Joined 16 years ago
I didn't get the job, and don't honestly remember anything about the technical side of the interview, but I do remember them being very kind and gracious. I happened to be studying abroad in London and they didn't bat an eye when they had to buy what I'm sure was a way more expensive ticket than usual for the on-site.
Thanks for posting this - very interesting to see where everyone ended up!
Intel seems to have rightly recognized that the driver advantage is a huge moat for those guys - they have to instead compete on price and focus on having good support for titles that will get them the the biggest chunk of the market.
That said, man, if they could have released these a year ago the wind would have been at their back way more than it is now with GPU prices trending back towards MSRP.
If not for that I'd have preferred someone local, you could tell you were just a number over there, and there were a bunch of communication issues around scheduling the appraisal that were annoying to sort out.
- This level of anxiety, especially if you experience it in other settings, doesn't sound normal and you might well benefit from some combination of medication and seeing a therapist. Many, many people experience this - it's nothing to be ashamed of and these things can help.
- As others have said, most everyone finds interviewing stressful! That's totally normal. It's also (especially for an introvert) a learned skill that will get better with practice. Don't sweat it too much if your dream company turned you down. Most places will let you re-interview after a certain amount of time, so don't consider it a forever dead end.
As someone else pointed out, Chicago has made some changes here - and they plan to eventually remove all service lines. That said - this is Chicago. The mayor had a goal to remove 650 lines this year and there was a story in the Chicago Tribune recently that so far that number is ... 3. For context there are ~400k lines to replace.
We went through the exercise a few years ago. It can be difficult to find a plumbing service willing to do this kind of work because not only do they need a special certification (makes sense) but the company has to put up something like a $5000 bond on their work with the city.
On top of that replacing the portion of the line that goes from the shutoff to the main requires digging up the street, so it can only be done if your street is not currently on a "moratorium" because it was recently repaved. Finally, the city charges a significant amount in permitting fees before you even get to paying for the plumbing service, roadwork repair and landscaping.
We finally gave up on that project and given the relatively low level leeching into our water just decided that we could live with using water filters specifically designed to remove lead for any water that our kids drink / cook with.
If Chicago was really serious about tackling this they could start with waiving permitting fees and bond requirements and streamline the process for managing the part of the process that occurs on city property. That'd at least make replacing these more tractable during a remodel.
That means that the true cost of a junior candidate vs a senior candidate isn't just their 1st year salary difference on paper, you have to count in the cost of training _and_ retaining the junior hire. That doesn't necessarily mean the math doesn't work - especially if the market for senior developers is much tighter than for junior developers.
Also the idea that you'd be mentoring for 16 hours a week one-on-one seems like it is either inflated or there was a problem. Maybe the candidate was a bad hire even for a junior role, or the mentor is micromanaging, or the work product expected was never appropriate for a junior developer - but something seems off there.
That said as the role gets more senior the value of the signal goes down IMO. Side projects are typically done solo, and are small-ish in scope. Whereas a key function of a good senior IC, at least in my opinion, is to be a force multiplier more than a heads-down coder.
Also have to imagine the long term vision is beyond just accelerating the web as it is now. This opens up possibilities for moving resource hungry applications to the cloud, expanding beyond just a browser to be more of an OS, white-label installs for brands to offer a cloud app, etc.
That this has been tried before (Silk, Stadia, etc) IMO is validation that this idea has legs and just needs the right timing and execution. No idea if Mighty will be what makes that go mainstream, we'll see!
That said, a quick googling shows that 2/3 of the American beer market is still dominated by non-craft domestics (AKA your cheap, watery lagers like Bud/Miller). Even amongst the craft segment it's definitely the case as another commenter pointed out that IPAs are overrepresented for whatever reason.
I think where we're still really lagging behind is quality of beers at your average bar. If you know where to go you can find great selection but the average bar probably still has just a handful of decent non-domestic-lager offerings, likely in cans/bottles. In comparison to when I lived in the UK and it seemed like any corner pub would have a couple great draft ales .. it's not the same.
When I'm involved in the hiring process I've always approached it from the angle that you want to leave a good impression with the candidate regardless of whether you hire them or not. Careers are long, word gets around, and you'll reject way more candidates than you hire.
The brokerage is forwarding your flow to one of it's partner broker-dealers who is providing the actual execution service. Those BD's would happily take this flow for free (as evidenced by the fact that they now _mostly_ pay for it). The executing BD, not the brokerage, is on the hook for trading fees _if_ they need to execute the order in the public market - which is rare as they mostly internalize that flow. The executing BD's business model is based on the assumption that the flow is not particularly toxic and that at scale, the profit margin per share exceeds any execution costs.
The larger point stands though: from the perspective of the executing BD the payment for order flow + price improvement are both costs, which they want to cap. If you dial up PFOF, you naturally get less price improvement.
Basically there are two ways broker-dealers that want to do business with Robinhood or similar firms can provide incentives:
1. Pay the flow provider (i.e., Robinhood) some amount per order/share
2. Provide price improvement over the prevailing market price to the end customer (which the provider can then use to market themselves as providing good execution).
Ultimately both of these are coming out of the broker-dealers bottom line, so the unit economics have to work - (1) and (2) have to leave a positive profit margin on average. Typically a firm like RH would be monitoring execution quality and negotiating price improvement requirements with the broker-dealer. This order finds that RH failed to do that, and likely as a result of their demand for high payment for the order flow, (2) was below their peers while they were stating otherwise in their marketing materials.
I guess the pay is phenomenal but I have a hard time imagining that this kind of algorithmic trivia approach makes any sense at all for hiring into senior roles. Especially if someone was trying to move laterally between FAANGs.
