ethbr0 (u/ethbr0) - Readit News

ethbr0 commented on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story old.reddit.com/r/startups... · Posted by u/bsmth

yieldcrv · 2 years ago

> Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.

did it work for that purpose?

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

Not this time!

But for every candidate that could answer, I think so.

ethbr0 commented on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story old.reddit.com/r/startups... · Posted by u/bsmth

janstice · 2 years ago

That sounds like someone who will make a four-page fizzbuzz solution, which was at one stage a highlight for us.

What I try to get candidates to do in interviews is find the project they are most proud of, and get them to talk about it at a technical level - the constraints, challenges & solutions. That’s much harder to fake than pretty much anything else, and works at any technical level. My theory is that if they can communicate technical things in enough detail, and show that they have sufficient depth in at least one area they should be able to move sideways into our stack and context.

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

I've also had good luck asking about a project they were on that went off the rails and what they'd do differently next time around.

You can tell pretty quickly how involved they were and if they were thinking through solutions vs just doing as told.

ethbr0 commented on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story old.reddit.com/r/startups... · Posted by u/bsmth

ionwake · 2 years ago

I find people who judge others on how they answer a tech question to be sus highly judgemental and often wrong about their hunches

But I could be wrong

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

That's why I try to ask open-ended questions. Get to a solution. Might not be my solution, but at least get me there.

How do you run candidate interviews?

ethbr0 commented on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story old.reddit.com/r/startups... · Posted by u/bsmth

somestag · 2 years ago

Presumably something like "a string is a sequence of characters" would be a good first answer, though it might prompt some follow-up questions.

I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I thought through it out loud.

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

My high water mark was the basics... and then the candidate drawing an analogy between char as primitive and char-array-based-strings as object oriented classes that offered additional functionality on top of chars.

ethbr0 commented on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story old.reddit.com/r/startups... · Posted by u/bsmth

t0mas88 · 2 years ago

What role were you interviewing for? Sure anyone with a serious CS degree at some point knew the difference between a char and a string. But if you're hiring a VP or product in a larger org, it doesn't matter whether they remember because the people they'd be managing wouldn't even need to know.

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

Customer-facing implementation engineer, more or less.

ethbr0 commented on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story old.reddit.com/r/startups... · Posted by u/bsmth

F-W-M · 2 years ago

"Strings are sequences of characters" or sth. like that.

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

It's a grab bag, tell-me-something-interesting icebreaker question. I'm looking for some evidence of the fact that you can differentiate the two in some meaningful way.

Not intended to be a gotcha question! Just a quick test of basic CS knowledge to get the candidate comfortable.

ethbr0 commented on My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story old.reddit.com/r/startups... · Posted by u/bsmth

Aurornis · 2 years ago

> Ultimately I ended up with a bunch of highly paid employees who don’t know how to do anything but to “build and lead amazing teams.”

I've worked at a lot of startups. The worst of them were led by people who list things like "organization design" and "build and lead amazing teams" on their LinkedIn.

At the most dysfunctional company, the ex-FAANG CTO would take key job descriptions and add the requirement that they must have FAANG experience. This created a glass ceiling where the early employees, non of whom had FAANG backgrounds, were unable to be promoted. Instead, we got a lot of ex-FAANG VPs and Directors who didn't know how to function at a startup. They were told to lead teams of people who knew the business inside and out (because they built it!) yet they could barely function outside of a big company themselves. Every meeting would be a competition of stories about "At Microsoft we did this..." or "At Facebook we did that..." because playing the FAANG card was the only thing the CTO liked to hear.

The only non-FAANG person who thrived at that company was the single worst leader I've ever reported to. He is a LinkedIn influencer with his own newsletter where he talks about, among other things, his expertise in "Organizational Design". Yet the organization he designed was completely dysfunctional because he ignored how the business worked and instead hired arbitrary numbers of people according to some book he read. Half of the people at that company were 90% idle, while the other half were working 80 hour weeks because the "organizational design" person had strictly assigned responsibilities to arbitrary teams in a way that didn't account for how the business actually worked.

The next line from this post is exactly how he responded to every problem:

> Imagine you hire someone to scale an area and their solution is to divide that area into 5 sub areas and hire someone for each of them to figure it out, etc. that’s their solution.

He was never accountable for anything because he always had someone under him to blame.

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

I interviewed a guy the other day.

CS degree.

"I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams."

"Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?"

*crickets*

We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.

ethbr0 commented on Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes ipp.mpg.de/5322229/01_23... · Posted by u/greesil

barbazoo · 2 years ago

> the wendelstein 7x is never going to generate usable electricity

What's the reason for that?

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

tl;dr - Output nuclear fusion power, plasma volume, and magnetic field strength scale differently with reactor size increases

In detail, I'll let someone smarter than me in nuclear physics explain: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/175830/nuclear-f...

ethbr0 commented on An automatic shiny hunter for any Pokémon game tomshardware.com/news/ras... · Posted by u/guiambros

lewdev · 2 years ago

Interesting; the modern Game Genie

ethbr0 · 2 years ago

The wrinkle about "modern Game Genie" is that when the original debuted, there were no microtransactions.

Now, hastening grind runs directly counter to most(?) game revenue models.

Interesting times!