Ironically, when interviewers talk about how they interview, they pretty much all seem to believe they are very good in evaluating candidates. But when candidates talk about job interviews, they all seem to agree interviews are done badly.
A rule I have is that everyone is good in something and bad in something else. So, if by the end of the interview I haven't found a topic where the candidate excels and a topic where sucks, the interview hasn't been effective.
If you've found what they're good at, and it matches what your needs are, does the information on what they suck at help you decide between multiple candidates?
They also changed their answer ranking algorithm. It started giving much higher weight to answers from users who answered many other questions on the site.
I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions.
But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition.
Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking.
I agree, this is actually a really really good business idea. I heard so many times top devs wish something like this would exist.
Can you give an idea of what an ex-FAANG dev can expect after signing up? Like what's the frequency of projects? (not sure when you started this, if you just started it I understand you might not have a clear answer yet)
Facet has been in business for many years, so we have several long-term, repeat customers. We've just pivoted into this business model in the past couple of months because we we're getting overwhelmed with new projects and couldn't hire full-time devs fast enough. So instead, we thought we would see if there was an untapped pool of extremely high-quality devs that just wanted to be freelance. Turns out there is!
We get new projects weekly and our network is sized to match. We want make sure the number of opportunities we find covers 75% of our developer network. Our network is smallish right now (less than 50). If demand for joining exceeds our project capacity we will implement a wait-list for joining until our project volume catches up.
Wow thanks for sharing. Facet sounds right for me as I work for a big company but looking to expand my experience into a smaller more impactful business/startup/consulting space.
"We have the best product in the world and we are revolutionizing the life of our users. What's next? What more can we achieve in the next 5 yrs given how great our product is already?"
On a more serious note, I wonder why they keep doing these Q&As given that everyone thinks they are useless BS.
Sad news. WhatApp really feels to me as the future of social networks and its massive numbers tend to prove it.
1:1 chat and phone calls to communicate to your friends, groups to keep in touch with people you are less close to, and status in the extremely rare case that you want to briefly show something to all of your contacts (but without all the problems of FB: your contacts are all people you actually know fairly well, no like and similar bullshits that create so many problems, no pictures stored forever, etc.).
At the same time, I already saw many people switching to telegram. It seems impossible for whatsapp to decline given its current numbers, but who knows really.
I would suggest anyone interested in learning more about this to watch the BBC documentary The Big Bank Fix. It shows how these traders didn't do anything wrong.
The documentary shows how there were some really high level bank executives involved in libor frauds and that was getting media attention. Therefore, SFO met with banks and eventually, based on documents provided by the banks, decided to prosecute simple traders.
The reason traders have been sent to trial has nothing to do with the actual libor fraud carried out by executives. But since it is still about libor, has been sold to the media as the libor trial. Start and end date of the "crime" have been carefully chosen to not include evidence of the executive crimes (such as the phone call shown in the documentary). SFO experts have admitted during trial to lie in order to convict these traders.
Many of these traders were in their early 20s when the alleged crime happened. Germany, France, and EU have already said that it was not a crime at the time and rejected extradition.
I rarely felt as sad as after watching that documentary.
I read The Spider Network (fantastic look into how bank prop trading worked) and came to mostly the same conclusions. The idea of just prosecuting "rouge traders" is a complete injustice, as trying to adjust the rate submissions was apparently a widely known practice in banks. Tom Hayes, a mildly autistic savant just doing what everyone else was got 14 years, essentially a murder sentence in the UK. Fire the traders and maybe ban them from trading for a few years.
Of course the investing public with LIBOR based loans wants blood, and they just believe the headlines that a few traders "conspired" to fix rates. In reality the entire system was built on a profoundly flawed incentive structure of trusting banks with positions that profit from LIBOR moves to not alter LIBOR submissions to make themselves money. But LIBOR is too big to fail at this point so they chose to scapegoat a few traders instead of admitting the whole system is corrupt.
Anyone who has worked for a large tech company in SF in the last 3/4 years knows that this has happened everywhere.
In fairness, Google was one of the very last ones among large tech companies to play the quota game. But the problem is that that's a game that once the first company starts playing it, everyone else is forced to play it too.
Company X publishes a report with amazing diversity numbers and brands itself as a great company for certain minorities and diversity in general, along with some unbelievable BS about how they achieved that. At that point, you have to introduce quotas too to get similar numbers or your brand and recruiting will be strongly affected.
New Asian immigrants moved to Bay Area for high paying tech jobs have very different views from those that were born in America or have lived here for a long time. Many of the new immigrants have no citizenship yet while the latter are simply much less impacted by these diversity movements overall
Anecdotally I only knew two Trump voters in the Bay Area. One is Chinese and the other Indian. Polling was not great in the last election, maybe because pollsters can mainly call people with landlines [1] which excludes large pools of people.
Exit polls are different from opinion polls. The surveying techniques are entirely different, and in general exit polls are considered far more accurate than opinion polls -- because you're polling on a concrete question ("who did you vote for a few minutes ago") rather than a less concrete one ("who are you more likely to vote for").
Considering how many people were shamed for voting for trump I’m not entirely sure how accurate those exit polls were as most of them predicted a landslide for HRC before the count started.
don't be fooled by the media. Trump supports legal immigration and is allocating more quota to legal immigrants. As a result, tons of legal immigrants support Trump.
> Trump supports legal immigration and is allocating more quota to legal immigrants
Trump has proposed eliminating many of the major existing categories of legal immigration in the core, family-owned action based system. He's proposed replacing the eliminated categories with a small number of renewable non-immigrant (no path to citizenship or work permission) visas for parents of US citizens.
