This is something that is frustrating to me. Startups will go to MIT and Standford begging for interns and grads but people who are qualified and show enough initiative to do the challenges/job postings don't even get an email back. Just because my school is small and not well known outside of the Midwest doesn't make it inferior.
/rant I suppose I just have to start my own thing if I want to work around smart and cool people.
Additionally, outliers aside, talent density outside of the top five or ten schools is pretty dismal. It's kind of a rough deal for the handful of talented people at smaller schools, but you can't expect a company with limited resources to bother going after them.
I accidentally upvoted you. Sorry, but I absolutely disagree. Talent "density" outside of a few media friendly schools is actually very good. Better still, that talent is cheaper.
You can get excellent developers for $50K/year coming out of a "second tier" school which certainly beats having to hire a $200K/year princess out of stanford.
Fact mit, harvard and stanford aren't holy ground for the only places to find smart people. In fact I think the brand name works against them a little. My experience (MIT only) has been that the stars tend to be better but the average tends to be about the same as anywhere else. You get students forgetting data structures, using the wrong algorithms and other such tragedies. I'd bet money that Harvard and Stanford have the same issues.
Bullshit. When I came to SF to be an intern, I purchased my own tickets (my parents helped) and I found a room on Craigslist for three months. (Again, my parents helped with the rent.) I wish I had known about AirBnB.
My point is, if your intern can figure out web programming, the difference between Ruby procs and lambdas, or what fine whiskey tastes like, they can book a flight.
Go build your own thing, showcase your work and they would come after you.
Working for github or any successful startup would be great but not the only thing in town.
It probably is not the case with github but most startups teach you what not to do more than what to do.
It's pretty well known that Github like to hire people that have impressed them with projects that they have worked on, so I'd say it's pretty safe to say that for the most part they probably approach people to join the team that they feel will be a good fit. This would also help them, considering that they have such free work environment with no policing days off and work schedules etc, to make sure that they find people who fit into their company well.
I got to listen to Tom, one of the cofounders of GitHub, do a presentation tonight in Boulder for the local Linux users group. He did a great job. One of the nice things about it is that it wasn't a high level pitch about the business model or about what GitHub was. Instead, it was basically an introduction to the core architecture of git. How it works. How it's different than say CVS, or just keeping manual backup copies of files around. He actually went into Terminal, wrote code, and essentially hand-crafted git storage files in a Ruby interpreter, in order to illustrate how git works internally, and how simple it is. It was great on two levels. One one level, it was very substantive for a crowd of Linux geeks, we eat that stuff up. And on another level the fact that he clearly understood this stuff and enjoyed it and gets his fingers dirty actually building things. If I wasn't already firmly in the no-Ruby-for-me camp (prefer Python, and don't want to waste time switching time investments over to an approximately similar language), I'd probably love to work with them. Small companies rock. People that know their shit, and are passionate about it, rock.
Well, it crashes Safari on my iPod Touch 2G. I was curious so I looked at the code.
IMHO there are only two possibilities:
(a) It's the css-font-definition-stuff they're doing
(b) google analytics script is causing the problem
Actually, I do think it's google.
Too bad, people should check their websites on mobile devices, too, before release. I believe I am not the only one who enjoys his/her daily dose of hacker news from a mobile device reclining on a couch. :-)
Note for web developers: Browsers on Windows suck at rendering most custom fonts. If you feel that you definitely want to embed your font, at least please check it on Windows first, play with font sizes and positioning and make sure they don't look silly.
Why should everyone have to purchase another OS, at a high price, just to work around another OS's problems? Shouldn't you be contacting your OS provider about this instead?
When that "other OS" is highly ubiquitous (~90% or higher market share), it is reasonable to expect developers to purchase the OS before developing for an audience that uses it.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 97.8 ms ] thread/rant I suppose I just have to start my own thing if I want to work around smart and cool people.
You can get excellent developers for $50K/year coming out of a "second tier" school which certainly beats having to hire a $200K/year princess out of stanford.
Fact mit, harvard and stanford aren't holy ground for the only places to find smart people. In fact I think the brand name works against them a little. My experience (MIT only) has been that the stars tend to be better but the average tends to be about the same as anywhere else. You get students forgetting data structures, using the wrong algorithms and other such tragedies. I'd bet money that Harvard and Stanford have the same issues.
My point is, if your intern can figure out web programming, the difference between Ruby procs and lambdas, or what fine whiskey tastes like, they can book a flight.
Even still, I'd rather they say that, than that they aren't taking interns. Perhaps it was just a question of my timing though.
Link: http://twitter.com/#!/holman/status/32892327869554689
Proof: http://twitter.com/pjhyett/status/27159671752101888
See:
- https://github.com/blog/
- https://github.com/blog/792-aman-gupta-tmm1-is-a-githubber
- https://github.com/blog/790-simon-sr-rozet-is-a-githubber
- https://github.com/blog/788-mislav-marohni%C4%87-is-a-github...
- https://github.com/blog/786-tim-clem-is-a-githubber
- https://github.com/blog/779-corey-johnson-is-a-githubber
where you were suppose to add your handle to GITHUB_HANDLES list, but alas didn't work.
IMHO there are only two possibilities:
(a) It's the css-font-definition-stuff they're doing (b) google analytics script is causing the problem
Actually, I do think it's google.
Too bad, people should check their websites on mobile devices, too, before release. I believe I am not the only one who enjoys his/her daily dose of hacker news from a mobile device reclining on a couch. :-)
I'm scared now... Maybe I'm getting fired or something.