198 karma · joined January 23, 2009
loginctl enable-linger <username>
I aim to have our interview cycle take under a week, although in honesty, I think it takes about 10 days. I often take on a little more work myself (especially in the phone screen) if I believe it helps speed up the process and saves others time. Speed is important. Keeping momentum during hiring really makes the experience better for everyone.
For background, I work for a startup lab in Boston (we build prototypes that we spin out into companies). We're about 35 employees.
Oh, and let me start by saying that while all the pre-interview work you've listed above does take some time, the real time cost to hiring is from the interview process itself since it involves multiple people.
1.) Resume review: 3 minutes. It took longer when I first got started. I used to agonize over "call/dont-call." But you'll usually have a gut reaction to the resume, and you'll eventually learn to trust that (for better or worse ;-)
2.) Code samples/Exercises: I don't bother with them, although another manager I work with uses them to good effect. Unfortunately, they can add between several days to a week to the process, so I do a more involved phone screen instead to keep things moving.
3.) Phone screen: I spend up to 90 minutes in the phone screen. This seems to be fairly unusual. 90 minutes is a lot of time to invest, but the key is, I only spend that long with the candidates I think I'd like to bring in. The call is setup so that I can cut it short at any point. Even still, I spend a lot of time here. I get to know the candidate, feel out their passions, and actually have them write code, live in an EtherPad derivative while talking to them.
4.) Almost 6 person-hours. Our amazing director of talent greets the candidate, and spends 15 minutes giving them the lay of the land, paperwork, etc. Then two different two-person teams interview the candidate for an hour each getting to know the candidate, sharing what life here is like, and working on one large technical problem. Then our CTO and I spend 45 minutes with the candidate answer questions, talking about the direction and strategy of the company, and gauging their interest in what we do here. Interestingly, the interview process we've been using on the UX side of things spends more time working on a single practical exercise (using computers, not whiteboards) and finishes with a broader meet-and-greet. Since I'm constantly experimenting with this process, I'm planning on trying a variant of this on the software engineer interviews as well.
But I aim to have the whole process from resume review to offer letter done in a week.
http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html
http://luajit.org/performance.html
That said, I do agree that Lua can be more cumbersome than Python or Ruby.
Basically: deal is X, but if condition Y holds true for the next year, we'll given you an additional Z.
Courting investors is a full time job, but so is hiring if done right. You probably can't do both with just two of you. If the goal of raising money is to hire more people, and you've already got enough cash to hire even one, do that first.
Just make sure you hire into a position you believe can increase your profit. Spend time thinking about it.
Companies your size grind to a halt while raising capital and it can take months. Once you've expanded a little, multitasking becomes easier. If you're lucky (and this is what you're trying for), you may find that your new hire increases your profit enough while you were looking for investors that you can afford to hire again.
If the new hire doesn't increase profit, you can still take investment (especially if you've been doing the leg work after maxing out your headcount), but you're going to have to figure out how to hire effectively eventually, you'll just have more money in the bank.
"See you in the conference room in 2 ksecs..."
Put a bunch of geeks together too long and this is what happens.
My $60 plan through T-Mobile is more expensive then the Virgin one mentioned in the article, but because T-Mobile reduces your bill if you don't take the phone subsidy, it is a lot cheaper than the other options I looked at when buying.
I can't stress enough how great a phone is for the price. The CPU is only 600MHz, but with Android 2.2 it doesn't feel sluggish to me (perhaps because I don't know how fast a phone like the Nexus S feels).
The best part of having no contract is in a year I can just buy a new low end phone with dramatically better specs and hand this one down.
Unlikely as it is, I wish Apple would upstream that code to Oracle.
I guess there's potentially still SWT on top of a ported, open source Java7 from Unix/Linux if you need to do non-X11 UI on Mac.
Well, some Googling suggests that might work anyway...
Mac and Windows applications ship bundled versions of third party libraries all the time. Managing a complex web of name+version based dependencies is much harder in a decentralized software ecosystem, so bundling starts to look attractive.
For our purposes, the benefit of a system where software is more reliable, predictable, and accountable is greater than the cost of asking developers to recompile in unusual circumstances.
user-interface and discovery-system are two hypothetical processes whose pids (process identifiers) are passed in to this process as arguments. user-interface would be responsible for creating a window with a text display area and a text entry box. discovery-system would use our remote service discovery model to find others chatting in the same "room."
