pauleastlund

I get what you're saying, but your tone here is pretty hostile here and you don't seem to acknowledge that the point you're making is in perfect agreement with the post you're responding to. You quoted him just before he said, "[This] is, of course, nonsense."

I can't tell if you're just trolling or if this is actually your sincere interpretation. Did we read the same article, at all? The takeaway from the one I read is, "if all you do is present information in a way that's accessible to extremely bright self-directed students and let the rest fail, you're not a real teacher. Our entire job is to find ways to make programming accessible and compelling to people that it doesn't immediately click with."

I'm not sure how you wound up reading an article about racially segregated CS education as a means of enriching the upper class.

But... you've got no experience with any other accelerators on which to base that opinion. Uninformed and unrepentantly incendiary is not a great combination.

I'm not saying you're wrong for feeling this way about YC. You aren't. Everyone has opinions they haven't bothered to verify with data, some of which might rub other people the right way. The trick is remembering that they're probably not worth sharing to a large audience, or stridently defending.

Yeah, I agree with this. I worked at a big software company with big open office spaces. I really didn't experience the constant frustration with interruptions -- I didn't feel it much and I didn't hear other people grumble about it too much, either. Everyone understood that asking questions makes the whole group more efficient, and everyone appreciated getting a chance to help their teammates.

Lots of people are commenting to your post and others about the inefficiency of frequently interrupted work, but I actually think the efficiency argument runs the other way. let's say I'm working on some problem and I run into some really obscure issue coming up from a system I've never dealt with. I might kill 10 minutes of your productivity by asking you, but I could also easily kill 30 minutes digging into stack traces on various servers I've never heard of before looking for an answer you know off the top of your head.

Also, usually in a fairly close-knit team most people know who is going to be irritated by the interruption and who isn't, and they go to the folks who are friendly about being interrupted. I get these theoretical concerns about open office spaces but in real life I just don't encounter them that often.

> Second, no "hostile environment." That is, you should steer clear of even the appearance that you are making the workplace uncomfortable for people who are sexually attractive to you. Decorating your desk with a calendar featuring glamour photos of models, unless that is your duty in your occupation, is not a very good idea.

+1. I've personally never really gotten the whole "bonding over women we mutually find attractive" aspect of hetero male culture (and I guess there are parallels for other genders/orientations) but those who are into it really need to understand how off-putting it can be to other people. I'm a straight guy and I often find it a little off-putting, but I can clearly tell from facial expressions how much more uncomfortable the women in the room become, and I am not particularly socially perceptive. This stuff really has no place in any setting connected to the office.

Spot on. The big concern I had before we decided to homeschool was the lack of social development, but when I really thought through all of my "social development" in grade school it was learning to survive in a really nasty Lord-of-the-Flies environment where a lot of kids without well-developed moral compasses were competing for the admiration and respect of a lot of other kids without well-developed moral compasses, and we all learned proper American values like "our parents and other adults are lame" and "we should look down on people in lower grades than us." "Social development" for me was in late high school and college where I reacclimated to an environment where people weren't looking to score social points by putting one another down.

Why would I want my kids to take that long detour through dysfunction?

First, I do think some of it is not just teacher demographics; I think the learning style promoted in American schools serves girls, in the aggregate, better than it serves boys. But more directly addressing your post, I don't think the point about teacher demographics is that boys can't respect women; I think it's that they're less likely to see women as role models.

I always tried to downplay this stuff -- race-blind-and-gender-blind and all that to treat all people equally -- but I have a son and three daughters now and in spite of us never really making it a Thing, gender is a Thing for them. My kids were curious about video games but my daughter got turned off by a lot of them because "how come so many of the characters are boys." No matter what I said, she couldn't get past that. She felt like video games weren't for her. Is it crazy that boys might subconsciously feel the same about school? "If it's for boys how come all the teachers are women?"

I didn't mean to assume that you weren't applying for jobs. You said you'd been on a "few interviews," and I was trying to stress that what you're looking for -- a company that both wants the skill you have now and will help you gain the skills you want to have in the near future -- is probably uncommon, and you will have to cast a broad net.

You're right: many companies hiring for bug-hunters don't offer a good path to real developer roles from there. And many will not be totally honest about it. Those are difficulties. That's why the search will be hard. But there are good managers out there who will deal straight with you, and there are employers that will let you make that transition -- and even assist you in making it. You're just going to have to really look for them.

This is exactly what good managers are for.

Go get _some_ job doing what you know how to do -- hunting down bugs in embedded C++ code is a skill the right employers will pay good money for. Don't apply for full software engineering jobs if you don't feel confident doing that. Be up front with your hiring manager about what skills you have now and what skills you want to develop. ("Up front" does not mean "ruthlessly self-critical." Do not say, "I'm actually quite terrible at programming," or, "I have no value in an engineering organization." Say, "I've done plenty of coding but to be honest most of my professional experience to date has been tracking down hard-to-find bugs and I think that's where I'll be able to provide the most value from day 1.")

