Toshi – An Open Source Bitcoin Node for Developers

Re:Toshi – An Open Source Bitcoin Node for Developers by sillysaurus3 on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @07:46PM (#8327724)

I tried very politely to explain this problem to Coinbase about two years ago during an interview, and their reaction was to ask about my college degree, give me a bunch of weird whiteboard problems that had nothing to do with actual programming, and then show me the door, one day after I helped fix all of their client libraries when they switched SSL CA providers and didn't even realize it, and then provided a pull request to coinbase-ruby providing concurrency support using this very same threading mechanism, on the two-hour flight there (proof: https://github.com/coinbase/coinbase-ruby/pull/6).

Are you being fair to Coinbase? There are two sides to every story.

But if this is true at face value, then it's disappointing to hear that a YC startup would care at all about a degree or about whiteboard problems, of all things.

If a company cares about what a programming candidate can do, then caring about a degree or whiteboard problems is caring about the wrong thing. Thought experiment: How much better or worse would YC's results be if they had candidates solve whiteboard problems during the interview? (Admittedly, YC cares about degrees though.)

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Re:Toshi – An Open Source Bitcoin Node for Developers by xcubed on Thursday September 18, 2014 @03:07AM (#8334071)

Not surprising to me about Coinbase. A friend interviewed there and decided not to continue with the process as he was so turned off by their team. In particular he made a suggestion for improvement and they got very defensive.

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Re:Toshi – An Open Source Bitcoin Node for Developers by wslh on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @02:00PM (#8331368)

> If a company cares about what a programming candidate can do, then caring about a degree or whiteboard problems is caring about the wrong thing.

Yes, it is like being interviewed for making a time machine, you show a working time machine and they continue to ask you questions about physics...

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