2,602 karma · joined February 14, 2008
engineer at Google. previously at Bond Street and Recurse Center. before all that i made https://idonethis.com
https://www.amazon.com/Challenging-Problems-Probability-Solu...
i don't mean for appointments. i mean get rid of your todo lists and all similar abstractions and explicitly allocate your time using a calendar.
i wrote this up with some more details here: http://rz.github.io/articles/2016/oct/time-on-your-side.html
while django encourages Fat Models and that approach ends up working well sometimes, django itself has no such approach to models. how much logic to put in a model is left to the application developer.
i think what tends to happen, though, is that coming up with a convention different than Fat Models is difficult, especially early on, so most organizations don't bother and end up with models that are badly abstracted AND fat.
this could be seen as a failure of the django community, but it is not a shortcoming of the framework itself.
that isn't an argument against startups offering options. that only says that you value your time in such a way that precludes you from investing it in startups.
yep. it's probably more like 100:1 don't go work at the other 99! :)
i agree that the value of options is statistically not greater than the compensation package at GOOGBOOK. that said, you don't get to live 1000 lives in parallel. so, either you have to think very carefully about this one (or ~5) investments you are going to make OR you can go work at a bigger company with higher salary if that isn't for you.
thought experiment: knowing everything you know about e.g. stripe right now, would you buy $100k worth of stripe back in ~2012? in 2012 it was a risky proposition to do so, but many people at the time understood why stripe was likely to be big and successful and invested money in it. i'd rather live in the world where there is a mechanism to invest in such a company besides being an accredited investor with access.
many people go wrong when thinking about options in that they don't try to consider the fundamentals of the investment. working at an early-stage startup isn't just a job, it is a way to do risky investments using your time.
all that said, what Dan proposes at the beginning makes a lot of sense: the startup should be willing to give you cash instead of options (provided they have the cash).
be that as it may, mentoring, helping others, and setting examples are high-leverage. you may become 10x more valuable if you do your job while being effective at those.
these things are only at odds with your engineering work in that they take time, but a highly skilled professional knows how to manage their time to maximize impact.
they are also not at odds with working outside of the office -- there are many ways to communicate, you can be at the office only some times, etc.
the right way seems to be to give a heads up, early on, that references will be needed and be explicit about when they will be contacted. this ensures that the process doesn't block for a couple of days on the candidate contacting their references.
i agree that it seems easier to simulate working conditions with a homework assignment. (it does add a lot of work for the company to do homework problems well, but let's leave that aside)
the downside is that the candidate has a limited amount of time to talk to you. they often have a full-time job going on top of the job hunt. secondly, are you really game to spend 0.5-2 days of unpaid work just for the chance of being invited to interview further?
but also, keep in mind that the candidate has a limited amount of time, and often a full-time job on top of the job hunt. the homework questions are only good if the candidate has time and desire to them.
while homework problems can be better than in-person interviews, they can also be a lot worse. for one, because they are NOT time-bound. secondly, they are much more difficult to setup and evaluate: do you provide a spec? code to modify? third, asking people to do work for free in order to explore the potential relationship is a big ask. lastly, they are very time-consuming for the company.
in grad school i learned the hard way to always ask for in-class exams instead of take-homes :-). time and scope constraints can be favorable both for the company and the candidate.
> Enough with the graph traversal problems.
the point of asking graph-traversals and similar algorithms questions is not that they are the relevant job skill. it is that they are a way to gain information about the candidate's problem-solving ability in a limited amount of time. unavoidably, these questions test for speed and familiarity along with problem-solving. that makes them a lot less than perfect, but i've generally found them valuable.
airbnb's 1000 days are mentioned in the article. it is not like they were just coding in their living room during that time. they had a product out, and they were flying to NY to talk to every possible host, improving the listings, and so on -- learning what made the product awesome. it was probably tempting at the time to work on getting more hosts on the platform, or to optimize the number of bookings, and other growth stuff. that's what Sam is cautioning against.
of course the VC prefers you die over you stopping to take risks. duh? they don't make money on cashflow positive companies. however, a lot of cashflow positive companies are really good outcomes for the founders and employees. as a founder, you ought to consider this before raising money.
The common approach for big companies is to declare that false positives are way worse than false negatives, but if the problem is that you can't find enough developers to fill your roles, it may be better to have false positives coupled with a trial period or something similar.
if you don't follow the plan, you haven't planned correctly. a good plan has built-in mechanisms to make you follow it. OP's project tries to give you one potential mechanism for that.
Why victimize the employees so much? It isn't like you go to work for the startup and when it implodes you are left with nothing and no options -- far from it, you likely made a good salary while you worked there and are likely very employable afterwards.
> They are investing their time and their careers without access to any information.
Being that employees ARE investors (their time), they should do their due diligence, too. A company not being transparent about whatever information you need to make a good investment decision should be a reason not to work there ie as a prospective employee you should evaluate how the company shares information with its employees.
> This leads us to the central problem of getting into orbit: Reaching orbital speed takes much more fuel than reaching orbital height. Getting a ship up to 8 km/s takes a lot of booster rockets. Reaching orbital speed is hard enough; reaching to orbital speed while carrying enough fuel to slow back down would be completely impractical.[5]
Did SpaceX just solve this problem and rendered this paragraph obsolete? Or is that Falcon 9 reached space and turned around without achieving orbital velocity?