Apply around to a lot of places, and look for somewhere that values the skills you have but also will allow you to develop into the longer-term role you want to hold. Make sure you meet your hiring manager before you accept a job, make sure you talk through this with him, make sure you look him or her in the eye and believe that they are a good person and are sincere about helping you grow into the next phase of your career.

This was my experience at Google as well. I was there a little over five years. There were times when I was completely in love with my team and my project and I was working until 3AM and feeling great about what I was getting done. There were times when I was burnt out or dealing with personal/medical issues and not contributing nearly that much. I can't complain about how I was treated in either circumstance.

Beyond my own experience, I had multiple teammates who had long commutes and family commitments and made a rigid practice of leaving before five every single day. As far as I know, none of them were ever given any trouble about it. Maybe they weren't promoted as fast as if they'd burned the midnight oil, but that seems like a fair trade.

In my experience at Google, far, far more than 1-5% were offered full time jobs. Maybe my group just had above-average interns? But I don't think so. The intern hiring bar was fairly high.

I get where you're coming from, but are you really going to base policy on that? That would be bizarrely condescending: "Sorry, it would be advantageous for our economy and for your personal well-being for you to enter our country, but we've decided you owe it to your homeland to stay." Not to mention that it wouldn't be effectual if other first-world countries didn't play along.

The genius who comes from Nigeria to the States to write some code is going to pick up skills and connections that will prepare them to go back and have a tremendous impact back in their home country. Maybe many won't; maybe many will stay here, optimize some small metric for Facebook, and be fat and happy. And that's a shame compared to the outcome where they go fix up their homeland. But hey: any one of us could go spend our lives living in and trying to improve a third world country, regardless of where we're born. Why should the folks who happen to be born there be forced into it?

Really? You think Facebook is a totally utilitarian joyless tool like a shopping bag?

People need to use shopping bags because they need to carry groceries. No one needs to use Facebook. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate shopping bags, your grocery shopping is going to be a hell of a lot less convenient. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate Facebook, you're just going to have more free time.

Man, you folks are cynical. Having done a stint in a people management role at a tech company I can attest that things aren't always this straightforward.

- PIPs are definitely the tool you use when you want to fire someone, but they're also the tool you want to use to get someone's attention when all else has failed. I had to give a PIP to an employee who just could not get his head in the game. I had absolutely no desire to fire him.

- I have definitely witnessed HR stand up to managers and push back on plans to fire employees who haven't had adequate time to fix their conduct and turn things around. You can argue that they're protecting the company from wrongful termination liability, but I know at least one of the HRfolk involved and that was definitely not his primary motivation.

I get thinking that big corporations are only driven by profits and are therefore always going to be selfish/evil (though I don't really believe it) but I don't get thinking that blanket statements/accusations about individual people in these organizations could possibly be true. There are well-meaning HRpeople in the world, and managers who mean what they say. Maybe not as many as there should be, but still lots.

The really baffling part is how he possibly thinks he could be helping himself by giving this interview.

OK, nevermind -- your information is newer than mine. I escaped Yahoo late last year, so I wouldn't've heard about this.

> Yahoo employees have to use Yahoo Mail for all of their work e-mail. The web interface only, with ads.

I don't know where you got this from, if it was true but no longer isn't, or if it's only true in parts of the company, but I was just there for 13 months after an acqui-hire and no one ever made me or anyone on my team use Yahoo Mail.

For us, it's that we're extremely close friends (we were friends for some time before dating), we both have a tremendous respect for one another, we have the same (fairly dark) sense of humor, and when we found each other we both knew how lucky we were and both were willing to upend all of our previous individual plans for life in order to be together.

None of that is a reproducible formula for a perfect relationship, and honestly my personal track record wasn't great before finding my wife. Really the only advice I have is to find someone that's not just a significant other but a very close friend -- a lot of people say that, but not many truly have it -- and, when you find someone like that, put her (or him) before absolutely everything.

#1 is my wife, by literally an order of magnitude. That's about right; we have a truly extraordinary relationship.

After that, unfortunately, this ranking is nonsense. #2 is someone I met once and have never communicated with since. We have only one friend in common. Totally bizarre. My good friends are scattered between ranks 5 and 50, amidst a sea of near-strangers.

"Corporations no longer are loyal to employees."

I don't find this to be universally true. I was at Google for five years. When my first daughter was born, they gave me 2 weeks of paid paternity leave. When they upped the policy to 7 weeks months later, they made it retroactive and gave me another 5 weeks to spend with my new family. When I was dealing with health problems, my managers were extremely understanding and put a number of different options on the table for how they could help me cope. When my wife and I decided we needed to move somewhere without a real Google presence, they bent over backwards to find a way to make it work without my leaving the company.

It's difficult to separate "company X is being nice to employees because it is in their best interests right now" from "company X is showing loyalty to its employees," and in general morally upstanding behavior coincides closely with long-term self-interest. But to my mind the way I was treated constituted loyalty. The clincher to me is that Google has a newer extraordinary suite of benefits for the families of Google employees that die. That is a good, loyal, and _expensive_ thing to do, and I have a hard time seeing how it makes sense as part of some cynical calculation. I don't think a lot of employees are going to be attracted to or retained by Google because of its stellar death benefits.

