> If you’re hanging out with your friends trying to come up with an idea, I don’t think you should start that company
The difference between a founder that started a company this way versus a founder that started a company out of significant personal experience is astounding. The way they talk about their company is utterly different and I imagine that has a great deal of influence on hiring as well.
> This is a ridiculous game, and I think every wise person should refuse to participate in it in the first place and set their own priorities.
Regardless of whether or not that 19yo ties his happiness to doing something great doesn't change the fact that he's going to be part of this game either directly or indirectly. I desperately want to believe that we can all lead a happy life simply by setting our own priorities. However, as warm and fuzzy as that can make me feel inside I just don't think it's true. Resources are scarce. There's going to be competition. In some places in the world there's heavy competition even if your priority is something as basic as water.
That is an excellent idea. I want to do something where once you complete an exercise, only then can you see how others answered the same one. Kind of like Project Euler if you've ever used that.
> Don't think that the fact of recruiter getting in touch mean anything -- they are playing their own numbers game.
Exactly. In some conversations I've had with fellow dev's they seem to equate a message from a recruiter with a job offer. I never understood this. Sure, I get messages from recruiters on LinkedIn but it's prob. the same generic letter blasted to hundreds or even thousands of candidates. The quality of your online profiles (SEO?) as a programmer is directly related to the volume of messages you get from recruiters.
I don't make the mistake of thinking a recruiter calling me on several occasions, attempting to get me to interview is a job offer. What I find surprising is that the recruiter still wants me to interview even after I explained who and what I am. Maybe that's just an overzealous recruiter trying to fill numbers. Maybe Google has relaxed standards outside of what people usually think. One of the first things I said to the recruiter was something along the lines of "Are you sure you have the right guy?"[0] followed up with "I'm not quite sure that I am qualified". Between talking to the recruiter and people who work there or passed the interview, it sure doesn't seem like they are only looking for geniuses.
I'm just trying to offer a point of data regarding what Google by proxy of their recruiters, looks for. The recruiter himself has been working for Google for quite a while, so either he really knows how to game the system, is currently desperate, or Google doesn't have as extreme standards as one would think.
> What I find surprising is that the recruiter still wants me to interview even after I explained who and what I am.
Did you tell him that you're a psychopath? My point is that if a recruiter reaches out to you, it probably means your online identity matches their criteria for potential candidate. Now this criteria can be as simple as oh neat he uses haskell to I'm impressed by his contributions to project X, Y, Z. So unless you tell him something that is completely contradictory to his superficial impression of you there's no reason he should tell you NOT to interview with the company.
Also, I feel like whatever reason the recruiter decided to contact you (Github / nice linkedin profile) has very little to do with the companies hiring bar. It's a terrible proxy for measuring how a company hires. It's at best an indication of the technologies you'll potentially be working with. For example, if you only have java listed chances are you prob. would have never gotten that phone call. You should try it as an experiment.
Want to know where the bar actually is? Go for an interview. Of course, what they mean by interview is usually 1-2 rounds of phone interviews. So in essence you're still pretty far from being seriously considered as a candidate.
I don't think it really matters to the recruiter if you are qualified, or if they are judged on how many people they source end up getting offers. They are just there to get you in the door.
I suppose that would depend on how the recruiters operate. I'd imagine that at Google's size, they probably have recruiters just feeding people into the pipeline. I tend to assume people aren't just doing a shitty job, in this case throwing people at a wall and seeing what sticks, despite how much it clashes with my "imposter syndrome" mentality.
Nice! I wonder if interactive programming might end up encouraging a trial and error approach to coding which can be a very bad habit.
Just a minor tip: I feel like you spend way too much time typing in the demo. You should just copy and paste the changes you want to make ahead of time.
Excellent point about the trial and error approach. I started programming relying heavily on setting a breakpoint and writing code inside of Chrome's devtools (then copying the code, which I knew worked, into my project).
It didn't take me long to realize that just because I could do something like (for example) `view.attributes.blah = "something"` it wasn't how you're supposed to do it (`view.set("blah", "something")`).
As a beginner, you're really just trying to make shit work. And it's fine to do stupid things, you'll learn the errors of your ways later on. The most important thing is that you have the means to learn rapidly.
You say trial and error approach, but I'd call it experimental approach. And this is good. The bad habit is never growing beyond that.
Thanks for the tip. That was my first screen cast. I went through like 7 iterations eventually I just threw the towel in. Yeah the whole sine-wave function thing takes to long. Next time I will paste stuff like that in.
This was no where near as painful as some talks I've seen, where the speaker is programming. Like running of time, and only being half way through the talk. Live coding definitely slows down the momentum. A good example of coding demos is Stephen Wolfram introducing the Wolfram language [1]. 12:55 minutes of pure ecstasy :D
Actually I'd like to strongly urge you to not copy/paste code in. The trend lately has been to not paste code in but to do the typing... it's more akin to live coding and I think learners gain more. A lot of the better online tutorial sites make their teachers work the code out live. In addition to that, they often discourage the use of macros and shortcut keys so the viewer can see and learn what's going on. With modern video players those who don't want this can scrub past it.
The risk of typing the code in and not copying and pasting for those who are up to speed is that they have to take a few moments to watch the coding or skip past it; the risk of not live coding for those who aren't up to speed is not understanding what's going on. The time taken to live code is really helpful for people like me.
I like live coding too but I think how much of it is acceptable depends on what you're trying to demonstrate. If you're doing a programming tutorial video then yes by all means type every line so the viewer can follow along. However, if you're trying to show how various code changes get reflected in your browser do you really need to dedicate 20% of your video time to writing a sine function?
I think so, especially in this case. In this case, you only really get a sense of just how interactive the programming is by watching how a really short amount of time coding produces game play changes. When people cut and paste I think the viewer wonders in the back of their mind if something else got tweaked (not intentionally to mislead or anything, but because of the nature of coding). This is probably one of the reasons why, for example, the PeepCode Play by Play videos got so popular.
Try camtasia; you can speed up sections of the screencast and even make animated gifs (which compress well for programming experiences). see for an example:
You know what really pisses me off? When any change to your profile gets broadcasted to your entire network. This needs to be off by default. My "feed" is inundated with updates with updates about people tweaking their title or personal information.
I think they're doing a great job grouping and ordering their videos according to common standards. I find myself jumping around trying to figure out what I need to learn less often.
I don't think these bootcamps are going to go away so long as there's pent up demand for developers. I do think there are existing models that work for a particular audience (college educated, analytical/mathematical thinkers?) and those are going to continue serving as more effective alternatives to scouring the web for resources on your own or going back to school.
Some schools might find out that 8 weeks is too short. Others might find it too long. Being that these rapid fire dev ramp-up programs are still pretty new it'll be interesting to see what insights emerge.
Or really any school for that matter. In the valley you have schools like Stanford and Berkeley that serve as the initial filters in the talent funnel. Getting into either school is a feat unto its own, so I don't think these school take credit for all of a students success.
Interestingly enough I did about 50 problems of PE in Javascript (no libraries except my own custom written helper functions) to see how far I could get. Output was simply writing to the browser.
The difference between a founder that started a company this way versus a founder that started a company out of significant personal experience is astounding. The way they talk about their company is utterly different and I imagine that has a great deal of influence on hiring as well.