Although I absolutely hate it, I interview every 1 or 2 years and use it as negotiation for refreshers. The only time I ever got a reasonable pay bump was by showing I had alternative offers. On the other hand, you have to also be willing to leave.
Python (or really any dynamic programming language) makes interviews a lot easier, however I have started asking more in-depth questions to make sure they actually understand Python and have done a little bit of research into the language and implementation.
I have noticed some colleges have been teaching more to the interview, so their grads can crush some problems in Python but fail when you ask them to implement a helper they were using. I am not talking about implementing a heap either, I am talking about merging objects.
I chose a startup over a better Big Company offer (although no where near the difference in pay), and deeply regret it. Understandably the grass is always greener on the other side, etc., however here are a few things to consider:
1. Really stupid things can happen, even with established startups. We lost our 401k and may possibly lose our healthcare (although that is looking more promising) when our HR/Ops manager went on extended leave and their replacement is still struggling with the basics. This isn't due to a lack of funds, but rather the new person being disorganized and ignoring emails from Zenefits. When I joined we were a well oiled machine, but we were dependent on one person, and things fell apart quite quickly after they took leave.
2. People are still people. No matter how much say you have, your startup will make a bad hire, most likely many. This happens at all companies, but startups particularly struggle with finding decent candidates at early to mid stages. The difference is, that with a startup having a bad employee can make work significantly worse without any proper recourse. Even if you hire great people, you may find that the startup you joined is culturally different 6 months to a year later. Things change fast, and for many things go from great to awful within the span of 3 months.
3. When it comes to bad hires and politics, the most common complaint at large companies is that the only people who get promoted are those that are friends with the manager, etc. That is an issue no doubt, but at startups everyone is expected to be friends, and the role between boss and friend is even more blurred. We have a legitimately bad employee (caught her twice rebasing her PRs after reviews, so changes could not be tracked between commits, in which she responded to review comments by adding carriage returns so github showed that the code changed and therefore hid the comments), but there is no proper path to reporting this, and bringing up these issues are extremely taboo on my team, especially because she is now close friends with our boss (they meetup during vacations). Sure, this happens at large companies, but I cannot move teams or even refer to a standard to we can stop this from happening. Honestly, it hurts the most because the whole point of a startup is that you care about the product and team, so when this happens it just becomes a low paid job since you lose the culture of trust.
There is a lot of good that comes with startups, but I will be honest, unless you are starting your own, or are young and are looking to be best friends/party with your coworkers and make your job a lifestyle, it usually is not worth it.
edit I wanted to add one more point: The startup I was at previously gave me 1% of shares. Things were not working out well, and our CEO sold for an acquisition hire in which he made ~$1.5 million, and I would have made ~$36k after vesting for 3 more years. Literally, with the acquisition hire signing bonus and new salary, I would have made less than I do now from just switching jobs than if I stayed.
Backdoor references are very unethical in my opinion. Beyond the fact that you are telling a third party about someone’s job search without the searcher’s consent, you can also get a very biased opinion.
My wife was fired from a job at a well known University in the area. She had 2 bosses in a year, one of them twice after coming back from prolonged mental health leave. Within a month of coming back my wife’s boss had a long term relationship end which lead to my wife being blamed for everything and anything, and was then subsequently fired.
On the other hand, my wife has excelled at her current job. She has been promoted 4 times at this point to a director level position and is extremely well respected. If they were to call her previous boss (who has had multiple people promoted over her in the past 2.5 years), the review would be awful and not reflective of my wife’s work.
You know what would have caught this without any effort what-so-ever? Calling the company and verifying dates of employment. It is part of every job application, and is expected.
Backdoor references are very unethical in my opinion. Beyond the fact that you are telling a third party about someone’s job search without the searcher’s consent, you can also get a very biased opinion.
But frontdoor references are guaranteed to be biased no one (well, almost no one) is going to use someone that didn't like them as a reference, they are going to dig up someone that will say something good about them.
We had one DBA hire that was not very good, she lasted 3 months before we had to let her go because she just couldn't do her job. One of her references didn't have much good or bad to say, but her most recent manager (where she worked for 5 years), gave a very glowing reference, outlining all of the projects that she had helped with.
It wasn't until we had let her go that we found that that while the person that gave her a glowing reference actually was her manager, she was also her roomate... and her girlfriend.
