RenTech is a weird firm. The following is a fictional account.

Out of school (I was a finance/engineering double major), I interviewed at RenTech. They told me this was my last chance, that if I worked a day on Wall Street they wouldn't want me because they didn't want that culture (I think it's more about ensuring you have no industry connections outside the firm). They're geographically isolated, encourage employees taking mortgages to buy local homes and frown on industry interactions outside the firm. If you try to leave, they will enforce their non-competes (which are legal in New York) and sue your new employer [1].

I was wary of that need for control then. Today, I think it's morally wrong. Few people can predict what will matter to them ten years down the line. If I worked at RenTech today, I'd be depressed knowing (a) my work went to enrich the likes of Robert Mercer [2], and (b) there is no exit.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/renaissance-millennium/update...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_%28businessman%2...

Re: renaissance. Of course. I'm highlighting where the 'we don't hire finance' trope originates. Nothing to do with Renaissance.

For all of you too young to remember:

In the 'dot-com' era - many 'new companies' still hired 'top down'. They would hire an 'executive team' first, and then maybe developers.

Often, a CFO etc..

Think PetStore.com - two MBA's hiring 'others to do the work, as workers do'.

The notion of 'all hands on deck founders' etc. was still novel.

Many people still wore suits.

So - 2000-ish - those attitudes evolved - and the 'CFO' for a very early stage company became obsolete. CFO/finance types are generally not required at the most early stages of a company wherein the issues are 'money in, money out, money in the bank'.

So, the slightly aggressive hipster/startup trope of 'we don't hire finance types' I think evolved essentially out of this new understanding of how early stage companies work.

1. They have preconceived notions about how finance "should" work

2. People not from finance are driven by other things

This is not to say that there aren't people from finance who don't fall under this, but it's a good way to weed them out without inviting a billion applications from people in finance.

One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only loosely correlated with profitability. So I wouldn't conflate Renaissance's success with their hiring practices.

Picking up on your use of the word heuristic, "hiring the best" is very much an optimization problem. Specifically, there's a signal detection problem inherent to hiring in which you want to maximize your hits (selecting the best candidates) while minimizing your false alarms (hiring someone who turns out to be a bad candidate).

There's another layer to this optimization problem, which is that you want to minimize costs, both in time and in money.

As such, there are bound to be many heuristics that are close-to-optimal. I don't know whether excluding people with a background in finance is one of them (in fact, I suspect it's not), but the use of such a heuristic is not prima facie absurd.

In fact, using (good) heuristics in hiring is a feature, not a bug.

The problem here is that the heuristic is (I think) bad.

2. That fun might have these heuristics that GP talks of, and for them, the people they hire may well be the best for them. As in, motivated and attitudinally oriented towards what they want, and more able to work free from the assumptions of _knowing_ how it's done in finance. They may be wrong in your case, but that's how heuristics work. To me, that's less of a bullshit case than trendy languages etc.

I do not think assembling a team for HFT is easy at all, especially now. There are a lot of good reasons for being very peculiar and selective. I am not sure industry outsiders who are just applying understand the dynamic or, in many cases, why a seemingly great candidate is rejected.

I don’t know much about the company, but a firm with extraordinary long term returns with a penchant for secrecy, cult-like hiring practices, and all of the employees invested in their extraordinary investment vehicle sounds sketchy to me.

They have a huge services division and that's the same formula used by all the big players. It's a numbers game for billing and they shoot to make it work by having a few highly competent people cover up for the C- players.

> Oracle is now more of a technical holding company than a software company, aside from their db, they merely pickup/purchase new companies and wring them out for revenue. Anything Oracle writes themselves is usually terrible.

Spot on. The database is incredible though the use cases I'd recommend it for over open source alternatives has shrunk to nearly nothing. Outside of that, the Oracle App landscape (Financials, HR, ...) are hilariously terrible, especially factoring in the prices paid for it.

This is something I've heard over the years but I'm not sure if it is still holds true. (I work with Oracle databases daily).

Oracle DBMSes are very robust, to be sure, and you can expect them to run forever. But in my mind other databases seems to have caught up and there really isn't a compelling reason to choose Oracle over other commercial databases anymore (also, Oracle pricing is a big deterrent).

In terms of performance, Oracle's licensing prohibits any benchmarking, but anecdotally I haven't found it to be particularly performant for most of my queries. Oracle used to be known for the innovative under-the-hood algorithmic improvements to the database, but lately I haven't seen anything too exciting, whereas SQL Server is getting better every year with new innovations (columnstore indices, in-memory features, Polybase, in-database Python/R computations, etc.).

