598 karma · joined October 1, 2009
That's a bet that high interest rates aren't the new normal for very long.
I've had two jobs which started with take-home tests. Honestly, I found them fun - they were maybe on the level of a 2nd or 3rd year undergrad CS homework assignment.
The jobs also were the ones I stayed around for the longest.
Examples: Team a needs version 6 of a dependency Team b is using version 5, and there's serious compatibility issues Team c is writing something in Rust which makes sense for them, but not teams a and b.
Beforehand, I would have either used some hacked up unix tools (grep, cut, awk, uniq, sort), or if things are super complex loaded them into something like postgres - which requires a lot more overhead. Sqlite seems to be in the sweet spot where seeing tabular data within a db takes almost no work at all.
In California there are severe penalties for being late and effectively taking an interest-free loan: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_waitingtimepenalty.htm
That's a matter of luck rather than timing, although being in a VC-hub really helps.
Not super surprising - contracting is a feast or famine business, but after a few years into the early 2000's doldrums I ended taking W2 jobs and never looked back.
Unscheduled phone calls, if you're not my kids, go straight to voicemail.
My sense of this is that it requires more imagination than Meta leadership is capable of.
Eventually the recruiter messages tapered off until about.. 2005.
In the 90's there was a joke that they'd take the engineering headcount and multiply it by 10M (or something), subtract a multiple of management and there's your valuation.