However isn’t the point that references are people who have worked with you and (hopefully) managed you. By calling a backdoor reference, you may not be calling a strong relationship and getting hearsay. For all the recruiter knows, they could be calling a coworker that asked the candidate out on a date and was rejected.
The whole point of references is that given the opportunity to put your best foot forward, can you find people to vouch for you. It may fall short, but so will calling a tenuous relationship.
I did quite well at my previous job (my boss has been a reference twice, in addition to my employee who took over my position when I left), but had a another specific manager been asked, I would have received an awful review, unrelated to my job, but because he hated my boss and therefore hated me and my team. We rarely worked together, and he has little idea of my accomplishments, but it wouldn’t be crazy to ask a director at my previous company for that backdoor reference.
Basically my issue is that I don’t believe that backdoor references are in any way more effective than regular references, but are tremendously unethical, and could lead to false negatives.
> no one (well, almost no one) is going to use someone that didn't like them as a reference, they are going to dig up someone that will say something good about them.
If this is not the point of references, what is?
Also: for some levels of US Government Clearances the agents ask you "Who else do you recommend we talk to about This Person?". It might be interesting to see if it's commercially cost saving for some level of businesses to do this as well.
Employment verification is common for things like loans, so in most organizations it does not stand out. It's also common for this to be farmed out to 3rd party companies at large companies to avoid the risk of lawsuits.
As someone just learning programming, I found the first few chapters to be super helpful, and ridiculously easy to understand. Honestly, if you want a pretty funny, and really simple book on algorithms, I could not recommend this enough.
Here is a free article on Dijkstra's Algorithm, written by the author, for those who want to get a taste of what the book is like.:
Actually I think that has to deal with the lack of "nationality" experienced among Jews. For generations Jews have experienced being treated as second class citizens (if they were considered citizens at all). Because of this being ingrained in our culture (being the underdogs) along with the realization that we can relate to others who feel the same way.
Another big point is the importance of education among Jews as compared to other second class citizens who may be of the same race/ethnicity as those in leadership but are poor. Even today in America, poor Caucasians and African-Americans concentrate a lot less on education than the wealthy or certain ethnicities (this of course is more complicated than just being educated). If you look at all of the revolutionaries, regardless of race, they are typically highly educated.
Between feeling like they do not belong within the current incarnation of the country while also being educated enough to point out issues and know about successful revolutions in the past, Jews were able to lead these movements.
It is that or the probability that a lack of bacon makes us all a bit more uppity.
I wanted to start off by saying that I do not support the actions of the Israeli Government, however this response is beyond unacceptable. I have only been on Reddit for a year, but I feel that World News and even Pics, is becoming a haven for hate speech, only worsened by obvious support from the Reddit community. Does this sicken anyone else?
From the little I have seen, the show is very American centric, and at many points is arguably xenophobic (isolationist to say the least). It is very strange that this would be shown in Brittan (much less popular).
For better or worse, Fox (ergo, Fox News) is shown just about everywhere, dude. Fox News is shown in Australia as one of the channels included with Foxtel pay TV. I had to go to Papua New Guinea for work last month, turned on the TV at the hotel in Port Moresby and there it was too.
For the English speaking countries at least, I have always assumed that there was a core audience agreeable to the views portrayed by Fox News, hence why it is shown. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
I've always assumed that Fox (News Corp) made it's editorial decisions based on the interests of it's owners. As far as I can tell, it's profitability comes second to it's function of being able to drive the news cycle and move public opinion.
I'm not aware of the profitability of Fox News specifically or any of the Fox related ventures, I not surprisingly have no interest in such things. No doubt what you're saying is not outside the realms of possibility though.
But I guess I figure a safe assumption to make in most situations involving musings on the motives of publicly owned corporations is that money and relatively shortsighted plans to acquire more of it tend to trump most else. e.g. Foxtel in Australia shows John Stuart and Stephen Colbert most weeknights. Not I suspect, because the execs at Fox agree with their POV but because there is an audience for that POV and the execs can spend their money in more places than they can spend their moral conviction in their position on the political spectrum.
I know that many Fox News Anchors use Macs on their respective shows (Fox News is on the TVs at work, do not judge me!), I wonder if Fox will react to this by pulling those computers.
