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  What I learned from Google - You Get Fifteen Years

four years ago I was in Mountain View, California, interviewing for a position with Google.It was an odd sort of interview.  Lots of puzzles, math-like challenges, and code.  Lots, and lots, and lots of code.What struck me at Google wasn’t the challenges.  Nor was it the office environment, the cafeteria, or the mini-swimming pool, all of which were impressive.No, what struck me were the people.All of the people I met — and I mean all of them — had this sort of early-twenties look to them.  Like the characters in Microserfs, these were “firsteesâ...

2,680 1       PROGRAMMER TECHNOLOGY CAREER TRANSFORM LIFETIME


  Why Memorizing is Ineffective

The information-age has burst into life, creating a wake of social change. Young people are growing up faster and more sophisticated, as raw information, tailored-entertainment, and branded-marketing are streamed into their rooms. But this technological exposure has not necessarily made them savvier or more capable of handling tomorrow’s challenges.The debates in public education over “school-choice” and standardized testing have missed the far more important issue. The real choice Americans face is whether students continue to learn only through memorization or whether they...

3,972 0       MEMORY MEMORIZATION INEFFECTIVE CAREER


  The Wrong Inequality

We live in a polarizing society, so perhaps it’s inevitable that our experience of inequality should be polarized, too.In the first place, there is what you might call Blue Inequality. This is the kind experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia. In these places, you see the top 1 percent of earners zooming upward, amassing more income and wealth. The economists Jon Bakija, Adam Cole and Bradley Heim have done the most authoritative research on who these top 1 percenters are.Roughly 31 percent started or manage ...

1,820 0       INEQUALITY BLUE INEQUALITY CAREER EARNING


  Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity.  It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering.  This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer.  The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works.  It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “f...

6,944 0       PROGRAMMER DEVELOPMENT ADVICE CAREER LOW LEVEL


  So you want to write JavaScript for a living?

What do you need to know if you are interviewing for a job that involves Javascript development? What kind of expectations do employers have of candidates now that the state of client side development has been changed with the rise of asynchronous JavaScript and the often slick, supporting interfaces? These were questions I was asking myself after a friend pointed me to an interesting job posting over at Meebo that included some JavaScript puzzlers on logical operators, DOM oddities and… well that’s all I should say so as not to drop any hints. At any rate I thought...

1,834 0       JAVASCRIPT CAREER SKILLS KNOWLEDGE


  A Few Lessons I Learned After Having Failed

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.- Michael JordanIt was mid 2008 and Younique was doing reasonably well. However, I had an itch that I needed to scratch. I wanted to build a mobile advertising platform – think DoubleClickmeets AdMob. At the time the mobile advertising market wasn’t as competitive as it is today. Towards the end of 2008, I decided to forgo...

1,468 0       CAREER LESSON SUCCESS FAILURE MOBILE ADVERTISING


  What, exactly, is a Product Manager?

I often get asked what a product manager is. What do they do? Where do they come from? Why do they like sharpies so much?In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan describes the job of the product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. Similarly, I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology and user experience (hint – only a product manager would define themselves in a venn diagram). A good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with pract...

3,465 0       DEFINITION CAREER PRODUCT MANAGER FEATURES


  Redesigning the Technical Hiring Process

Since my last post on technical interviews, I’ve been fairly involved in hiring at Pulse as we grew our team from 6 people when I joined last November to 14 full-timers. In my previous post, I suggested that technical interviews, in the conventional sense, are not especially effective (by technical interviews, I mean the traditional 45 minute coding-at-a-whiteboard and algorithm puzzlers interviews). Those do a great job of telling you how well a candidate is at acing those types of interviews, specifically coding on a whiteboard while someone watches over your shoulder, and how well th...

2,256 0       DEVELOPER RECRUITMENT PROCESS CAREER SKI