ruswick

I see that you are only targeting the big companies. This is really smart, since those companies tend to pay better and their employees will have a bunch more cash to throw at their house, leading to a bigger commission.

What are your plans for adding new companies? Are you going to branch out into firms that might not pay as well? Stick with the "top 1%" companies but in different cities?

Real estate service that focuses on tech people seems lucrative. Good idea all around.

One reason is that this site only seems to have listings for the "top companies." These companies are very hard to get a job and and tend to pay well, so the home listings are probably skewed to suit buyers that work at the elite companies and have more money to blow than a normal person.

I bet that if and when this site begins targeting the other 99% of companies, the listings for those will trend lower to reflect the average salaries.

I've had a similar experience. A company I was trying to intern at asked me to write a rails app for them before they would think about giving me an interview. I wrote the app (which all-in took maybe 10 hours) and sent the recruiter a link to the heroku instance the app was running on and the repo on github.

I never got a response. I think three months later I might have gotten a one-liner saying they had gone in "a different direction" or some bullshit like that.

It's insulting and ludicrous for companies to treat prospective employees so disrespectfully.

Yep. Flexbox is maybe the best development to happen to CSS in a decade. Makes layouts that were once impossible without JS into trivial three-lines-of-css solutions.

That's a pretty common thing. I don't see the problem.

Maybe. I've always thought it would be interesting to make applicants pay an application fee. This would cut down on people "spraying and praying" with their application, and would lessen the workload for companies. It would also justify spending more time and effort in reading applications, since the company isn't just wasting resources reading bad applications.

Even under the current system, at least the waste is symmetric. I give up a few hours of my time, and the company gives up a few hours of its time. There's equity. The mutual work that the company and applicant do offset each other.

A take-home test model skews that balance in favor of the company. An applicant can spend 10 or more hours working the project. The company can run it through an automated testing suite and have a recruiter spend five minutes looking it over. The system is designed to waste more of the applicant's time and less of the company's.

It sounds like your process went ok. But one hour tests are one thing. Projects that may take 10 or more hours are totally different. It really is amazing what some of these companies will demand of their applicants before even granting an interview.

And although this system might be more accessible than traditional recruiting, it is far from perfect. It is the job of the community to demand better and more respectful hiring practices from companies. Paying the applicant for the time they spent working on the project or offering a traditional interview for people who work full time and have families would be a good start.

Oh God.

The point is that they pay you the $100k for the time you give them as an employee. They don't pay you a cent for the interview project, so you shouldn't give them a single second in return.

Exact same thing here. I've made it a personal policy not to tolerate these types of take-home tests. My time is way too valuable to spend hours on a project only to have it ignored by the company.

Also keep in mind that applying to jobs is frequently throwing your application into a black hole and just praying. Sending a resume into the black hole is one thing. Sending a large codebase or project you worked on as part of the application is entirely different.

I remember a few months ago, I was applying for an internship with a company and they requested that I write a web app to test coding proficiency before they thought about granting an interview. I spent about 12-15 hours writing the thing, deployed the app to Heroku and put the code on Github. I sent a link to the app and the repo to the recruiter. I never got a response of any kind.

Although some companies do try to make the application experience as pleasant as possible for the applicant, the majority of companies don't give a shit about the people who want to work for them, and make no attempt to respect the time of their applicants. Placing greater demands on the applicant is an easy way to shift more of the workload from the recruiter to the applicant. The applicant is the loser in this situation.

There's a lot of grade inflation, especially at the top level. I took 9 APs in high school, and they were, generally speaking, the easiest classes. Part of that is that, when you create a nationally-standardized curriculum, you have to water some of the content down. Part of that is a culture of not doing anything to jeopardize the student's admission prospects. The school's reputation is dependent on AP placement rate so they also had an incentive to keep kids in APs, and giving a B to a high-achieving student could provoke an angry response from the student or the parents.

Not to mention, there is no standardized grading system in the US. GPAs are nominally out of 4.0, but some schools pump those numbers by tacking .5 onto honors classes and 1.0 onto AP. At other schools its 1.0 and 2.0. Other schools don't have APs at all, or don't offer a bump for high-level courses. Who is the "better student?" The one who has a 4.43 at a school where there are no APs and honors is a .5 bump, or the student with a 5.28 at a school that offers 19 APs and gives a 2.0 bump? It's ludicrous.

The subjective measures colleges use actually started as a veil to enable racism in the 1920s. It gave them cover to deny anyone they wanted on the basis of intangible factors. This ended up hurting Jews the most. It has stuck around because it benefits the rich. Families with money to throw around can make their student look more desirable. Family connections can get you a prestigious internship with a senator. A few thousand dollars can get the student a spot on a "research trip" to Costa Rica. Another few thousand and you can get a book of your photography listed on Amazon. I go to what many would consider an "elite" school and all these examples come from people I know.

