neerkumar

Ironically, when interviewers talk about how they interview, they pretty much all seem to believe they are very good in evaluating candidates. But when candidates talk about job interviews, they all seem to agree interviews are done badly.

A rule I have is that everyone is good in something and bad in something else. So, if by the end of the interview I haven't found a topic where the candidate excels and a topic where sucks, the interview hasn't been effective.

They also changed their answer ranking algorithm. It started giving much higher weight to answers from users who answered many other questions on the site.

I guess the goal was to incentivize users to answer more questions.

But Quora was nice because you would find for almost each question an answer from a real expert in that specific question. And that's pretty unique by definition.

Result was that the best answers were often not the top 1 despite having way more upvotes -> bad user experience. True experts almost stopped answering because what was the point if it was going to be hard for users to find their answer, and certainly they wouldn't bother to start answering a bunch of questions on the site just to increase their ranking.

Low level/high volume content took over Quora.

I agree, this is actually a really really good business idea. I heard so many times top devs wish something like this would exist.

Can you give an idea of what an ex-FAANG dev can expect after signing up? Like what's the frequency of projects? (not sure when you started this, if you just started it I understand you might not have a clear answer yet)

"We have the best product in the world and we are revolutionizing the life of our users. What's next? What more can we achieve in the next 5 yrs given how great our product is already?"

On a more serious note, I wonder why they keep doing these Q&As given that everyone thinks they are useless BS.

Sad news. WhatApp really feels to me as the future of social networks and its massive numbers tend to prove it.

1:1 chat and phone calls to communicate to your friends, groups to keep in touch with people you are less close to, and status in the extremely rare case that you want to briefly show something to all of your contacts (but without all the problems of FB: your contacts are all people you actually know fairly well, no like and similar bullshits that create so many problems, no pictures stored forever, etc.).

At the same time, I already saw many people switching to telegram. It seems impossible for whatsapp to decline given its current numbers, but who knows really.

I would suggest anyone interested in learning more about this to watch the BBC documentary The Big Bank Fix. It shows how these traders didn't do anything wrong.

The documentary shows how there were some really high level bank executives involved in libor frauds and that was getting media attention. Therefore, SFO met with banks and eventually, based on documents provided by the banks, decided to prosecute simple traders.

The reason traders have been sent to trial has nothing to do with the actual libor fraud carried out by executives. But since it is still about libor, has been sold to the media as the libor trial. Start and end date of the "crime" have been carefully chosen to not include evidence of the executive crimes (such as the phone call shown in the documentary). SFO experts have admitted during trial to lie in order to convict these traders.

Many of these traders were in their early 20s when the alleged crime happened. Germany, France, and EU have already said that it was not a crime at the time and rejected extradition.

I rarely felt as sad as after watching that documentary.

I hope my comment didn't come across as I am portraying them as a victim. I saw first hand hiring based on quotas and I hated it (and I am an immigrant with dark skin).

I was just stating a fact about Google, that they were among the last to implement quotas in Silicon Valley, and why I think they started doing it.

Anyone who has worked for a large tech company in SF in the last 3/4 years knows that this has happened everywhere.

In fairness, Google was one of the very last ones among large tech companies to play the quota game. But the problem is that that's a game that once the first company starts playing it, everyone else is forced to play it too.

Company X publishes a report with amazing diversity numbers and brands itself as a great company for certain minorities and diversity in general, along with some unbelievable BS about how they achieved that. At that point, you have to introduce quotas too to get similar numbers or your brand and recruiting will be strongly affected.

The promotion process at google self-selects for a very important skill: you are given a certain goal and you find the optimal way to achieve it, regardless of whether you agree with it or not.

This is a crucial skill for middle managers. Their role is often making sure their team executes on executive vision without questioning the vision (imagine how messy things would become if each middle manager would start questioning executive strategy and push back on projects).

At the end, Google process worked as they designed it for. People like you, who don't like to just do what they are told to do, choose to move on. And people who accept it get promoted and go on to become effective middle managers from a Google executive standpoint.

Yeah, that sounds so bad. It sounds like: try to screw them over, but be aware that some employees will realize that and, just for them, you will have to adjust compensation.

Maybe that's a way to give Detroit hosts an incentive to stay on Airbnb. After all, the more money they make the more likely they are to still use Airbnb despite the new city rules. So pushing more demand towards Detroit will reduce the number of hosts who decide to leave the platform (and possibly attract new hosts).

I think it can make sense from a business standpoint. It is unfortunate it hurts other hosts who have nothing to do with it. But I would guess this is just temporary.

I have never worked as a quant, but I have got a couple of job offers a few years ago when interviewing at the end of grad school.

Things might have changed in the last 5 years or so, no idea. But back then, in my experience, you didn't need any financial background or knowledge. The core of the interview was puzzles (way harder than what tech companies used to ask) and algorithms in whichever language you wanted (a bit easier than tech). Theoretical knowledge of statistics was also required to pass the interview.

To be honest, I hope by now they changed the interview format. I doubt that structure would actually help them identify the best candidates.

If you ask them to cover insurance for 6 months, they will probably do it given the circumstances. Health insurance is usually the most negotiable thing.

Beside that, just accept that you no longer work there and look at them just like you would look at any other company. Can you offer them something that would help them?

A good thing to offer is that, once they rebuild the team/hire new people, you can help them get up to speed. It is not confrontational, it focuses on something positive for the company too making them think about better days, and you are not committing to anything in the short term (and you probably won't have to do anything in the long term either).