neerkumar

Ironically, when interviewers talk about how they interview, they pretty much all seem to believe they are very good in evaluating candidates. But when candidates talk about job interviews, they all seem to agree interviews are done badly.

A rule I have is that everyone is good in something and bad in something else. So, if by the end of the interview I haven't found a topic where the candidate excels and a topic where sucks, the interview hasn't been effective.

They also changed their answer ranking algorithm. It started giving much higher weight to answers from users who answered many other questions on the site.

I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions.

But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition.

Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking.

Low level/high volume content took over Quora.

I agree, this is actually a really really good business idea. I heard so many times top devs wish something like this would exist.

Can you give an idea of what an ex-FAANG dev can expect after signing up? Like what's the frequency of projects? (not sure when you started this, if you just started it I understand you might not have a clear answer yet)

"We have the best product in the world and we are revolutionizing the life of our users. What's next? What more can we achieve in the next 5 yrs given how great our product is already?"

On a more serious note, I wonder why they keep doing these Q&As given that everyone thinks they are useless BS.

Sad news. WhatApp really feels to me as the future of social networks and its massive numbers tend to prove it.

1:1 chat and phone calls to communicate to your friends, groups to keep in touch with people you are less close to, and status in the extremely rare case that you want to briefly show something to all of your contacts (but without all the problems of FB: your contacts are all people you actually know fairly well, no like and similar bullshits that create so many problems, no pictures stored forever, etc.).

At the same time, I already saw many people switching to telegram. It seems impossible for whatsapp to decline given its current numbers, but who knows really.

I would suggest anyone interested in learning more about this to watch the BBC documentary The Big Bank Fix. It shows how these traders didn't do anything wrong.

The documentary shows how there were some really high level bank executives involved in libor frauds and that was getting media attention. Therefore, SFO met with banks and eventually, based on documents provided by the banks, decided to prosecute simple traders.

The reason traders have been sent to trial has nothing to do with the actual libor fraud carried out by executives. But since it is still about libor, has been sold to the media as the libor trial. Start and end date of the "crime" have been carefully chosen to not include evidence of the executive crimes (such as the phone call shown in the documentary). SFO experts have admitted during trial to lie in order to convict these traders.

Many of these traders were in their early 20s when the alleged crime happened. Germany, France, and EU have already said that it was not a crime at the time and rejected extradition.

I rarely felt as sad as after watching that documentary.

I hope my comment didn't come across as I am portraying them as a victim. I saw first hand hiring based on quotas and I hated it (and I am an immigrant with dark skin).

I was just stating a fact about Google, that they were among the last to implement quotas in Silicon Valley, and why I think they started doing it.

Anyone who has worked for a large tech company in SF in the last 3/4 years knows that this has happened everywhere.

In fairness, Google was one of the very last ones among large tech companies to play the quota game. But the problem is that that's a game that once the first company starts playing it, everyone else is forced to play it too.

Company X publishes a report with amazing diversity numbers and brands itself as a great company for certain minorities and diversity in general, along with some unbelievable BS about how they achieved that. At that point, you have to introduce quotas too to get similar numbers or your brand and recruiting will be strongly affected.

The promotion process at google self-selects for a very important skill: you are given a certain goal and you find the optimal way to achieve it, regardless of whether you agree with it or not.

This is a crucial skill for middle managers. Their role is often making sure their team executes on executive vision without questioning the vision (imagine how messy things would become if each middle manager would start questioning executive strategy and push back on projects).

At the end, Google process worked as they designed it for. People like you, who don't like to just do what they are told to do, choose to move on. And people who accept it get promoted and go on to become effective middle managers from a Google executive standpoint.

Yeah, that sounds so bad. It sounds like: try to screw them over, but be aware that some employees will realize that and, just for them, you will have to adjust compensation.

Maybe that's a way to give Detroit hosts an incentive to stay on Airbnb. After all, the more money they make the more likely they are to still use Airbnb despite the new city rules. So pushing more demand towards Detroit will reduce the number of hosts who decide to leave the platform (and possibly attract new hosts).

I think it can make sense from a business standpoint. It is unfortunate it hurts other hosts who have nothing to do with it. But I would guess this is just temporary.

I have never worked as a quant, but I have got a couple of job offers a few years ago when interviewing at the end of grad school.

Things might have changed in the last 5 years or so, no idea. But back then, in my experience, you didn't need any financial background or knowledge. The core of the interview was puzzles (way harder than what tech companies used to ask) and algorithms in whichever language you wanted (a bit easier than tech). Theoretical knowledge of statistics was also required to pass the interview.

To be honest, I hope by now they changed the interview format. I doubt that structure would actually help them identify the best candidates.

If you ask them to cover insurance for 6 months, they will probably do it given the circumstances. Health insurance is usually the most negotiable thing.

Beside that, just accept that you no longer work there and look at them just like you would look at any other company. Can you offer them something that would help them?

