tophercyll

You can make user level systemd instances run at startup and stick around regardless of login/logout.

  loginctl enable-linger <username>

This enables some nice deployment strategies that don't require root.

Not a brag--just wanted emphasize how straightforward and fun something like this can be.

It would probably be worth it to temporarily define one of the reserved opcodes as putchar.

Sure.

I aim to have our interview cycle take under a week, although in honesty, I think it takes about 10 days. I often take on a little more work myself (especially in the phone screen) if I believe it helps speed up the process and saves others time. Speed is important. Keeping momentum during hiring really makes the experience better for everyone.

For background, I work for a startup lab in Boston (we build prototypes that we spin out into companies). We're about 35 employees.

Oh, and let me start by saying that while all the pre-interview work you've listed above does take some time, the real time cost to hiring is from the interview process itself since it involves multiple people.

1.) Resume review: 3 minutes. It took longer when I first got started. I used to agonize over "call/dont-call." But you'll usually have a gut reaction to the resume, and you'll eventually learn to trust that (for better or worse ;-)

2.) Code samples/Exercises: I don't bother with them, although another manager I work with uses them to good effect. Unfortunately, they can add between several days to a week to the process, so I do a more involved phone screen instead to keep things moving.

3.) Phone screen: I spend up to 90 minutes in the phone screen. This seems to be fairly unusual. 90 minutes is a lot of time to invest, but the key is, I only spend that long with the candidates I think I'd like to bring in. The call is setup so that I can cut it short at any point. Even still, I spend a lot of time here. I get to know the candidate, feel out their passions, and actually have them write code, live in an EtherPad derivative while talking to them.

4.) Almost 6 person-hours. Our amazing director of talent greets the candidate, and spends 15 minutes giving them the lay of the land, paperwork, etc. Then two different two-person teams interview the candidate for an hour each getting to know the candidate, sharing what life here is like, and working on one large technical problem. Then our CTO and I spend 45 minutes with the candidate answer questions, talking about the direction and strategy of the company, and gauging their interest in what we do here. Interestingly, the interview process we've been using on the UX side of things spends more time working on a single practical exercise (using computers, not whiteboards) and finishes with a broader meet-and-greet. Since I'm constantly experimenting with this process, I'm planning on trying a variant of this on the software engineer interviews as well.

But I aim to have the whole process from resume review to offer letter done in a week.

Could be the result of an earn out.

Basically: deal is X, but if condition Y holds true for the next year, we'll given you an additional Z.

Let me start by asking $15k/month in revenue or profit? Do you have capacity to hire?

Courting investors is a full time job, but so is hiring if done right. You probably can't do both with just two of you. If the goal of raising money is to hire more people, and you've already got enough cash to hire even one, do that first.

Just make sure you hire into a position you believe can increase your profit. Spend time thinking about it.

Companies your size grind to a halt while raising capital and it can take months. Once you've expanded a little, multitasking becomes easier. If you're lucky (and this is what you're trying for), you may find that your new hire increases your profit enough while you were looking for investors that you can afford to hire again.

If the new hire doesn't increase profit, you can still take investment (especially if you've been doing the leg work after maxing out your headcount), but you're going to have to figure out how to hire effectively eventually, you'll just have more money in the bank.

We often (jokingly) measure time in kiloseconds around my office. As rue points out, that's just a bit over fifteen minutes, so its actually a useful unit.

"See you in the conference room in 2 ksecs..."

Put a bunch of geeks together too long and this is what happens.

Perhaps you're thinking of a different phone? I believe the Optimus T/S/V line all have capacitive screens.

I have an LG Optimus T on T-Mobile. I got it a while back for $200 with no contract.

My $60 plan through T-Mobile is more expensive then the Virgin one mentioned in the article, but because T-Mobile reduces your bill if you don't take the phone subsidy, it is a lot cheaper than the other options I looked at when buying.

I can't stress enough how great a phone is for the price. The CPU is only 600MHz, but with Android 2.2 it doesn't feel sluggish to me (perhaps because I don't know how fast a phone like the Nexus S feels).

The best part of having no contract is in a year I can just buy a new low end phone with dramatically better specs and hand this one down.

The biggest loss here is the Mac specific GUI bits. Not only does Apple Java use native drawing primitives for ui (instead of requiring X11 like some ports), it also doesn't look completely horrible.

Unlikely as it is, I wish Apple would upstream that code to Oracle.

I guess there's potentially still SWT on top of a ported, open source Java7 from Unix/Linux if you need to do non-X11 UI on Mac.

Well, some Googling suggests that might work anyway...

Remember, it's basically only Linux distros that have the capability to upgrade a third-party library like that (ironically, distro maintainers actually have the source code required to recompile everything if they wanted!).

Mac and Windows applications ship bundled versions of third party libraries all the time. Managing a complex web of name+version based dependencies is much harder in a decentralized software ecosystem, so bundling starts to look attractive.

For our purposes, the benefit of a system where software is more reliable, predictable, and accountable is greater than the cost of asking developers to recompile in unusual circumstances.

Every process has "my-actor" defined in its global environment. It provides methods related to basic actor functionality. In this case I'm calling the "announce" method to say something to all of the process' subscribers.

user-interface and discovery-system are two hypothetical processes whose pids (process identifiers) are passed in to this process as arguments. user-interface would be responsible for creating a window with a text display area and a text entry box. discovery-system would use our remote service discovery model to find others chatting in the same "room."

We don't build any in, but the same strategies (ie, requiring a license key, etc) that work for regular applications like Microsoft Word also work for fluid applications. The bits can be copied easily, but the same is true for traditional software.

Crazy strategies, like CDs that physically can't be copied and must be in the drive or kernel extensions obviously won't work, but that's probably a good thing. =)