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davidcgl's comments

davidcgl | 9 years ago | on: Not OK, Google

Many readers are skeptical about the usefulness of personal AI assistants. This reminds me of what Jeff Bezos said about disruptive technologies [1], which I think resonates well among many tech company executives. You (they) need to be willing to be doubted for a very long time.

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/amazons-bezos-innovation/

Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics. And there will be at least two kinds of critics. There will be well-meaning critics who genuinely misunderstand what you are doing or genuinely have a different opinion. And there will be the self-interested critics that have a vested interest in not liking what you are doing and they will have reason to misunderstand. And you have to be willing to ignore both types of critics. You listen to them, because you want to see, always testing, is it possible they are right?

davidcgl | 9 years ago | on: Cracking the Coding Interview Tutorial

I'd argue they are consistent in that every candidate who made it past resume screening is given equal opportunity to partake in a well documented process. Whether or not the process itself is effective is a different question.

Sure, interviewers themselves are inconsistent (accents, prejudice, interview difficulty, etc), but that's not something that can be fully mitigated when every candidate gets a different set of interviewers.

Again, I'm not defending the practice and would just like to have a constructive discussion.

davidcgl | 9 years ago | on: Cracking the Coding Interview Tutorial

I'm not sure I understand -- who's complaining?

To be clear, I can see why big companies prefer coding interviews (it's more "consistent" when interview feedbacks are boiled down to a score), but at the same time I'm not defending it because like many have said it's not a great measure of an engineer's capability. I'm looking at the problem from the employers' point of view.

_khwc | 9 years ago | on: Cracking the Coding Interview Tutorial

While there are many legitimate criticism of whiteboard-style coding interviews, I have yet to see a convincing alternative that scales well to the size of big companies. Google [1][2], Facebook et al. hire thousands of engineers per year, meaning they conduct at least 10-100k interviews per year. How do you design a process that is consistent, measurable and efficient at that scale?

[1] Google gets 2 million resumes a year https://www.fastcompany.com/3044606/hit-the-ground-running/g...

[2] Headcount increased from 57,148 to 66,575 between Q2 15 and Q2 16: https://abc.xyz/investor/

davidcgl | 10 years ago | on: Twitter Names Jack Dorsey Chief Executive

If you boil down the entirety of Twitter into just a CRUD app that allows you to post 140 characters at a time, then yes, you can make that in a weekend.

Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.

davidcgl | 10 years ago | on: Twitter Names Jack Dorsey Chief Executive

> any competent web developer could make A non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon

I wish people would stop claiming how they could clone a social media app in an afternoon / weekend.

davidcgl | 10 years ago | on: Using Google without a Google+ profile

G+ wanted to be a rendezvous for all social/sharing activities on Google, and it turned out that many users didn't like it. Would G+ have fared better if it didn't force G+ onto every Google property? Maybe? It's easy to do armchair analysis, but hindsight is 20/20.
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