vinaysshenoy

It's hard for us to tell since this was the first time we were doing an "official" interview for hiring.

We did allow concessions for people who were not able to find time to do the exercise. We merged it with the pair programming exercise and asked them to build it with us in office.

The exercise itself is a simple note-taking app with a couple of screens. We don't impose a time limit on candidates interviewing to complete this stage.

> For a new project there aren't any well defined states of the code that make sense to be persisted. This means the commits will be arbitrary and their messeages not very meaningful.

I didn't understand this? The problem is well scoped and defined. Regardless of whether it's a new project or old, we expect candidates to be able to split their work as atomically as possible.

We (https://obvious.in) documented our entire hiring process on our Playbook (https://playbook.obvious.in/hiring/hiring-process/engineerin...).

Took us about a week to write everything down the first time and then we continuously updated it until it reached the current state.

We had the advantage of being a "public by default" company, so there was no need for approvals of any sort.

We were sending email via SMTP from our Android apps for a while until we ran into quite a few cases where SMTP was blocked at the router level. We had to move to HTTP mailing to let the mails go through.

People who buy Fiio don't buy them for the UI. The audio quality that comes out of a Fiio player is phenomenal.

I don't like how Star Citizen is being handled. Luckily, I never backed it and it's clear that the project is going to be undergoing massive delays and is going to be a huge mess since it's gone beyond mere "feature bloat".

But this guy seems too immature to take seriously. In fact, I stopped taking him seriously at the first mention of "Shitizen". That doesn't really do him any favours.

All! Mac OS X + Linux!

This is bullcrap. Some of the most talented devs I know work at pure Indian startups(Flipkart, for example, has an extremely good tech team) and there are a huge number of startups coming up in India that have some really kickass talent.

There are good devs and bad devs everywhere. The problem in India is that the average software developer is one not because they wanted to code, but because the family pushed them to do it since it pays well. As a result, you get a bunch of devs who don't really care about what they do, and are incompetent.

The kicker is that these devs are the ones the rest of the outside world works with since they come to India for cheap labour, and hence, you get the impression than coders in India are mediocre.