hsuresh

Set up a mailing list? I'd love to see those notes too. My email is in my profile.

I have been working on a product in this space, and I'm aware of the situation. I'd love to help, and also learn from your job search process, can you drop me an email? (I couldn't find email in your profile)

That's true. Recruiters provide the initial screening, which is lacking in a job board.

But the hiring process is broken beyond the initial screening as well, biggest reason being lack of incentives for the involved parties to close a position quickly.

I am building a product/startup [1] to address some of the problems you mention, and as a result, I've been talking to hiring teams at several companies, so I can give you some reasons why the processes are bad.

* Hiring is a marketplace, and supply/demand is not always balanced, so most issues related to job search/hiring is due to this.

* When a company posts an ad for a job, they usually receive about 150-200 applicants within 2 weeks, thanks to job boards, LinkedIn etc. Unless it is for specific high-skilled jobs, in which case, they receive hardly any applicants at all.

* Most of the applicants are usually not a match for the job, but given the number of applicants, recruiters rely on resumes, social profiles etc to shortlist about 20 applicants.

* Tests and assignments are quick means to filter, hence their popularity.

* Not much of an incentive to keep applicants posted at every step, plus, managing communication with a few hundred applicants for multiple positions is hard - so you're most likely to receive only automated communication from the hiring team.

I believe that having a clear specification of the job, that can be checked/validated with applicants is critical to ensuring a smooth, fast interviewing process.

[1] - Shameless plug to my startup (in beta) - https://www.interviewpass.co. If any of you are interested in using InterviewPass in your hiring, drop me an email at suresh@interviewpass.co - happy to help set it up for you.

Founder here. Happy to answer your queries about this product.

Hiring and job search takes way too much time. Most of the bottleneck is at the screening stage for companies, and getting a foot in the door for applicants. This is an attempt towards solving it, although right now our product is focused on the businesses.

Direct link to the github project:

https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/de...

And the blog post of the announcement:

https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/semantic-image-segme...

They did that recently in India - not sure if and when they'll roll it out to the rest of the world.

I like (and do follow) your suggestion. However, i disagree on Twitter. Twitter is a cacophony of misinformation, misquotes, comments taken out of context, and or responses to really fringe & stupid opinions.

It does, in countries that have poor internet connections.I did have the option to download videos, when in India.

At last a balanced story on the topic. The discussions online on this topic have been mind numbing - quoting out of context, ad hominem attacks, every bad form of arguments listed in PG's essay[1]. Twitter is the worst.

Almost makes me want to build a better debating platform.

[1] - http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I used to be like this. And the problem was, because there was no pattern to my sleep, I found out extremely difficult to sleep, even when I wanted to.

A few things helped me. First, I started logging my sleep. It helped me analyze how much sleep I was really getting. Second, this sounds simplistic, but I first fixed the waking time. Irrespective of the time I sleep, I started waking up at the exact same time everyday. And finally, I stopping using all gadgets at least for 2 hours before my sleep time.

I see a marked improvement in the quality of my sleep these days. Hope you beat your problem too.

I have a different theory. You need access to users/customers of problems you're trying to solve. I guess the first couple of rounds of tech boom happened in the valley because of the access to chip makers, early internet adopters etc.

What this probably means is just that valley doesn't matter anymore to every industry/market. Probably also explains why we're starting to see more international startups at YC.

This. We tend to underestimate the cost of switching. A new service doing the exact same thing as another (and not just software - the support, help, documentation, community etc) is still not good enough to get someone to switch, in spite of price. It might be easier to get new customers though, but remember, your competitor probably has an upper hand in marketing, and in general acquiring new customers.

If it follows other tech trends(eg: cell phones bypassing land lines), India and other developing countries will see self-driving cars before freeways and owned cars. Well, I'm an optimist.

The argument for direct cash transfers (not really UBI, but a predecessor of sorts) was that, there are already millions being spent on subsidies and other welfare schemes, and only a small percentage of them actually reach the needy.

> I feel like universal basic income will only work in progressive societies that have gotten used to various social programs before. They might go bankrupt long before any of it's population actually receive money due to corruption.

I actually think it is the opposite. UBI might work better precisely because corruption prevents other welfare schemes reaching the target population.

At least in theory, the direct cash transfer should help pull out a lot of people from abject poverty. The article quotes a jump from 22% absolute poverty to 0.5% - if it does that, it would go a long way in accelerating growth in India.

It is also easy to confine yourself in a bubble with this approach. It is possible to avoid it, but very hard.

Wow, this is a great post. It feels like it is getting harder to have a rational argument/discussion online and social media. The default mode is silence for most rational people - and we need to fix this.

I wonder if there's a tech solution to this.

> Do you have an accent?

Google's voice recognition works extremely well, at least with certain accents. I'm from India, and it gets me right almost always. Not just that, it recognizes some ridiculously hard to pronounce names of places in India.

> That's what bothers me about this movement: it should be about giving poor people free access to the Net (which would just render Facebook's toy platform irrelevant - no need to ban it). You are assuming that Free Basics is the only way poor people are getting connected. There are several more initiatives, funded both by the public and private. Banning Free Basics ensures that we don't differentiate internet based on an individual's affordability.

My guess is that India will likely leapfrog from cash to mobile payments - so in the long run that shouldn't pose as much of a problem to Amazon or any other vendor. There is already a lot of startups and established companies offering mobile wallets, and I believe many of then are setting good traction too.

Nope, it was in the afternoon, between popular kids shows.

I am new here in US, and I was shocked to see ads for sleeping pills on kids channels (Cartoon Network, iirc). Unbelievable.

I agree. It looks like most interviews are aimed at finding "defects" in people - why they would not be a fit, than looking for reasons what the candidate can bring to the company/team if they were to join.

I'll put it out early next week. It is a very basic rails app at the moment, and to avoid running background tasks, the endpoint exposed is a blocking controller. Email if you want me to notify you.

Well, retail stores bring people to the store looking to buy things. App stores (not just Apple's) are mostly mandated by Apple/Google/Amazon. They do provide some value (trust, for the apps), but 30% seems quite high for that.

I used to think VR was mostly for gaming, but with this, and expeditions that they demoed, I'm starting to get really excited about VR apps for the masses.

As much as i like technology adoption to go up, i am not sure if progress is really about replacing humans from jobs. I am not yet convinced that people don't need jobs. Besides, technology progress can happen much faster than change in governance, policies and culture.

Congrats on the launch! How is it different from asana/trello and a host of other tools? Why should someone use this over those tools?

All the best!

C-x C-b brings up a list of open buffers. Is that the same as what you are looking for?