To be sure, I know this doesn't mean Google would never ever lay devs like me off in a downturn, nor does it mean that I would never quit Google. (In point of fact, I did.) But I definitely don't advocate, as you suggest, that developers simply go to whatever employer is paying the most right now. Go to whatever employer has built a reputation for treating its employees the best.

Not to pile on, since you've already been downvoted, but have you actually read the abusive texts that started this whole shitstorm? Nothing in this article speaks well to Justin's character, but I don't think any of it would be getting attention if it weren't for the can of batshit misogynist crazy he opened up on a female co-worker. I think the social media behavior documented here is pertinent context for those allegations.

Playing weekly or semi-weekly is the way to go for Diplomacy. Setting aside a full day for it and getting a full complement is too tough.

We played a game of this in the Google NY office this way. It was glorious for a bit -- intrigue upon intrigue upon intrigue. A week between turns really gives you a ton of time to stew over your plans. It got pretty serious; I remember having to call a cubemate (who wasn't part of the game) after I'd left the office and ask him to destroy a planning map I'd realized I'd accidentally left out.

Alas, the whole thing ended in acrimony. One guy who was getting trounced announced he was quitting the game -- in which case his pieces just passively stand their ground and are slowly overtaken -- but then changed his mind and submitted moves the next round after all. Another player called that out as bullshit (and let's be honest, it was kind of bullshit, but it was a friendly game and the rest of us were prepared to let it slide.) It turned into an irate shouting match in the office and the group abandoning the game halfway through. I believe there are still people in the Google NY office that avoid each other in hallways on account of that game.

I clicked on this thinking it was going to tell me what substitute I should be using for /usr/dict/words. The payoff I got was much better.

> No one is proposing laws about who can hold given positions. There is no free speech angle here.

This is a total straw man. The comment you are responding to does not mention "free speech" once.

The point is: you are part of a significant, vocal group that is enjoying using its clout to blackball public figures from the tech industry over certain political views that are only held by a minority in tech. Should any of your views ever put you distinctly in the minority, you will understand why the precedent you are setting is a dangerous one.

I enjoyed clicking through the "more about me" link at the bottom of the article and seeing a big picture of Gabriel next to the text: "We're always hiring!"

A couple people have started picking at the blanket statements in the article, and, granted, none of them are universally true. The point about DIY design irked me a bit, too. With that said, I think the kernel of this article is absolutely right: too many startups are far too intent on raising a bunch of money to hire a ton of people because they think that's what growth is about. (And because running a big organization, even one that doesn't have a customer base to speak of, is a fantastic ego trip.)

I get this "it was money in exchange for goods" point of view, and I certainly find this article stupid and misleading.

But I'm still a little uneasy about what happened with Oculus, and the trouble that I have is, if you look at the the pledge levels, a lot of that money was nothing near a "cash-for-goods" exchange. 7 people pledged more than $5000 to get to meet the Oculus team. 100 people pledged $75 for a poster and a t-shirt. Those aren't purchases of goods for market prices; those are donations for token rewards, no different than when you give to public radio. Oculus solicited private donations to continue their work, and if the Facebook acquisition results in a dramatic change of direction for Oculus I think that will be a betrayal of donor trust.

Also, just to tie back to original post -- the poster's complaint was not, "I'm really giving this job my best but I just can't be productive for longer hours than I'm working right now." It was, "I'm giving this job all I'm willing to because the rest of my time goes towards work on a separate project."

The sentence in question was: "You can't run a startup at crunch time with devs putting in 7.5 hour days." The "at crunch time" was meant to qualify the rest of it -- to suggest that standard hours might work some or even most of the time, but not when you get that big client on the hook who wants something custom next week. I think that's in line with what you're saying.

With that said, most of the successful startups I know involved long hours early on, and not just occasionally. It absolutely involves borrowing from future productivity and present quality of life. Sometimes taking that loan is worth it, and sometimes it's just a stupid, pointless death march and the urgency is manufactured. The latter might be more common but the former definitely exists.

I didn't properly understand this until I was a hiring manager working with a recruiter, but recruiters often send these e-mails without making any effort to verify that the hiring manager is interested in the candidate. If you don't have a profile that the hiring manager finds immediately attractive, putting you through a coding exercise can be the recruiter's way of building a case to the hiring manager for bringing you in to interview.

I find the whole thing frustrating, too, which is my response to all of these canned e-mails (unless I'm totally disinterested or I'm really actively looking) is, "I'd be happy to take a call with the hiring manager to discuss the position." If they're really interested, they'll take the call, and if they're not, I haven't wasted my time.

We're both speculating a bit; neither of us knows what the contract said or how the conversation went during the courtship process. But regardless of whose fault the miscommunication is when it happens, both sides would be better off if they discovered the mismatch in values sooner rather than later, right? FWIW when I'm talking to potential employers I always have an open discussion around work-life balance expectations long before there are contracts on the table. It's a practice that has served me well.