A piece of advice from someone who wanted to work at startups.Having realized that its unlikely that my skills will translate to doing well at startup interviews, its only pragmatic to not pursue that path. But my end goal is not to work at a startup, its to keep learning and to stay relevant/employable and those can be done outside of a startup.
Any interview that is structured like a test is a bad interview. Starting your relationship with an abusive process will set the tone of the relationship and I applaud all those who have walked away from interviews that make one jump through hoops. From personal experience, The last interview I took lasted 40 minutes and the person we hired is the best developer I know.
I was never confident at giving interviews until my mindset changed from it being a test to an exchange where someone who needs help is trying to get together with me, someone who can help them. They should able to explain to me how they see me helping them. Questions like: 'what is your biggest challenge right now' or 'if I were hired, what would be the first task' help start that conversation. They obviously will do their due diligence and I need to do mine (collaborative environment, sane hours, reasonable pay, competent management etc.)
There have been a few articles on the hiring/interviewing practices. As someone who has not worked/interviewed in a startup, I have a few rhetorical yet sincere questions:
Does every startup implement their own algorithms etc. from scratch. Isn't it the reason why we have libraries? I thought most software was mostly glue/crud.
Do engineers at startup only code? Do they never talk to customers or need to clarify requirements or work on timelines or deal with scope creep, since it seems that these skills aren't evaluated at interviews.
If the answer to these questions is what I think it should be, to what end do we have this dog and pony show?
The Bridgestone Aerobee was another device that seemed fit all the specifications for a electronic notebook. Bridgestone had teamed up with a Delta Electronics to bring these out but killed it.
It amuses me when people from western countries complain about noise(most comments contain clues to location).
Having lived most of my life in India, noise has never been an issue for me, even while doing tasks that require intense concentration. It's like the brain implements a band pass filter for most ambient noise, you never notice it. I have also noticed that the more I concentrate on a task at hand, the less I notice anything else around me.
On the other hand, I have been living outside India for the past few years and I notice noise a lot more.
Make what you want of this but it has lead me to believe that our perception of noise is a function of our state of mind, the ambient noise level and our conditioning/habituation. The takeaway being that it is possible to learn to ignore noise, since in most situations one may not be able to control the source of the noise.
I get that too, if I'm reading or writing then nothing short of shouting or a physical tap on the shoulder can bring me back to reality.
But I'm not convinced everyone can learn it. I know people who are light sleepers and get jolted awake in the night because of noise. You'd think if their brains could adapt to filter out the ambient noise then they would have for the situation. Regularly interrupted sleep is probably pretty annoying.
I found the article useful. As a self taught programmer who works in enterprise software using procedural programming, I was missing knowledge of design patterns and Big O.
Having dabbled in Java recently, I found myself struggling with design patterns. I realized a bit late that I should read up on design patterns.
This post hit home for me at least (although I do unit test :))
off topic but to me living with no regrets does not mean literally that. Sometimes it means not regretting just one of action/outcome. Sometimes it means knowing that you did to the best of your abilities. And sometimes it means (eventually) accepting your fallibility.
e.g: not too happy about taking that chance, but happy that had the courage to take that chance.
Any interview that is structured like a test is a bad interview. Starting your relationship with an abusive process will set the tone of the relationship and I applaud all those who have walked away from interviews that make one jump through hoops. From personal experience, The last interview I took lasted 40 minutes and the person we hired is the best developer I know.
I was never confident at giving interviews until my mindset changed from it being a test to an exchange where someone who needs help is trying to get together with me, someone who can help them. They should able to explain to me how they see me helping them. Questions like: 'what is your biggest challenge right now' or 'if I were hired, what would be the first task' help start that conversation. They obviously will do their due diligence and I need to do mine (collaborative environment, sane hours, reasonable pay, competent management etc.)
All of the above is opinion.