He's proposed no concrete increase in total permanent allocation in the remaining categories, though he's talked about cancelling the diversity visa lottery and reallocating the quota used there to help clear backlogs elsewhere.
He has also expressed a strong desire to revamp the permanent residence visa allocation process to use an individual-focused, merit-based system that prefers applicants with a high income.
If I had to choose one, I'd prefer more employment visas over family visas and definitely diversity visas.
Don't you find it strange that a nationalist like Trump would advocate for visas for high skilled foreigner which directly competes with citizens for high paying prestigious jobs? Why would a high skilled foreigner with a spouse or children want to emigrate to the US without a family visa?
Young, unmarried individuals will be able to immigrate. Applicants can also bring in their spouses if they are educated and can are fluent in English.
It appeases his nationalist base because it would not give visas to immigrants in low-paid jobs. Most of those voters were never in contention for the high-paying tech jobs anyway. They have no reason to care too much about them.
It's not about recruiting. It's about lawsuits. Companies with more than 100 employees are legally obligated to report demographic information to the EEOC. The EEOC reviews this information when someone files a complaint alleging discrimination.
If similar companies in the same industry and geography have numbers that show a more diverse demographic profile, the EEOC is much more likely to consider a discrimination complaint non-frivolous, which is required to file a lawsuit alleging employer discrimination (as I understand it; not a lawyer).
Companies play this game a) to protect themselves against lawsuits; and b) to potentiate damage to competitors who are not yet explicitly playing this game, and therefore have correspondingly less demographic diversity.
Then company X gets rightfully trounced by a Chinese firm 5 years from now which does not share our ridiculous racial taboos. Some crimes are self policing.
No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds. Let's face it: the top tech companies have sufficient applicants, so they can choose whoever they want, and most jobs are drone jobs.
No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds.
Many companies have failed due in part to internal politics. Also, weren't many of the companies involved in the financial crisis going along with the prevailing political winds, just before everything changed?
> No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds. Let's face it: the top tech companies have sufficient applicants
Many companies have been trounced by outsiders unconstrained by their political liabilities.
Let's face it: Ford, Chevy and Chrysler all had sufficient applicants, even as Toyota and Honda were building the processes and company cultures that would dethrone them.
> Management techniques in NASA, the report said, discouraged dissenting views on safety issues and ultimately created “blind spots” about the risk to the space shuttle of the foam insulation impact.
Are you seriously trying to suggest that Chinese firms don't have their own racial taboos? Or gender issues? That directly contradicts every experience I've had or report I've heard. Aren't their crimes self-policing too?
All I know is that China has a huge, ambitious, STEM-focused workforce and a smaller economy. They could discriminate against applicants on any arbitrary basis ( I have no idea if they do, but that's irrelevant) and still continue to hire lots of intelligent, highly-qualified, and hard-working employees.
Is it? I'm not aware of any company in the history of the United States that has failed because it tried to increase its workforce's diversity. Would you mind providing an example?
Natural monopolist Google enjoys a "competitive moat" and collects monopoly rent. The combination allows for a lot of unpunished "inefficiency".
And scare quotes around "inefficiency" because I'm not convinced putting pressure on their productive white/asian male majority employees is actually inefficient for Google.
Or, instead of giving in, these companies could actually use their impressive power and reach to halt such practices and not let their brand be so affected. (Hello marketing budgets.) Big_Co is not a victim here, and portraying them as such is vastly unfair to the actual people being adversely affecting by discriminatory hiring practices. These companies can and should do better than "well everyone else is doing it!"
I hope my comment didn't come across as I am portraying them as a victim. I saw first hand hiring based on quotas and I hated it (and I am an immigrant with dark skin).
I was just stating a fact about Google, that they were among the last to implement quotas in Silicon Valley, and why I think they started doing it.
It's a false logical conclusion really (just as most things related to postmodernism and enforced equality of outcome through diversity are).
You could just as easily reason that companies who aren't implementing these policies and actually hiring based on individual qualifications and not group identity will out compete their competitors in the free market. They'll surely get bad press for a while but eventually their haters will get tired and move on to the next news cycle. In the mean time the company has hired all of the "undesirable" straight white and Asian males (not intentionally but only because their value in the market has been artificially depressed) and they are easily outpacing the productivity of their rival firms.
As the postmodernists reject possible logical conclusions from their actions and claim organization power they will eventually come face to face with the free capitalist market and the firms they overtake will fail. That is of course if they can't act quickly enough in manifesting their utopian vision of the destruction of capitalism itself.
The promotion process at google self-selects for a very important skill: you are given a certain goal and you find the optimal way to achieve it, regardless of whether you agree with it or not.
This is a crucial skill for middle managers. Their role is often making sure their team executes on executive vision without questioning the vision (imagine how messy things would become if each middle manager would start questioning executive strategy and push back on projects).
At the end, Google process worked as they designed it for. People like you, who don't like to just do what they are told to do, choose to move on. And people who accept it get promoted and go on to become effective middle managers from a Google executive standpoint.
Yeah, that sounds so bad. It sounds like: try to screw them over, but be aware that some employees will realize that and, just for them, you will have to adjust compensation.
Maybe that's a way to give Detroit hosts an incentive to stay on Airbnb. After all, the more money they make the more likely they are to still use Airbnb despite the new city rules. So pushing more demand towards Detroit will reduce the number of hosts who decide to leave the platform (and possibly attract new hosts).
I think it can make sense from a business standpoint. It is unfortunate it hurts other hosts who have nothing to do with it. But I would guess this is just temporary.
A rule I have is that everyone is good in something and bad in something else. So, if by the end of the interview I haven't found a topic where the candidate excels and a topic where sucks, the interview hasn't been effective.