> use cases I'd recommend it for over open source alternatives has shrunk to nearly nothing.

I agree, though I would say for heavy transactional use cases, I would still choose a commercial database over an open-source one. However, among the commercial databases out there, Oracle would be my last choice. It has too much legacy crud that have to worked around. The only reason Oracle is still around is because (1) In the enterprise, no one gets fired for buying Oracle. (2) fungible expertise in their services organization ensures business continuity, albeit at a lowest common denominator level.

That tells me all I need to know.

So technically you can benchmark in-house, but you can't publish those results without written permission.

The original intent was to prevent non-neutral third-party benchmarking by biased agents that sought to discredit their products through contrived setups (which admittedly can be a problem for any product), but to enforce it through licensing seems a bit heavy handed. Oracle does allow benchmarks that are favorable to them (see TPC-C benchmarks).

Ultra high end OLTP system leveraging Oracle RAC. It's a very specific use case that goes beyond basic replication where you require ACID compliance, HA, multi master (in this case via shared disks and distributed locks), all atop an MVCC database. The MVCC implementation of Oracle does not require a VACUUM style operation which is another plus for a 24/7 environment.

I know of a couple financial services companies that have this type of setup though I've yet to find one that (IMHO) really justifies it. In all cases they've got boatloads of money to throw at a problem and the guys in charge of making the tech decisions don't mind having one of those boats sail off to Larry Ellison.

Other idea - "prestige". "We are using top end solutions, unlike the lowly startups, we are serious businessmen see."

Edit: From what I saw Hyperion FM got relatively better after the Oracle acquisition.

In my experience the opposite seems to be true. I have heard people describe Hyperion as "pretty good" prior to the acquisition (this was a while ago, before my time). Today, if I talk to anyone about it, sentiments range from negative to very negative.

Almost every Oracle acquisition has suffered the same fate.

If a resume came across your desk with Oracle as the primary work experience what would you do?

Can an individual programmer be help culpable for Oracle's issues?

So if it takes half a fiscal year, depending on when you first say you need it, it can be much longer.

Two google interviews, and nothing. From what I hear from other people I consider way smarter than I, they also got nothing.

Google has a much copied process, but as a creator of something of huge value notes:

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Mebbe their filter isn't quite as good as they think it is. Talking to a number of absolutely brilliant engineers who didn't get hired, it likely has nothing whatsoever to do with talent, algo knowledge, mathematics, etc. There are other factors.

Being an above 40 guy probably didn't help me, google and others seem to have lots of trouble with ageism.

Dan's article was not specifically about being the "top", rather, what does the "top" mean in context, and how do people judge. What is the opportunity cost of doing this? As he points out, as I point out, it can be very high.

The smartest programmer I met in my first decade of work, was a person who had a high school diploma. No college degree. The guy was brilliant, personable, humble. He is quite successful now, and still doesn't have degrees. Chances are, he doesn't have formal education around the math/algos, but has picked up everything he knows.

At the end of the day, hiring is something of a crap-shoot. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance, either negative or positive. You are after passion, intelligence, fit, experience if it exists (re-inventing wheels can be time consuming/expensive if you are forced to do it, and getting a guide who has been down that path can save you making some mistakes/time/money).

I know people are telling themselves that google has a good process, but honestly, it looks like it enforces homogeneity more than it brings in needed talent. I am not sure this is a good thing. Poor replication of their processes is rampant throughout the industry. I am not convinced this leads to positive outcomes.

Just kiddin'. I think, inverting the binary tree probably means mirroring it. I had an interesting Google interview as well a few years ago where I aced the automated coding test but then the first human interviewer didn't get why I said that regular expressions run in linear time :) Our background was just very different.

> Two google interviews, and nothing. From what I hear from other people I consider way smarter than I, they also got nothing.

Then you and your friends weren't fluent enough with algorithms. That is the point, they don't care about all of your degrees, years of experience, conferences etc, they care about your fluency with maths and algorithms. This means that even a person with a shitty background can get hired at Google while a person with a stellar background gets rejected. Should you have gotten hired? Probably, but their system lets them find a lot of diamonds in the rough who wouldn't get hired anywhere else which is why they use it.

I didn't fail those portions. Actually did quite well on them. So did my friends.

You are making a number of invalid assumptions, starting from the assumption that their processes are fundamentally accurate or correct. My supposition is from the viewpoint that all systems are fundamentally flawed, and the goal is to minimize risk associated with a flawed system.

