stchangg

Yipes, I don't want to discourage anyone from applying. I think I was a special case of desperate/underqualified. That's why the process took me so long - I had to catch up big-time, and was extra paranoid about giving this my best shot (crossing my t's and dotting my i's). That meant spacing out my interviews so I had more time to prepare and improve between them.

Also, just wanted to note that the interview process has been greatly improved since we were able to allocate a person full-time to handling recruiting, scheduling interviews, etc. I don't know stats on our current turnaround time from application submission to offer, but I'm pretty sure it's much better (maybe a couple weeks to a month).

Thanks! That means a lot to me.

> Did you have to prepare for that?

Yes, I found it valuable/important to study basic data structures and algorithms before my interviews. Specifically, I read Wikipedia articles and worked through problems in Programming Interviews Exposed, although there are probably many better resources available these days.

Algorithmic questions, while often not very representative of the work that you'll do as a dev, are really common interview questions at many companies. I think this is in part because they're usually well encapsulated and don't require extra context/specialized knowledge. They're also usually not very programming language-dependent.

I'm another dev at KA.

Just wanted to chime in that we're also hiring general (not just mobile) devs, data scientist-engineers, general product designers, and interns in all of the above categories!

I'm a female developer w/ a EE degree, but mostly self-taught wrt coding.

My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring things even earlier. I think becoming a great {coder, thinker, leader, etc.} requires internalizing that at some level, it's okay to break the rules.

I eventually found my way onto IRC around age 12, where everyone posed as a 17-yr-old female from LA. I was thankfully super paranoid and fended off child molesters by pretending I was a 56-yr-old man from Texas. ;)

Congrats, Jamie and team! As a Khan Academy developer I can attest that this was a substantial technical undertaking.

"While it's possible that within, say, 10 years, internet access will have reached near global ubiquity, that shouldn't stop us from actively finding ways to work around its current limitations, to reach populations in need; waiting 10 years means letting already disadvantaged communities fall another generation behind, perpetuating the global digital divide as we move into whatever its next instantiation may be."

++. Kudos for highlighting (and tackling) the compounding nature of inequality.

FWIW, a friend of mine graduated in this cohort.

She has a physics degree from Duke, and back when we were freshmen together, was considering majoring in CS, among other technical majors. I'm not sure how representative she is of the batch, but for people with existing technical skills/background, 10 weeks of focused coding practice + feedback could be a pretty big help.