Wow, LivingSocial has now been funded to the tune of $918 million, and really, what is there to show for it?

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/livingsocial

Well, they have a hip looking office space near the Whitehouse, in downtown DC.

I guess they bought a lot of ads.

and not very well apparently, I managed to get a 70% discount on their listed price for something by using their referral system (refer 3 people and get yours free) plus targeted advertising

What seems sort of a shame is that at least at one point, their actual software seemed pretty nice ... I used their facebooks apps for a while and I enjoyed them.

There were also plenty of bugs and "issues", etc, however, and after a while it became clear they were overwhelmed or something, and things just kept getting worse. The feeling that I was putting lots of personal data into a database that seemed likely to implode at some point was obviously a big turnoff, and I lost interest.

But if they had been on top of things, it might have turned into something pretty cool (I guess you can say that about most startups though!)...

Had you approached the offer cynically, how much of that money could you have gotten out before this collapse?

Probably none. Generally common shareholders don't see a nickel until a liquidity event. That is, getting bought or doing an IPO.

I bombed on my interview there last year. Not feeling so bad about it now.

What went wrong at the interview? BTW, is this going to hurt the market for Django developers in DC?

I interviewed with three people. First, I interviewed with two developers, one of whom seemed like he may have been a manager. The questions that I think doomed me were questions about HTTP status codes and CSRF/XSS attacks.

The HTTP status code thing went something like "Why don't you name off some HTTP status codes?" So I rattled off the ones I knew off the top of my head, but then he asked me for more. It's the kind of question you can look up in about 30 seconds if you need to, but in an interview setting it's difficult to recall the ones you don't see often.

The manager guy also asked me to describe CSRF and XSS and the details of how those exploits work. I knew what they were, but I hadn't actually examined or written one before. I did learn about them inside and out when I completed the latest Stripe CTF though. I thought that question was reasonable, and I just didn't know it.

There were also some questions about caching in high-traffic environments, which I didn't know much about but I knew enough about it to tell them that I would be able to pick it up quickly. I don't think they liked when I admitted not knowing something though. It also seemed kind of interesting that there was so much emphasis on it since I wasn't interviewing to work with the main developer team but with one of their splinter offices who builds proofs of concept and prototypes.

I did pretty well on the rest of it, including the 2nd part of the interview with one of their in-house tool developers. There was supposed to be a third part where I would have interviewed with a non-developer to assess culture fit, but they ended my interview before that part.

I think I probably bombed it because I've been consulting for a long time and have a different development approach than they were looking for.

No. They're a rails shop.

You mean "were" a rails shop? (Or am I misunderstanding this news?)

The investors have thrown the company a lifeline to avoid filing for bankruptcy, but in exchange have taken full control and wiped out the founders and employee stock. This is the last roll of the dice.

Did another company offering options take its place?