I know it is generally hard to acknowledge that google does things wrong, but ... IMO (and I am fairly sure I am not alone here) ... they have a number of significant issues that they haven't quite moved past yet, and this is one of them. Remember, they started out with brain teasers, and school pedigree. The new system isn't demonstrably better IMO, but it helps them convince themselves that it is.

Then I don't see your point, what are you saying caused you to fail? I have a physics degree from an unknown school, learned to code in my thirties and got a job at Google by just doing well at their algorithms and maths questions so it is definitely possible to get in without ticking any of the hip boxes.

Don't feel because you got in that you are some ordained snowflake. If you had interviewed on another day or with another group within Google you very possibly wouldn't have gotten in.

There are many variables at work when it comes to getting hired and hiring.

"Maths" is a red herring -- a physics PhD who's still active in academia will definitely be very fluent in maths.

It's all about "algorithms", but I think a lot of software people have tunnel vision about that. There's a lot of fancy terminology you pick up in a CS degree; requiring people to know that filters out a lot of potentially good candidates, unless they've studied CS in their own time.

That's fine if the special CS terminology is absolutely essential for all programmers. But is it really? Realistically, 90% or more of your time as a programmer is spent working on other stuff (automation, testing, designing friendly APIs, catching sneaky bugs, scripting, just generally plumbing stuff together). If you're on a team, does every single team member need to have a great understanding of data structures? Or is it just nice-to-have, specialized knowledge?

I'd argue that it matters more for Google more than most employers. The combo of their scale, combined with their large amount of custom infrastructure, combined with their desire to be able to retask engineers on a whim, means that individual engineers will have pretty good chance of touching code where the choice of Big O could make or break a product.

On the flip side, though, I think many programmers (even programmers who are up to date on their CS) are fairly weak at mathematics. We think we're good because we can, you know, invert a binary tree, but how about figuring out an appropriate filter to smooth some data, or verifying that some randomized process is unbiased?

For something like digital filters, if you have basic knowledge you can just look up wikipedia for the details. But the same applies to data structures and big-O!

A lot of companies (including Google) can benefit strongly from people with good maths or stats skills. Do those people also need to be strong in CS? Or if not, do they need to be siloed into a separate hiring process, and placed in separate departments?

I reckon CS, maths, stats and other specialized academic training should all be treated as nice-to-have skills, of varying importance depending on the team balance and project requirements.

Also, I'm curious about how you managed to even get your foot in the door at such large organizations and not just get swept out in a filter at the gate. I'm assuming of course that such large companies employ some kind of application tracking system (which may be in error).

Even if it's never used as a filter by Google, their hiring practices just don't apply to the rest of the industry - Google can afford to pass on 99.9% of the high quality talent that applies. Other firms who try this are only crippling themselves.

I don't think it's 'unreasonable' at all to put strong emphasis on education.

Surely, at the end of the day it's possible to be great without it, but having a good education is pretty strongly correlating factor with so many things.

'Being cool', I don't think is correlated with much at all. Unless it's super consumer facing and inner culture is gong to have to match outer culture on some level.

If you think the entire Silicon Valley is missed this, because it's not 'my' correlation.

People who study CS are probably more likely to better at CS that those who have not.

It doesn't prove or mean anything in general, and your personal situation is not relevant: of course there are tons of 'non-degreed' great techies out there. Nobody is denying that.

I've hired a lot of people and there's no doubt that you get better luck with degreed than non - and even school rankings matter.

In Canada, for example, you get consistently strong tech recruits out of U Waterloo. Impressively so. Not always but usually. Other schools in the region - much more hit and miss.

I don't think this is controversial.

Of course, in the past twenty four hours I've created an app and potential side-business from a technology stack I had absolutely no experience in any of it just to prove to a potential employer I can do 'front-end' stuff for them.

The average developer can't even CSS, don't even play with that 'degrees are the ultimate arbiter' mess.

What do you mean by that? How sophisticated is it to "do CSS"? When I've dealt with it, you basically look at the inspector and at your CSS libraries of preexisting classes, and basically do a combination of attaching classes and writing new ones with custom styles until you get it all to look right.

What should I be looking to learn?

There's an art-form to doing amazing pixel perfect web designs, and I really respect the people who are good at it. That's not me though, and it's never going to be me.

I've had to do similar things to find work: (started young out of interest and put it aside for a few years, then), spend time volunteering (UNOV), freelanced, voluntary freelanced for small businesses/local orgs, build pet projects, just build things in general and study.