A good thing to offer is that, once they rebuild the team/hire new people, you can help them get up to speed. It is not confrontational, it focuses on something positive for the company too making them think about better days, and you are not committing to anything in the short term (and you probably won't have to do anything in the long term either).

In the US, in tech, it is relatively common for people to sign an offer and then change their mind and choose to not join. It happened a few times in different companies where I worked. It wasn't really a big deal, it is considered part of the game.

Note that the opposite can happen too and it is much more frequent. It can happen especially to students. They get an offer starting in 6 months after they graduate and by then the company has problems, like layoffs or hiring freeze, so they cancel the offer.

If company A is paying you much less than company B, that means they are paying you below your market value. So it is up to them to either match the other offer or lose you.

I don't get this. Eventually, it is just taking a cut from a transaction. What does even mean the seller is paying for it or the buyer?

Let's say the final price is 100$ and cut is 10%, so seller gets 90$ and buyer pays 100$. You could say the buyer is paying for it since the seller was willing to sell for 90$ and the buyer had to add 10$ to get the item. Or you could say the seller pays for it, since the buyer was willing to buy for 100$ and the seller has to give up on 10$ out of those 100$.

I really don't see the difference. It seems just marketing in terms of how you phrase it. I even saw companies saying things like: seller is paying 5% and buyer 5%, which seems just a way to make it look lower for both sides.

And InstaEdu, within the education section, was that site where students would pay people to do their homework. It was just a place where students could cheat.

As many other things in the corporate world, the easiest path is firstly get that at your current company, where you hopefully have some leverage. You typically need to wait for 1 yr before asking to go remote.

After that, it becomes much easier to get another remote job: you are already working remotely, which means you have a strong position from a negotiation standpoint when you ask for a remote job to future employers, and you have references showing that you can effectively work remotely.

I know several people who work remotely and they all followed this path.

If the goal of this was looking smart to attract smart talent, I feel it didn't work particularly well. At least, by reading the article, I didn't get that feeling.

Any game where the last survivor wins are based on the idea to get involved as little as possible early on (unless extremely high rewards are given along the way).

This is very nice. Are the emails validated or guessed based on company most likely format?

Glassdoor has a huge conflict of interest. Its customers are the companies themselves.

And it is not just a review problem. Even for job interview questions, where I work we were unhappy that someone wrote a detailed and correct answer to a question we usually ask. HR emailed glassdoor and they removed the answer saying it didn't comply with ToS.

Finding the right journalists to reach out to so that they can then write about your business can be seen as a special case of sales.

Similarly, I think it would be very useful something like: "I built product X, scrape the web and find me the best sales prospect for it". This is something that people do in a very manual way today and takes forever.

I really like the idea. Feel there is lots of potential to build similar stuff for anything related to sales.

It is so hard to actually get the VC business model. If in all these years, every single YC company had failed except for Airbnb, YC would still be 4X better than the second best competitor.

I never find advice on how to grow when your customers are heavily competing with each other and, therefore, they are very unlikely to recommend your product no matter how much they love you. I feel this is a very common situation and I never heard YC talk about how to deal with it.

Everyone who worked at Google or a company like Google knows that 90% of people do a job well below their skills. That's how it is in those places.

To sue them because you have back-end skills, but you were doing front end is laughable. There are so many PhDs in ML there writing SQL queries, or PhDs in CS changing the color of some text for an A/B test. That's how it works in the best companies in the world. You get the money and the prestige, but the job is bad.

The problem with these things is that you end up stop writing or even talking cause you get so concerned about offending others...

English is not my mother tongue, and I actually thought here I was being sensitive, cause putting "he" would have implied only males are career oriented, etc. Didn't occur to me I could have put they.

I think if you put some effort to help people, you will get help regardless of your skills by many of them. But that help will not be that useful in the long run if you don't have the skills to take advantage of it.

Stupid example: if you have helped me in the past, and then ask me for a referral at my company, I will certainly do it regardless of your skills and I will get you an interview. But then it is up to you to pass the interview. Networking opens up opportunities. It doesn't make you successful. If you randomly meet me at a conference and ask for referral, I won't do it.

And that's really the kind of networking 95% of people are looking for. It is not meet the #1 investor in the world or similar.

Not necessarily. You can do great networking without having built anything.

Say you are a student. Some startup founder starts a business where she targets college students. You like her business. You then reach out to her telling her you are emailing all students in your dept via internal dept email list or FB groups to let them know about her startup.

That's great networking. That person will help you in future for sure. And you haven't really built anything yet.

Horrible article. Networking doesn't mean asking someone for her email address or exchanging business cards.

Networking means creating meaningful relationships based on mutual benefits. If you are in a position to help someone, help her. She will then help you back later on when she can. And this is by no means overrated. If anything is underrated.

"He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups."

-> so an employee accuses a company of illegal behavior, the company denies it, and that's it? It proves the company is not doing it? No need for investigating or anything?

Elizabeth Holmes and Travis are probably thinking: damn, I wish people thought like that for me too!