College admissions in the US is incredibly strange and arduous, and I'm dreading the day they my kids have to endure it. I would almost prefer they became plumbers or something...

As if people who interview for Google don't just look up the most common interview questions and memorize answers before the interview...

He applied for an iOS developer role.

Typing "how to reverse a binary search tree" into google is not the same thing as solving a problem.

If these problems were so reliant on individual problem solving ability, there wouldn't be dozens of books with reams of answers to these questions on the market. These questions test memorization and nothing else.

Yep. I'm a current student and the thought of a professor doing some of the things listed here is comical.

Very true. I live in a a city where there are quite a few places to charge, but I imagine that there are millions of people who would be interested in an EV but don't have access to the infrastructure.

This is exactly what I thought when I read this. It's incredibly pretentious and doesn't come off well.

That said, electric cars are more accessible than ever. The leaf starts at only $21000, which is in the range of most new-car buyers.

The real problem is the lack of diversity. There are very expensive electric sedans like the Teslas and the i8, and then there is the leaf and plug-in prius. But, there are not downmarket electric compact sedans, minivans and true SUVs. If you want an electric vehicle, you either have to shell out $800 a month or get stuck with an odd-looking hatchback. I really hope manufacturers begin rolling out new form factors for their EVs sooner rather than later.

It's not a totally unreasonable complaint given that Apple has a history when it comes to security breaches.

My biggest complain is that they are keeping the old 5GB iCloud limit. It's 2015. 5GB is absolutely nothing in terms of both capacity and cost. People pay $700-$800 for their phones and upwards of $1000 for their MacBooks and are still made to shell out for anything more than an negligible amount of free storage?

I mean, it's not like iCloud is unreasonably-priced. It's actually fairly cheap. But, it just seems weird that Apple is printing billions of dollars a quarter with these very expensive devices and still feels the need to squeak out a few dollars a month extra from iCloud subs.

One would think that, with iWork and OSX going free, iCloud would also move from a paid product to a utility that is just included with the devices.

I don't think that's true.

In my experience, development experience is relatively easy for students to obtain while in school. Internships are abundant (obviously not everyone is going to come out of school having worked for Google or Microsoft but most people who want to get development experience during college can find it). Personal projects are another way of doing something "useful" that have effectively zero barrier to entry.

It isn't too hard to do something "useful" as developer in college, if one has the motivation...

The problem is that this method disproportionately hurts people who don't have the time or energy to effectively hold two jobs (one full-time position at their day job and one as an independent developer or open-source contributor by night) because of family, friends, or some other facet of life beyond their laptop.

I think it's totally unreasonable to expect that everyone spend every minute of their lives coding or to have some kind of deep, personal connection to the code they write.

This thinking is ridiculous, and doesn't really appear in any other industry. Do you care whether your accountant's idea of an enjoyable Friday night is sitting at home making more spreadsheets? Would you demand that your eye doctor go home and craft her own lenses in her garage for fun? Competency doesn't require fanaticism, and no employer should expect that their employees devote their entire lives to their occupation.

If I want to code for 8 or 10 hours a day, go home and enjoy myself in the little free time I do have, then wake up and do it again, I don't see why that makes me an inferior employee.

This just seems like more misguided, unjustified cultural absolutism that is so prevalent in the industry.

EDIT: For those saying that the article doesn't necessitate spending massive time outside of work writing code, the author clearly conflates the two. "i have always been convinced that those who love code do not restrict their coding activities to their work. they take home that love and continue to create for fun as a hobby." Personally, I think passion could be a valuable heuristic in hiring, but the author seemed to imply that passion is only measured by your willingness to work outside of your day job. At the very least, that seems to be his expectation of good candidates, and his hiring process clearly disadvantages people who can't or won't code 24/7.

This model will certainly allow Tesla to access a new and much larger group of potential customers, but I doubt it will be a "main-stream" vehicle. $35,000 is decidedly in the realm of high-end luxury cars (this car is still going to be far more expensive than the entry-level models from Mercedes, Audi and other prestige brands) and is still inaccessible to the vast majority of buyers, albeit not necessarily as exclusive Tesla's previous supercars.

Now, Tesla is no longer an "I need to be a millionaire" brand and instead an "I need to be a lawyer or engineer" brand.

Although this is a really exciting vehicle, I still think Tesla ultimately wants to target the proletariate with cars in the $18,000 to $22,00 range (possibly with a different brand to preserve the elite reputation of the Tesla name). That segment is far more lucrative than the limited luxury market for high-end cars. As soon as Tesla ships a car that can be afforded on an average income, things will really get interesting...

Yes.

This article makes the ridiculous error of totally ignoring the fact that trivial access to loans and overall exuberance around college creates NO downward pressure on prices. So long as people are willing to pay almost anything and have access to the money to do so, prices will continue to rise. In my opinion, the "spiral" is largely the fault of excess government subsidization and price insensitivity. College is sold as a magic ticket into the upper class, and most people simply will never question this assumption.

