rlu

To be fair, in retrospect everything seems obvious.

At the time I'm sure the Dropbox team had to make a bunch of hard decisions. For example, without knowing the success they would later have, it doesn't seem super obvious to have "one master sync folder" as opposed to being able to sync various folders around your computer (a la not-so-successful Live Mesh and perhaps other sync solutions)

The real vision though for Windows I think is probably summarized with Surface Pro + Surface dock.

I'm way too tired to explain why Windows 8 is a good idea - in the long run. But if you browse through my comment history I think I've explained it a few times. Probably from ~1 year ago

As a multi monitor user doesn't Win8 provide a much better experience over Win7? Not saying this alone is worth an upgrade, but IIRC it's definitely better in a "would make you more productive" way

Young people are trying something other than Windows. It goes by the name OSX.

For most people, there is also very little reason to make the effort of switching from Windows (or OSX - whichever they're on) to a Linux distro. Do you also think regular people would understand the concept of a VM well?

I think you're getting a little ahead of yourself.

It's funny reading this and then remembering that on top of all this, there's paging (i.e. fetching from hard drive).

It's like registers are refrigerators, RAM is like the grocery store around the corner, and Page faults are like the grocery stores in a neighboring town

woooooo memory!

I laughed at that part too

Here's me "blindly" picking Bing 5 times: http://i.imgur.com/NAuhhhV.png

This is why I'm skeptical of anyone here saying "I got Bing 100%" or "I got Google 100%". It's extremely easy for us to game.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure that most of us/the HN crowd can't fairly do the bingiton challenge.

At least for me, it's really quite easy to tell them apart just based on subtleties. I.E. Not the quality of the content itself but just how its presented. And if there are ever images involved, it gets even easier because Google and Bing display them completely differently (and honestly I think Bing does a more elegant/"nicer" job of it)

I don't know. I went to Europe for all of June and saw a lot more Windows Phones than I do in the U.S. Particularly in Italy.

What I'm curious of is most of Steam's users are probably avid PC gaming fans that prefer PC gaming over console gaming

At least that's true for me and various of my 'internet friends'

His name is Panos Panay and he's VP of Surface.

I agree he isn't very photogenic but if you actually watch him present....it's a whole different story. You can probably find his part of the Surface 1 announcement on youtube and I'm sure the one today will be put up later.

I never got to interview for a startup. Is it common to have a 1:n interview? At every single big company I've interviewed with, interviews were always 1:1.

He threw out 1:n interviews being bad as if it were the norm.

I also have no idea what he meant by this:

"All of this for a position that will involve working remotely (you are working remotely, aren't you?)."

Stopped reading after that because it didn't sound like he and I were in the same industry at all.

One thing is wanting to get users to use Metro more. It's another thing entirely to force them to use it exclusively by removing any other option.

Desktop apps can do many more things than WinRT apps are allowed to do. There are thousands of business critical applications running on desktop that are likely rarely maintained. These two reasons alone should convince you that Microsoft would be stupid to remove the desktop.

The blend of Metro and desktop is not meant to kill the desktop. It's simply a bet on hybrid devices (like Surface, Yoga, etc.) becoming the norm in years to come.

What are you talking about? I run Windows 8 at home and install non-App store software all the time.

I sort of got bored of the presentation 15 minutes in (and was only half paying attention, truth be told) but it seems to me that Gabe is operating under the (gigantic) assumption that Microsoft would remove the Desktop and move Windows into a 100% closed environment.

Sounds like he's jumping the gun. I don't see that future happening.

FYI (only tangentially related to the presentation), here are the latest hardware survey results for Steam users.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

You'll notice Windows 7 is still #1 (not surprising) but Windows 8 and 8.1 are the fastest growing, with almost 15% of Steam users running Win8 64bit.

If that is what was meant, then I'd argue it should not read as "not viable for games" but instead "not viable for the Steam business"

Maybe you're right and maybe you're wrong - but I certainly hope that this thought hasn't prevented you from applying.

Can't win if you don't play :)

Out of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook, Google was the only company that straight up declined to interview me because I did not meet GPA requirements (3.0 cumulative - I had a 3.4 at the time in CS but I hadn't done well in freshman chem or calc 3)

I like that they decided to stop asking brain teasers due to a lack of correlation between performance in them and performance once hired. Do they really think that cumulative GPA has a strong correlation on new-hire performance?

I certainly don't.

