview". Facebook sends you a link to it and a video of the author working a problem. Google sends you stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKu_SEDAykw. There are thousands of toy questions, and it's not feasible to memorize them all. The correct _and expected_ thing to do is study up for the category.

Now that your candidates have in theory studied, you'll get a studied, "best" performance for each candidate, and interview outcomes can be compared in a very low-bias, apples-to-apples way. I can't imagine the success criteria for a pairing being clearer than for toys. I think the potential for toy question interviews to be managed in a low-bias way is the main reason they're used.

In comparison, how do you ensure that your exercise in go is exactly as hard as your exercise in Java? Or do they need to know go, or some other language? Or that they didn't spend longer on the take home than you asked? Or 100 other factors of your particular exercise? It's really hard to let every candidate shine on a level playing field using "real world" stuff. [2]

That said, there's good reasons to do pairing, or a bug squash, or a take home, or juggling, or _anything different_. The first is that candidates with 15 years of experience don't show up better than college grads on "toy" questions, even if they've studied. You can only do so well on them, and experienced candidates tend to have options and won't put a lot of time in to studying. And the corollary to that is that the biggest tech employers are leaving some great candidates behind, because they interview better doing "real world" stuff. And your company can go get them, just because you bothered to do something different. Most companies won't outbid Google and Facebook, so why would your interview process try to find the same candidates they do?

[1]: And to be clear: I did not get any offers from my interviews based entirely on this sort of question. I'm not the worst but far from the best.

[2]: Triplebyte's long-ish video chat interview is the best thing I've seen at "standardizing" this.

My pixel hardware has been a disappointment. The vibrator actually broke off from the phone and it now just makes a rattling noise as it bounces around inside the phone. The screen scratches easily. Bluetooth pops and crackles.

I couldn't have imagined buying a second pixel, so removing the saving grace, the headphone jack, almost seems gratuitous.

I've tried the DDG switch twice and not being able to select results from the past year has always been what sent me back to Google. But it looks like they let you scope it to the past month, now, so maybe soon!

> Could be a solid strategy compared to the competition.

I thought the same, but from a different angle. Traditional channels with commercials can be monetized by Amazon in a way the rest of the big 5 can't. Watching a commercial on an Amazon channel for a new brand of chips? "Alexa, get me some of those chips". Amazon knows what you're watching, what the commercial is, where you live, has your payment information, and has the fulfillment infrastructure. Boom. Buy the commercial, get your new chips in 2 days.

By turning commercials into trackable purchase events, Amazon might be able to better monetize traditional, commercial-ridden television than any other player. That includes existing cable providers (!).

Like many content websites these days, Forbes loads in well under a second and is a great website if you disable javascript. I use "Quick Javascript Switcher" in Chrome, which just toggles javascript per-domain.

I'm not sure there's a way to do this on iOS, though, so I'm not sure if this helps you.

A family member of mine used to take medical malpractice cases from these communities while I was growing up. She was routinely harassed and hassled by whatever (exclusively white) sheriff of whatever town was the brother-in-law of the doctor she was suing. Just driving around in these places trying to drum up support for such a suit would be a risk. They have a way of arresting you for imagined vehicular infractions right after the judges go home for the weekend, then letting you out Monday morning as soon as you're arraigned, where you can pay the bill to let out your impounded car.

If that sort of pressure can be applied to people working cases that affect just one doctor in a community like this, I sure wouldn't want to to see what kind of pressure the chemical companies could bring to bear.

Matt Levine at Bloomberg wrote a fascinating piece on this yesterday:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-02/bitcoin-e...

It's an interesting read even if you don't care about shorts or bitcoin at all.

I'm working with them now as a candidate. Huge, dramatic thumbs up. Skipping first-round interviews saved enough time that I could talk to a lot of companies that I wouldn't have otherwise.

For anyone who finds historical money markets interesting, the problems arising from a lack of efficient currency in the late 17th century are the recurring theme in Neal Stephenson's _The Baroque Cycle_, which is a great (if long!) read. I can't vouch for the accuracy, but one example is a 30-page dramatized story of a primary character learning why it was easier for France to buy baltic lumber than to ship it from its interior to its shipyards. There's similar dramatized stories of how to arbitrage letters of exchange from banks in different cities, having so much gold that it can't be spent, and what it means to ship specie across an ocean. Overall, a very economically cerebral trio action novels.

> The idea that the taxis are corrupt and despicable is 100% Uber/Lyft propaganda.

Here's links to stories of investigations into taxi bureaus and dispatchers for bribery and other schemes in 3 states:

http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/06/federal_investig... http://astoriapost.com/taxi-dispatchers-arrested-for-alleged... https://nypost.com/2014/03/19/16-jfk-taxi-dispatchers-busted...

Perhaps there's a city where Taxis are a good, clean business, but there are enough bad ones to support the generalization.

> The idea that a bunch of immigrants driving 12 hours a day to support a meager income for their families are a cabal of special interests is ridiculous.

There's a distinction between the drivers and the taxi regulatory agencies and dispatchers in the above stories. In this case, Uber/Lyft are replacing the agencies and dispatchers that are the bad actors, not the drivers. Your point about not making drivers out to be evil is well taken, but I don't think that's what anyone refers when they talk about "the evil taxi industry."

GitHub doesn't charge for anything that's open source. Who the owner is or if they happen to be a customer doesn't factor into it.

This is an important part of the new integrations early access program: https://developer.github.com/changes/2016-09-14-Integrations...