Ending the flood of government money will force people to actually question the value of education and, as many people are priced out of the market, will hopefully lead to a rise in more efficient means of education like apprenticeships and cc.

That said, the article MASSIVELY distorts the extent of the spiral because it focuses on sticker price and not on net price. Evidently, the author doesn't realize that sticker prices are so high because colleges price discriminate. Very few people pay anything close to the listed price for college. For public colleges, the average net price is one third of the list price. For privates, the percentage is higher, but that's just because wealthy people are overrepresented at private colleges. Even then, the average net price isn't even close to the list price.

For example, I attend an "elite" private school. Although the sticker price at most of these schools is between $60,000 and $70,000 a year, massive grants are given to students that mitigate most if not all of the cost. I come from a family with slightly above-average income (but still decidedly middle class) and get a $50,000 grant from my school. I have a friend who is also middle class who is being given a full ride.

So, although this article makes a few fair points, it ignores the root of the problem and fundamentally misinterprets the data.

This is an interesting reversal for Github. The original FAQ implied that Github would try to market Atom commercially. I'm curious as to what made them change their mind.

And the consumer doesn't care at all what anyone is.

All they want is a good game, and for many of them that game is 2048...

Although heavy subsidization is a major enabler of the problem, it is not the only factor. Affordable education is out there. The problem is that people have been conditioned to believe that cheap education is bad education.

The problem is the students have been fed the lie that more "prestigious" schools yield better outcomes. Although this might be true in an extreme minority of situations (investment banking is one example where prestige matters), for the most part, the ranking and cost of the college don't matter at all.

Everyone simply ignores selection bias and assumes that getting into the "best," most expensive school possible will improve their life. In reality, if you control for selection bias, there is no difference between the outcomes one gets from Harvard and the outcomes one gets from Suffolk. In fact, the people who make the most money out of college are community college graduates. (Obviously, this is influenced by a lot of factors, but the blanket assumption that a high-end four-year school is automatically better is clearly false.)

For some reason, no one bothers to actually evaluate the value of their education critically. Instead, everyone simply buys into the collegiate cult of prestige.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/10/who-need... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/03/community-college-g...

I agree with this entirely. As it currently stands, implementing this policy in such a abrupt way will hurt discussion and negatively impact the quality of the community.

And although there are ways to improve the actual implementation of the system, I still think it is fundamentally flawed for a few reasons.

First, any system in which a comment is assumed to be spam or trash until proven otherwise will produce less meaningful discussion. Maybe most of the good comments will be filtered through; but some will invariably be missed, and people with valid ideas will not have their comments seen by anyone. Moreover, from my understanding, the HN user base is primarily in North America. (I could be wrong.) If this is true, won't users in other countries be disproportionately affected by this kind of oversight because there are simply fewer high-karma users in the rest of the world?

This is fundamentally a debate over whether HN should have 50% fewer good comments and 100% fewer bad ones, or whether we should just get everything. I believe that latter.

Second, this program places excess responsibility in the hands of high-karma users. HN is now moving from a passive system (eg. one where everything is visible and the best stuff gets voted to the top), to one where every comment must be scrutinized and evaluated just to be visible. Logistically, I don't see how this works. Users with over 1000 karma are rare. From what I've seen they are less than 5% of the total HN user base. This minority is now going to be responsible for evaluating every single comment?! I truly do not see the small number of high-karma users on HN being able to sort through every comment. Many, many comments will be missed or ignored.

Overall, I believe that any effort to stop spam on HN should be given consideration, but this system poses substantial logistical problems and will, in all likelihood, hurt the community.

Selling anything for billions of dollars has never been and never will be a mistake for anyone.

In-state tuition at my state flagship (Illinois) is $20,000. Factor in cost of living and various fees, and costs can easily run into the $30,000 to $40,000 per year range. Moreover, state funding for the university has fallen in recent years, meaning that financial aid is scarce and that tuition is perpetually rising.

If I recall correctly, the interest rate on Stafford loans is 3.4%. Government "Parent PLUS" loans and private loans are much higher. What's especially appalling is that the federal government actually uses student loans as a source of revenue. (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-...)

The cost is getting out of control.

The OP comes across as very fond of deriding the US schooling system, but proposes nothing beyond an egotistical assurance that he can teach math well even though no one else can.

Math education is not homogenous. People are not homogenous. Everyone experiences math in different ways both in school and in everyday life. Some people will simply memorize the steps necessary to solve problems. Some will actually grasp the theory behind the problem solving. Some will experience very little of what is considered "classic" high school math. (At my school, those who are not tracked into calculus or statistics as Seniors take a course that deals with things like formal logic. It actually seems really interesting.) The OP's blanket assertions are simply wrong.

Moreover, math is a massive field. The OP's claim that calculus and algebra are not math but that "pattern recognition" is is just absurd.