Maybe it prepares one better as an engineer than a scientist in the field — the application of a science vs the theoretical and experimental work in developing the science.

--- To expand on the parent subject...

I've had interviews since where I've been able to lay out some of the things I've designed and built both independently and while working for a major media company and still had interviews last hours upon hours to receive no call to even notify me that they've decided to go another route all for some odd questions with no definite answer like:

    Implement a poly-fill for bind by extending the Function object

    Explain what this css does "if you don't know that's okay,
    but don't get it wrong – that's 'bad'.":
    
    .box {
      display: flex;
      min-width: 1024px;
      min-width: 52em;
      margin: 0;
      padding: 10px 15px 10px 15px;
      
    }
    
    .box--item {
      flex-shrink: 2
    }
    
    .button {
      appearance: none;
      border-radius: 3px;
      background-color: blue;
    }
    .button--green {
      background-color: green;
    }

Only to have every answer given either go unremarked-upon or just told "no", even though the answer could not have been a definite wrong. It was just not the preferred answer.

I was also informed you would be paid more just for having a Masters or PhD, regardless of your contribution. They had graphs and were happy to show me.

I'm talking smaller, trendier companies here though. Buzz words and egos seem to abound. It never made me bitter, but it just seemed so bizarre-o. Not really for me.

This tells me you're wasting your time and potential. There are other ways to get a job.

Thanks for your reply though, I agree with you but then I run into reality and the need to pay bills.

Beyond that, software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless and that only self taught people are worth looking into. I've worked with many college educated people who can't write good code, and I've worked with many self-taught people who really don't understand what they're doing. The best has always been a person who went to school and then continued on learning after the fact.

Ugh, yes. I've worked for a leading SIM and smart card manufacturer and they required a 4-year degree to even get in the door. I interviewed countless people, including some who were able to answer some quite technical questions that others couldn't. And many of those had to get disqualified since we found out during the interview process that they didn't have a degree. There were so many degree holders there that didn't know what the hell they were doing, and it was obvious.

I've also been in the field for many years and held several interviews. My takeaway, to put it a bit clumsy: "knowledge is easy to fix, mindset and experience not as easy."

But yeah. I was reinforcing your point, not being counter.

"...expect to get turned down without a degree" and "...software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless ..."

My point is that there's a middle way. Only looking at degress is stupid because it doesn't guarantee anything other than that they got a degree. With that in mind it doesn't make sense to instantly disqualify people without a degree either.

> If you're not willing to put in the work

Why should anyone who already knows everything for a degree have to waste 4-6 years of their life?

Having two kids getting their CS degrees right now at top 50 colleges.

I am not impressed.

A friend of my son goes to UNFS (North Carolina State Film School). For four years he makes films. After the first year he has to choose between photography, directing, writing, etc. Then he spends 3 year fine tuning his craft. Great program!

CS Programs seem to be a little of this and a little of that, none of it coordinated. Quality is teaching is varied, occasional a great teacher or TA, much more frequently poor teachers or TAs.

On the other hand, I didn't start my adult life a few dozen grand into the red with student loan debt, which, from what I gather through long acquaintance with many who did, has very considerable advantages of its own. So I'd have to call it a tradeoff - but, then, that's my whole point: it's not accurate to say that either option is strictly preferable to the other.

It forced me to study a wide variety of things I probably wouldn't have spent much time on if on my own (i.e. OS programming, making my own compiler, prolog, finite automata, assembly programming, etc).

Also did A.I., 3d graphics, network programming, and various other things, but I probably would have learned that on my own to a certain point (I developed video games for awhile).

Pretty much. Managed to work on about eight games in a row that didn't make back their investment for three separate companies while I was in the game industry. They failed for various reasons, and a few of them really should have been successful, in my opinion, but oh well. Bad timing (releasing at the same time as heavy hitters), bad marketing, bad luck with reviewers, getting screwed by platform holders, aiming at the wrong audience, bad choice of difficulty, bad choice of which idea to pursue, technical issues that weren't in the testing environment and not discovered until release, overly restrictive and expensive update patching policies with platform holders, all sorts of fun reasons.

I probably agree that for each student at least one of those 4 years is usually wasted; but this is different than whole program being a waste for a person.

I guess "community taught" would be better than "self taught" since I learned from so many people online. But I had been programming for 10 years before school, and while I was in the military (over 6 years) I took advantage of many MOOCs from MIT, Stanford, UNSW, etc. and many books from Knuth to most of the No Starch Press library which I understand is not the case for traditional students. It is frustrating though, especially not being just out of high school.

