vacheron

Having worked in both, there is a huge number of really smart people who turn down offers to work in quant shops. And people really underestimate how much tech will pay top researchers/overestimate how much the average quant makes.

People really over hype and overrate what kind of work happens at Jane Street or similarly exclusive HFTs. They have their mix of interesting projects and mundane work like any other company.

Interesting. Alberta is really only known for reinforcement learning as one of the leading academics relocated to Edmonton, but they're not known for much else. You won't hear of Alberta much in academia or in Silicon Valley, and the only reason I know of them is due to prior interactions with Richard Sutton.

UBC and UT certainly receive more funding for computer science and engineering and they're generally well regarded research schools and highly recruited from. UT seems to be slightly more prominent but I'd wager it's a result of the school being much larger with multiple campuses all considered the same school. Same story with Waterloo's computer science faculty being many times the size of UBC with mandatory internships in its undergrad program.

Perhaps the reputation of schools domestically in Canada is different than their brand overseas, as UBC is known even in Switzerland and Sweden, but Alberta and Waterloo are completely unheard of. Even now as I relocated to the USA, UBC comes up often (despite the relatively small Computer Science faculty) and all the past companies I used to work for across quantitative finance and autonomous vehicles recruited from them.

I am against the principle of any individual within a company being able to extend offers at will without any interviews or input from others. A "proven track record" is often too vague and arbitrary a bar and this just lends way to allowing personal bias in hiring decisions. Having interesting experience, projects or an impressive github allows you to get your foot in the door and get to the interview stage. It should not circumvent the technical interviews.

I hire developers and researchers for my company and we are very selective in who we choose to interview (small company in a bleeding edge field). We only consider engineers with relevant, impressive expertise and academics with solid published papers. Still, many of those interviewed don't receive offers and it's not because we ask them to recite some esoteric solution to a riddle. We have called candidates in just because they have promising github projects related to our work, only for these individuals to completely flop when questioned about basic fundamentals. Our interviews were extremely lenient and informal in these cases and we gave multiple chances to some.

> Here in Canada a good grade in academic-stream high school math was simply mandatory for admission to any BSc program

Perhaps that's why I've always found excellent engineers from Canada's flagship schools (U of British Columbia and U of Toronto) :p

More seriously though, I have an advanced degree in Math and seldom needed it for development work, even when I was working in more quantitative roles. And whenever I did need the knowledge I would just look up and learn again. Glad you're doing well without a traditional background.

As someone who has formal degrees in Math, I believe this is mostly because the programming Math students do is extremely tedious and simply not enjoyable. In school we were making graphs in Matlab/Octave/Mathematica/R which I think most programmers would not like. Maybe some used Python if they were lucky. Coding visualizations, solving matrices or convex optimizations in Mathematica is not exactly inspiring.

It sounds like they're just recording the text you're typing and not the entire interview (video recording, conversation) but I could be wrong. If that is the case though, I doubt they'd need additional consent since it's implied that they're evaluating you based on the code you share with them anyways.

I never understood why people advocate for job offers sans interviews for someone who has interesting projects. IMO any company allowing such practices opens itself up to corruption and nepotism.

I've worked for startups and even mid-sized publicly traded companies where managers with sufficient seniority were allowed to extend offers on a whim and it always resulted in friends of said employees being hired. Inevitably, entire teams and even business orgs would be filled with friends or fraternity brothers and their work performance would vary greatly.

No one likes interviews but it's crazy that I keep seeing HN users considering this an acceptable practice.

You don't see any hint of irony in that statement from someone who leaves artwork in public spaces without asking the general public for permission first? The same artist who destroys his own art, which he left in public, when someone tries to "own" it?

Claiming that everyone who works at Google works on Ads is like saying everyone who works at Amazon moves boxes in a warehouse.

Surely you must mean the targeted advertisements and data collection necessary for that. I don't see anything inherently wrong with an advertisement in and of itself, and it certainly isn't morally questionable. Companies need consumers to be aware of their products in order to sell them.

> if someone told me they worked for google or some other advertising network, I would silently be judging them for their life choices

Maybe try some introspection.

Not that I'm defending the theft or IP or technology, but it is interesting how some things we consider stealing, others homage and some that we simply ignore. No one would complain if spies from your own country stole from a rival nation during a war (hot or cold). The US used to steal technology from Britain and the rest of Europe.[0]

The more you magnify on any country's history, the more prevalent shady dealings comes up. This goes doubly so for superpowers. It seems that at some point in time, everyone has done unscrupulous things to get ahead and we often forget to be introspective.

On a personal anecdote, I dabble in fashion design and it continually baffles me as to what is considered "homage" when large, established companies blatantly rip off designs. Large companies like H&M or Zara can literally steal pieces from famous designers, make it worse and cheaper and sell it in malls worldwide. Obviously, when an Asian brand does the same thing, it's a knockoff. Peeves me to no end.

[0] - https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

This made me reread the article[0] again (if we were talking about the same one) and I don't see any mention of interview ratings and job performance.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

This story seems like a bad example of a false negative. There were claims by Google insiders that Max was given a particularly easy interview as a formality. I am by no means a brilliant programmer and also rusty with algorithms, but given the structure and question, I would be surprised if most people couldn't figure out how to invert a binary tree within a matter of minutes.

Max himself later opened up[0] and admitted to being difficult to work with. It is entirely likely that he was rejected based on his personality and not his ability. As someone who contributed to Homebrew many years ago I would not be surprised if this was the case. In their own words: "I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science". I am not sure why any company would want to hire someone like that and put the culture of the team in jeopardy.

[0] - https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

AFAIK (as someone who does not work at Google), "brain teaser" questions have not been asked at Google for almost a decade.

Every time I see complaints like this I can't help but think the posters have a chip on their shoulder from being rejected by Google or a similarly selective company. It's never a commentary on any fundamental issues with these types of interview questions and no one ever comes up with a better process that is equally scaleable and effective for hiring generalists. In my experience interviewing with dozens of small, medium and large companies, the vast majority of technical roles require these types of questions now. These come off as criticisms against Google specifically for asking hard variants of these questions.

I don't personally have any issue with companies asking questions like these as long as they don't simply look for "a correct and optimal solution coded up perfectly whilst under stress in under 30 minutes", but rather the process of solving the problem.