ruswick

I see that you are only targeting the big companies. This is really smart, since those companies tend to pay better and their employees will have a bunch more cash to throw at their house, leading to a bigger commission.

What are your plans for adding new companies? Are you going to branch out into firms that might not pay as well? Stick with the "top 1%" companies but in different cities?

Real estate service that focuses on tech people seems lucrative. Good idea all around.

One reason is that this site only seems to have listings for the "top companies." These companies are very hard to get a job and and tend to pay well, so the home listings are probably skewed to suit buyers that work at the elite companies and have more money to blow than a normal person.

I bet that if and when this site begins targeting the other 99% of companies, the listings for those will trend lower to reflect the average salaries.

I've had a similar experience. A company I was trying to intern at asked me to write a rails app for them before they would think about giving me an interview. I wrote the app (which all-in took maybe 10 hours) and sent the recruiter a link to the heroku instance the app was running on and the repo on github.

I never got a response. I think three months later I might have gotten a one-liner saying they had gone in "a different direction" or some bullshit like that.

It's insulting and ludicrous for companies to treat prospective employees so disrespectfully.

Yep. Flexbox is maybe the best development to happen to CSS in a decade. Makes layouts that were once impossible without JS into trivial three-lines-of-css solutions.

That's a pretty common thing. I don't see the problem.

Maybe. I've always thought it would be interesting to make applicants pay an application fee. This would cut down on people "spraying and praying" with their application, and would lessen the workload for companies. It would also justify spending more time and effort in reading applications, since the company isn't just wasting resources reading bad applications.

Even under the current system, at least the waste is symmetric. I give up a few hours of my time, and the company gives up a few hours of its time. There's equity. The mutual work that the company and applicant do offset each other.

A take-home test model skews that balance in favor of the company. An applicant can spend 10 or more hours working the project. The company can run it through an automated testing suite and have a recruiter spend five minutes looking it over. The system is designed to waste more of the applicant's time and less of the company's.

It sounds like your process went ok. But one hour tests are one thing. Projects that may take 10 or more hours are totally different. It really is amazing what some of these companies will demand of their applicants before even granting an interview.

And although this system might be more accessible than traditional recruiting, it is far from perfect. It is the job of the community to demand better and more respectful hiring practices from companies. Paying the applicant for the time they spent working on the project or offering a traditional interview for people who work full time and have families would be a good start.

Oh God.

The point is that they pay you the $100k for the time you give them as an employee. They don't pay you a cent for the interview project, so you shouldn't give them a single second in return.

Exact same thing here. I've made it a personal policy not to tolerate these types of take-home tests. My time is way too valuable to spend hours on a project only to have it ignored by the company.

Also keep in mind that applying to jobs is frequently throwing your application into a black hole and just praying. Sending a resume into the black hole is one thing. Sending a large codebase or project you worked on as part of the application is entirely different.

I remember a few months ago, I was applying for an internship with a company and they requested that I write a web app to test coding proficiency before they thought about granting an interview. I spent about 12-15 hours writing the thing, deployed the app to Heroku and put the code on Github. I sent a link to the app and the repo to the recruiter. I never got a response of any kind.

Although some companies do try to make the application experience as pleasant as possible for the applicant, the majority of companies don't give a shit about the people who want to work for them, and make no attempt to respect the time of their applicants. Placing greater demands on the applicant is an easy way to shift more of the workload from the recruiter to the applicant. The applicant is the loser in this situation.

There's a lot of grade inflation, especially at the top level. I took 9 APs in high school, and they were, generally speaking, the easiest classes. Part of that is that, when you create a nationally-standardized curriculum, you have to water some of the content down. Part of that is a culture of not doing anything to jeopardize the student's admission prospects. The school's reputation is dependent on AP placement rate so they also had an incentive to keep kids in APs, and giving a B to a high-achieving student could provoke an angry response from the student or the parents.

Not to mention, there is no standardized grading system in the US. GPAs are nominally out of 4.0, but some schools pump those numbers by tacking .5 onto honors classes and 1.0 onto AP. At other schools its 1.0 and 2.0. Other schools don't have APs at all, or don't offer a bump for high-level courses. Who is the "better student?" The one who has a 4.43 at a school where there are no APs and honors is a .5 bump, or the student with a 5.28 at a school that offers 19 APs and gives a 2.0 bump? It's ludicrous.

The subjective measures colleges use actually started as a veil to enable racism in the 1920s. It gave them cover to deny anyone they wanted on the basis of intangible factors. This ended up hurting Jews the most. It has stuck around because it benefits the rich. Families with money to throw around can make their student look more desirable. Family connections can get you a prestigious internship with a senator. A few thousand dollars can get the student a spot on a "research trip" to Costa Rica. Another few thousand and you can get a book of your photography listed on Amazon. I go to what many would consider an "elite" school and all these examples come from people I know.

College admissions in the US is incredibly strange and arduous, and I'm dreading the day they my kids have to endure it. I would almost prefer they became plumbers or something...