(I expect to get some push-back from you guys and I'm interested in the discussion to follow :))

How many employees does Square have?

It would have been nice if he included a video/sound clip of how it sounds.

Well I personally like the fact that it's backlit and the media keys are more intelligently placed in my opinion. With that said, I wish you could choose the cherry mx switches. I prefer blue.

So, yeah, definitely not enough to make me replace a mechanical keyboard I already have, but perhaps enough to make me consider getting it over my current one (das) if I didn't already own one.

Fair enough. In that case, my last 'paragraph' is definitely what the takeaway from my comment should be.

While this is pretty shitty, and overall I completely agree that personality tests should not decide a hiring decision, I certainly don't think that we should lose sight of one thing:

It is 100% legitimate to not hire someone because they don't fit in with your team. They might be really smart and ace your interviews, but if they simply don't fit in then they don't fit in. This advice is given countless times in basically every single "how to give interviews" post I've read, and they come up on HN quite often. Remember the one a few days ago about how Stripe (?) uses "the Sunday test" on candidates? I thought that was pretty brilliant.

So, while the company in this story did something most of us agree is bad, they at least had good intentions. I'm not defending them, just reiterating that it's valid to reject someone based on how they fit in with your team. Just try to not do that by using a test...

[edit] also, the "fits in with team" decision should obviously be made by the team itself and not by HR. But I'm definitely not in the "abolish HR" camp, lol.

What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess.

Perhaps the bigger lesson here is to not do personality tests. With that said, obviously gauging team fit is super important - but you don't need (and should avoid) a test for that.

On a related note, it seems another lesson to be learned from here is to be cautious when searching a technical job at a non-technical company. We don't know whether this is the case in OP, but nevertheless the whole "BigCorp" caution you give is likely more applicable when you look at financial companies or otherwise "companies that don't focus on making software/etc."

But I have no idea why growing startups would model their HR after them. If they want to model their HR after a "Big Corp" then they might as well model it after a technical Big Corp. Let's not compare apples to oranges.

For the sake of argument though, if the point of the test (in OP's case anyways) is to determine culture fit, should it matter what the "right" answer is if the rest of the team got it "wrong"?

Did you ever consider changing teams or org? The review process is of course standard throughout all of MS but a lot of your complaints seemed to be local to your team (e.g. status report noise) or Org ("Office needs robots"). Bug triaging might also be less of a bore now that microsoft seems to be moving to yearly release cycles.

Either way, seems like you ended up making the right decision for yourself. Congrats!

Not that I know of.

The real culprit of my misfortune though was that my trusted devices (which wouldn't require 2nd auth) got erased because when I got asked to do two factor authentication in the hostel's computer I clicked on the "I don't have access to my phone anymore" link (seemed very fitting!) which then let me change my verification options (e.g. add a 2nd email address that they can send a link to, rather than have them text me a code). This got me into a weird state (which I think they told me ahead of time but I went through it anyways) where it takes 30 days for these new verification options to override the old ones. You can of course cancel this - provided that you have access to your old verification options (i.e. phone in my case) :)

That's a good design for sure (prevents a hacker from changing verification options without me noticing). However, what is a terrible design, and I don't know if it's a bug or not, is that when you change these verification options it also decides to erase every single one of your already trusted devices.

This meant that now, instead of only being unable to login to anything on random computers (e.g. hostels) I was unable to use any of the MS services on my Surface which I had brought on the trip.

Thank goodness that this happened near the end of the trip and not the beginning. I was only left without email, skydrive etc. for ~2 weeks.

This reminds me of a rather interesting design decision I encountered with Windows Phone this summer. I'm still undecided as to whether it is a good design or not.

So, over the summer I was traveling through Europe and lost my phone in Italy. I have two factor authentication on for my Microsoft account so this was somewhat of a problem seeing as every way to authenticate myself was with the phone (text, email, auth/code app).

Then I remembered I could go online and locate my phone through some web-app on windowsphone.com. This seemed like a terrific idea. So I went there, and, unsurprisingly but disappointingly, was unable to login because that app was not excluded from two factor authentication.

It was extremely frustrating to say the least.

Well, actually, if you already have recompiled ARM exes, you can quite easily 'jailbreak' the RT to have them run. I have Notepad++, 7-zip, putty and a few others.

I know you were trying to say that this should be enabled by default, but I thought you might want to know that it's at the very least possible.