hiring

Who Is in Your Kitchen?

Analogies are useful to describe complex systems. Software engineering is opaque to most non-technical entrepreneurs. Let’s try cooking as a software development analogy.

Much like creating software, cooking involves ingredients, planning, tools, techniques and a certain amount of intuition. And like cooking, it is driven by people with various degree of talent and experience. As an entrepreneur, you can't settle for serving food that's merely suitable for human consumption. You're seeking to delight your customers. How do you achieve that?
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My Disastrous Interview at BitTorrent

“Let’s go thru it one more time,” he said. I’m sitting across the table from Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol. In front of him lays a printout with a dozen lines of Python code.

“Well, I’m not sure what this code does anymore,” I replied. I was nervous. I did not expect to be asked to reverse engineer an algorithm on the spot like that. Specially not as a first interview question for an engineering management position and in a language I knew nothing about. In fact, I did not know what to expect at all when I stepped foot in that San Francisco office.
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One Question to Rule Them All

It’s 10:43 am and the candidate is standing by the white board, giving me a blank stare. With fifteen minutes left in the interview, I still can’t decide whether the guy is faking it or simply nervous.

I walk over, grab the marker and draw a rectangle, setting up the stage for my perennial technical question that should settle this for good.
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