Kind of surprised this one didn't get on HN:

ptpacek on interviewing

I believe it was. Which is why I believed the link you posted was gray for me.

daveT, anything new with the job search?

I figured it was submitted. Just wondered why it didn't front-page.

Job search: I'm pretty much getting out of it what I'm putting into it at this moment. Just burned out from it.

Also, he posted this twitter conversation he had with an ex-google/microsoft/apple engineer who wrote Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions

http://www.conweets.com/tqbf/gayle/

I'm surprised he doesn't see the ridiculousness of his position that the hiring processes that Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/etc use do not work at all. Prestigious companies that have deep pockets and need lots and lots of top engineers can and should hire based on straight-forward criteria that are easily communicated and scale well. What he's probably finding is that the same process does not work as well for his company because they are not willing to pay as much and/or don't have the name recognition, which means excellent people who are excellent in a way that's easy to identify have no reason to work there over some other company that pays more.

This is the moneyball phenomenon - it's not that excellent baseball players are more likely to look unathletic or have bad scouting reports than others. It's more that excellent baseball players who also look the part will be in more demand, so you can save money by hiring players who are good at baseball, but for some reason don't look the part and have an unusual set of abilities that combine to be useful, as opposed to traditional skills scouts look for. But the key is that this is all relative - whatever you're doing only works when others are not doing the same thing. Thus, it makes no sense to talk about how your way is the "right" way or how others do it is "wrong" - it's about finding an ecosystem niche and adapting or moving on when the strategy gets crowded or is invaded by large critters with bigger pockets.

It did. I think it may have been over the weekend but it wad front page forthe better part of a day

Re: Clowntable + daveT

I lost a long-ish reply I had typed out, but lost it, so will say this:

I vehemently agree with everything clowntable is saying. daveT, judging companies such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce based on the interactions of sales people that are willing to speak to tire kickers (such as yourself and your team members) when the decision makers drop off the call in the first 10 minutes is shameful.

The people selling into accounts for clowntable's company are likely so far and away better and more business savy, it is laughable. You have described your work environment many times, and trust me the people trying to sell to you are not calling into "strategic major accounts" they are probably fresh out of training.

Every single domain is complex and special - the question isn't which domain, but exactly which specific business functions you are automating. Every single company in the world does generic stuff as well as domain-specific stuff of varying complexity. But you know this already...

A lot of domains have this kind of stuff. In finance, you may have portfolio risk analytics, cashflow engines for various financial products, or interest rate models. In medicine, you have software that controls various medical devices and interprets data. Every software company has to decide what their core strength is and why they exist - domain expertise is one of the more practical ways they can distinguish themselves. Ultimately we can only get outsized economic rewards if no one else can do what we can.

Btw, you're probably right in your conversation with daveT that the kinds of software he's talking about may not require much domain expertise and as Larry Legend was alluding, the real problem was that no one was willing to write software they need at the price they can afford. I just didn't agree with the stronger claims you were making.

Ouch.

I don't mean it to be insulting, just incredibly direct.

If you are not capable of signing a deal or are not involved in the decision making process, and are an "oh wow that looks neato" person, you should never be getting the attention of a competent salesperson. Likewise, if you are a "I only want to hire a company that has done this exact use case, for a company exactly like ours, only working with people in the same city as me, and you have to be price competitive" you also are a waste of a competent salesperson's time.

Both of those types of people exist in significantly higher numbers than actual knowledgable decision makers. This is a huge reason why sales is so hard for everyone, the people who are willing to talk to you are rarely ever the people you need to be talking to.

Sales people that fall into those traps are often the same sales people who don't understand that the #1 most important part of sales is honesty. Being honest, transparent, and clear are by far the most important parts of selling custom open-source software.

Saying that you can't trust products/software because C level people might not include a tiny feature that a worker bee needs is absolutely silly. These types of challenges get solved all the time, and while I agree it might not sound great to hear, "we built a custom ERP for a global logistics company with drivers in 20 languages, self-automated distribution centers, and oh yea artificial intelligence.." what the company is really saying is, "if you are willing to work with us and communicate with our team of trusted hard working intelligent people, we can build a solution together."

daveT is a really smart dude who is going to accomplish a lot, and I'm not going to let his jaded view of how business software works because of a bad experience at one crappy company ruin good software for him. It may sound like I am being a dick, but really I am just trying to keep it real, there are greener pastures out there with software that delights users. It isn't everywhere, or even mostwhere, but it is out there.

I'm surprised this has to be spelled out but I guess in dave's defense, most of us are on both sides of the fence because we are vendors, whereas he's exclusively on one side.