Crazy strategies, like CDs that physically can't be copied and must be in the drive or kernel extensions obviously won't work, but that's probably a good thing. =)
user-interface, discovery-system |
# This process is spawned with two pids as arguments
# If either pid halts, I halt too.
user-interface.link
discovery-system.link
user-interface.subscribe(when(
text-entered: { message |
# I entered a message in the UI, announce it to everyone subscribed to me
my-actor.announce('exclaimed, message)
}
))
discovery-system.subscribe(when(
peer-discovered: { name, peer |
# Discovery system located another user in the chat room
# Send message to user-interface showing a Growl style notification.
user-interface << ('notify, "{name} arrived.")
peer.subscribe(when(
# This guy went away - "halted" is announced when a process stops
halted: { result | user-interface << ('notify, "{name} left.") }
# This guy said something
exclaimed: { message | user-interface << ('text-append, "{name}: {message}") }
))
}
)
main.loop values = '[1, 2, 3]
incremented = values.map({ n | n + 1 })
summary = incremented.join(", ")
summary.starts-with?("1").then({
fail("Increment failed.")
})On p.173 Joe writes:
When we say things such as this:
Pid = register(...),
on_exit(Pid, fun(X) -> ..),
there is a possibility the process dies in the gap between these two statements.
So in Spin you wouldn't be tempted to write something like above (probably not Erlang either?).
I'm sharing one of the lessons we learned building our own programming language. I love how many language designers there are on HN!
We're working on an invite system, so everyone can benefit from Skynet! Skynet is better when you use it with others, so the invites will work for groups of friends.
We've gotten comfortable enough with our concurrency model, that we felt it deserved to be in the language.
As an aside, some features that benefit parallelism can be tricky to add retroactively, although possible (like an N:M threading model).
I'm not enough of an expert to weigh in, but the spec did make me chuckle. Super verbose with a dash of paranoia.
This is pretty funny (although gregw has written many longer and more detailed essays about websockets as well):
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=294563
In the end, we located the bug within our code connecting jetty's websocket support to our message passing system. You can bet that was an adventure to sort out. =)
It also raises the cost of factoring code out into its own file. Even a simple code header can easily be double the amount of code I consider worth extracting.
I know many IDEs add them automatically, so it doesn't feel like much of a cost to the writer, but as the reader, you pay it every time. Why waste brain power thinking "Ok, ignore everything above, this down here is the real source code"?
Provided everything goes okay, I'll try to post our data as a follow up.
It's a nice gradual introduction, and help me get started with TaPL (although I wish I could say I'd made much progress).
After completing their term in the lower body, the representatives graduate to serve a four year term the higher house. Here, they are entrusted with the power of making new laws.
Elections are staggered (similar to the US sentate), so every year one fourth of the members are elected, one fourth move up, and one fourth retire. This way, the chambers have institutional memory and transitions are smooth.
Both houses have the power to change the legislative topography of the nation. Because newly elected representatives serve in the lower house, when citizens vote to change the direction of the country, the first response to public opinion is the removal of existing laws. Only after serving a term in the lower house can laws be added.
To make this kind of system successful, there might need to be a legal review process that demands small, unbundled laws. Or perhaps a simple word count like @derefr and @mseebach suggest.
I guess the fact that we even think about this stuff pretty much means we're geeks. =)
Evan Miller (emiller) and I applied for Summer 06. Evan had to do most of the work on our application because I had deadlines with my publisher on my Ruby book. I was proud that I was writing a book, so I mentioned it in my bio.
In retrospect, I wonder if that doomed us. Sorry, Evan. If I was reading applications, I'd have been like, "This guy thinks he's writing a book and starting a company? Fuggedaboutit."
But another one of my friends got into Winter 07 and he's very persuasive. A year after their session ended he convinced me to leave the corporate world and join him and his cofounder.
Wish I could finish the story by saying we're insanely profitable already, but hey, we're still alive, we've got a great product, and that's awesome.
There are a ton of ways to get a business off the ground, so one rejection from one incubator is really just the beginning. To everyone in that situation, don't give up. And if this one doesn't pan out, maybe you'll go even further with the next one!
The tick/tock is done for both business and engineering reasons. Debugging new silicon is hard enough without landing a new microarchitecture and a new process simultaneously.
While the ticks (new process) aren't quite as exciting as the tocks (new architecture), they bring real benefits in cost, power, and increased perf, not to mention usually a few microarchitectural enhancements. These chips are the best of their uarch, and they pave the way for the next tock, as you point out.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Intel's Oregon CPU Architecture Team in the performance group, but that was more than three years ago, so take what I say with a grain of salt. And, of course, I don't speak for Intel in any way.