You were just overprepared for an undergraduate degree by the time you got around to trying for it. For anyone else taking a similar path, specifically the military part, you can often knock out an associates degree with that amount of military experience. Do it, you can skip most of the core curriculum and focus on the CS part and be done in 2-3 years (less if summer courses are available) and be in grad school in your 3rd or 4th your of full-time college education.

That has nothing to do with my CS studies, of which I have learned nothing from college and could have CLEPed a BS degree on day one if it was possible and moved on to a masters where I should have been initially placed.

> I'm sure you don't know everything.

I never claimed I knew everything.

...on the previous version of the system.

...the month before the training was updated to the most recently fielded version.

...taught by a retired Army guy.

...from Texas.

...who won't stop telling stories about his Army days.

But the hombre from Texas is not one of those people. He will drive for 30 minutes, past dozens of ordinary, mundane restaurants, to reach the nearest Texas-style barbecue restaurant, run by a fellow expatriate Texan, who shoulders the burden of living outside of Texas for the sake of fellow Texans who tragically cannot be in the best state all the time, yet need to regularly consume bits of Texas in order to survive.

Ironically, Texas has so many people in it, all constantly surrounded on all sides by Texas, that you cannot easily identify that guy until he actually leaves the state.

Also, the thing that's wrong with Texas is football. That is easily 120% of my problem with Texas.

Oxford’s distance Master’s will take experience in place of a degree.

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/

I did take some 400 level electives completely outside what I am interested in and had not studied which were great though. One professor for those asked in the beginning what each person expected from and I mentioned what I am actually specializing in and he consistently gave examples of applying it to what I do which was excellent.

And I still learned things my first year (especially in ancillary classes, I only took three computer classes my freshman year), I just didn't get much out of CS classes until sophomore year. One of those classes was a gimme class I really should have tested out of ahead of time in hindsight, though (basically computers 101, I had quizzes on identifying what was the desktop, mouse and monitor).

It took me few tries to understand this, after reading about F*: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15582969

I think you're mostly right, though. I think the article is probably right that companies who _say_ "we only hire the best" don't necessarily even hire good programmers. I don't think the companies you mentioned really care if they have the best, especially since that's pretty hard to measure anyway. They want people that are going to do great job in the area they were hired to work in.

The article’s title/headline could be adjusted to more accurately represent the claims made in it.

Also I think you mean 'hipster' instead of 'hippie'.

But - there are a lot of said 'hipster companies' in the Valley, moreover, the cult has spread beyond: it exists even in the copycat cities of Montreal, Van, NYC, Austin, Boulder, yada yada.

I'm well into my 30's an the last few start ups I've consulted with - both in the Valley but not well known - were undeniably trying to be too hip.

I'm as cool as late 30's something can try to be without losing any dignity :) but I felt like Grampa Simpson (not my antiquated pop culture reference)

In retrospect it was a terrible idea. That language is stupid verbose, and I ran out of whiteboard for every single question I had there. They were mainly interested in me for iOS development though. They did not give me an offer, although I don't think it was for that reason (I was a little nervous and two interviewers gave me some major head-scratchers).

Personally, I think that C# is the ideal language for interviewing in, as the .NET standard library is very powerful. SortedDictionary alone can easily polish off entire classes of interview questions, and the same can be said for pretty simply LINQ statements. I actually solved one problem so trivially using a combination of the right data structure and LINQ that the interviewer asked me to provide an alternate imperative implementation of the LINQ statement, just so he could see that I actually knew how to implement something like that rather than just use it.

You can approach similar levels of power with use of Java 8's Streams APIs and a good collections library like Guava, but Guava is only likely to be understood by a majority of interviewers at Google, whereas the C# standard library should be understood by a majority of C# interviewers everywhere.

It's absolutely worth spending a few hours brushing up on a "better" interviewing language and then using that rather than using a less optimal language just because it happens to be all you've used recently.

I agree with you that the Python language syntax is nice, but it doesn't have quite the same level of built-in support for algorithmically useful data structures as C# or Java with Guava. To give you a concrete example, it's not unusual for interview questions to require the use of a self-balancing binary search tree or a similar data structure in order to reach optimal runtime complexity. Realistically no one is ever going to implement a self-balancing BST along with solving the actual problem inside of a 45 minute coding interview, but it's nicer if you're able to refer to an actual library implementation that exists and can be used versus hand-waving away the existence of one.

I wonder why interviewers look for these traits when it is very clear that you'll almost never implement a low level data structure.