I bought close to a top of the line poker computer in like 2008 - has Windows Vista pro or something on it. It's getting very slow and chuggy. I'm wondering if wiping it clean and upgrading to windows 8 or 10 or something would help.

I will say this though, in the industry we sell to and for the type of software we sell, some of this is inverted because in many companies, lots of line employees are highly-paid revenue generators with a lot of organizational clout, but don't want to be involved in the sales process, whereas managers and department heads love talking to us and can sign on the dotted line, but are ultimately support staff without the power to impose anything that the employees don't want to do. So we often have to engage the line employees early in the process because they have the power to derail the sales even after the contract is signed - acceptance is a bitch.

But this is all very situational - great salespeople are really amazing at understanding and navigating organizational dynamics and getting to the finish line, in a lot of different situations.

I was in that exact same situation suzzer, dual booted with windows 8 and that partition runs very smooth.

edit: I should say "ran" because I don't use it pretty much ever and haven't turned it on in a while, but it was much faster.

Windows 8/10 would be faster but it's probably time for a new machine.

Suzzer, if I doesn't already have an SSD, throw one in there. I have an old desktop built in 2007 (Intel core 2 duo). Once I threw in an SSD, it was almost as fast as my MacBook Pro.

Using anything other than a SSD should be considered a crime

How fast the sata on a 2k8 computer gonna be tho?

What do you do on your computer? I built a mid range one 4 years ago and its still fast as balls for me. Not replacing it for another 4 at least.

Very likely sata2 (~300MB), which is much faster than any mechanical drive can shift data. Considerable benefit is in lower latency too.

Good call. SATA2 released in 2k4, while 3 was late 2k8

candybar,

Financial software? Traders?

Shameful to whom?

The decision-makers then ask us if we think the product, as presented, will have a positive impact on the company. I'm not one that likes long, protracted meetings, and I'll quickly interject that we need to wrap up. It is always the salesperson who wants to go on and show more and more features. If they want to hear "ooohs and aaahs" to stroke their egos, then that's their issue and not mine. The sad part is they often end up digging deeper holes for themselves.

Sure, you are right. You aren't going to land a 50m account from a 10m/year company. If SAP, et.al., are sending out their salespeople to use us as practice, that says a lot more about these companies than anywhere I've ever worked.

And if there is one defense I can say about where I work, it is this: I've never once been paid late and never cashed a bounced check, which is something I can't say about a single prior employer (some who's earning are in the billions). They also won't bitch and moan about not getting net terms.

I explained it above. As for me, I don't bother explaining to people the reason for my existence. If you feel I'm a tire-kicker, that is your impression and not one I care to defend against.

I also never placed a limit on locale or even specific use-case. I do place a limit on finances because hey, you can't buy a Bugatti on a Honda budget.

So, to restate what I said: the top of the business doesn't know about the issues the treadmill runners below them face and they shouldn't. This probably goes into speaking with the right people in the company. I also never worked at a large office farm, so I wouldn't know the full dynamics of how this works, but in flat companies, I see the owners often don't know what their employees do exactly. They simply don't have time to deal with minutia. I'm extrapolating to C-Levels here, so if I'm horribly misguided, then that is fine.

Mind that I'm talking about situations where a decision on bad software is absolutely devastating to the company. This not only costs the company, but destroys employee morale from top to bottom. Maybe after some N-size, these thing don't matter, but I guarantee a company of under 100 is going to be eaten alive, and if they ever do expand, the magnitude of the initial mistake will only increase.

If it was only one, I'd be much less jaded.

I do appreciate your blunt honesty here and thank everyone for their input. Always food for thought for me.

I do not approve of this '2k8' notation unless you're making a mediocre video game.

Photoshop. Lots of big/many file moving. Some video editing. That windows Vista green progress bar of death when it's trying to preview a bunch of images is so incredibly annoying.

Note Grue that Suzzer's PC is very near your 4 + 4 year window for replacement, depending on when it was bought in "2k8" I mean I'd almost certainly replace the whole thing - I did myself recently (forced though, the "2k7" machine lost it's LAN ports after a weekend without power). But a new decent PC build is glorious for a little while at least, after so many years. FWIW I went from an A64 3000+ / 4GB to an FX8350 / 8GB, both fairly cheap machines. Samsung SSD was already in place and moved across.

I upgraded a ~7 year old machine about a month ago. Parted out a bunch of stuff from Newegg and Amazon, it made a world of a difference. My old computer had 2 gigs of ram for comparison.

New build is based around an i5-4460. It was mind blowing really.