They work and some people really find them useful.
Some time ago I've noticed that a few of my friends really enjoy going through newsletter emails and finding out about items that are on sale etc. They wouldn't necessarily look for a newsletter signup form on a website, but when a popup appears something clicks in their brains ("OMG, I really need this!") and they sign up.
I don't like these popups but well, most of the time I'm just not their target.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that there were times when I actually got converted by a popup.
When you think of that, if it offers something that's useful to you, clicking on it feels so natural and you don't analyze it too much.
Wasn't twitter also measuring success in number of users and growth, marginalizing their losses?
For now it seems like they're still only a picture-sharing app that's popular right now. Obviously they're doing a lot to secure this position, but I wonder if they'll be able to maintain user's engagement for a longer period of time.
Are you angry about wasting 2 hours of your time or not getting the job?
Keep in mind that a lot of companies use automated tests to filter candidates, not necessarily in the most fair way.
They're simply not able to do a whole interview with everyone as it's extremely time consuming.
I'd say don't worry about it too much. If you have the skills you'll find plenty of good companies that will want to work with you.
Unfortunately, job interviews are not as predictable as how code works. Even the best devs I know get rejected once in a while. :)
Think about it - there's 2-3 people (interviewers) trying to asses whether a person has the skills for a job and is a cultural fit for the company.
All of these during an 1-2 hour long chat. That's virtually impossible to do right, they can only guess.
I was on the job market recently and similar things happened to me. It's worse when you don't get feedback after you go to an interview.
Two days ago I thought of making a job site that requires the employer to provide feedback, and the candidate to sign a form that says they won't sue the employer over the interview process. This way the employer has no excuse for not giving feedback.
I see very little value for the company in agreeing to something like this. A user could still sue (even after signing the form) by claiming the given feedback is discriminatory or something similar. No company would voluntarily take on that sort of liability when there are countless alternatives.
I've had things like this happen more than once:
1. HR/recruiter-ish Phone screening
2. Engineer-ish phone screening, sometimes with a coding session
3. Another phonecall as a prep for further rounds of interviews
4. Travel that requires me to take at least one day off of work and travel to another city for an in-person interview
5. Rejection with no reason, and "We have a policy of not providing that information to candidates" if you ask why
6. Questionnaire from the company, asking for feedback on their interview process (snerk)
In your case, with one guess, I'd say that the test cases that were provided were just examples of things you'd have to do to pass. It's like the homework assignment where the professor gives you a problem to solve and some test inputs. You know that they'll run some "acid test" on your code after you've submitted it. Maybe it caught some corner cases that they considered essential.
That, or they didn't like something about your coding style (style is subjective, and you'll never have feedback on how they judged it). Or, or, or...you can come up with speculative lists all day.
4. This in some ways is worse than greyostrich's situation (because it cost you more), but in another way, it's better. It cost the company, too - the cost of the flight, hotel, and time for their people to interview you. They didn't just waste your time to try to spare themselves any effort; they had skin in the game too.
5. In the current legal climate, if they tell you why, they may be exposing themselves to a lawsuit. They therefore impose a company-wide policy of never saying why they reject anyone. It stinks for the rejected applicant, but it's not because they're being jerks to the rejected applicant. It's because of lawyers. If you want to fix it, you're going to have to fix the law.
It's not your problem if a company doesn't have a correct respectful hiring process. requirements for potential employees on the market are crazy, companies definitely should live up themselves to the professional and cultural quality they demand from other participants. Companies tend to never excuse even slightest fails of generally well prepped candidates, no reason for candidates to excuse pure disrespect of their time and effort.
What I love about Paper (compared to Google Docs and similar tools) is it's simplicity. Formatting options are extremely limited, so all you have to do is just to type and it'll lay the document out for you.
This is actually the best feature, since you don't waste time adjusting tab stops and figuring out how to make bullet lists work (which was like 50% of my time when writing documents in regular editors).
I think both approaches are fine, depending on context.
This will definitely work fine for software that's delivered to the users. I don't really care about Chrome's or Gmail's version, especially since the update process is transparent to me. The APIs should be versioned on their own and everything is fine.
On the other hand, I really appreciate when semver is used by libraries (jars, gems etc.). From developer's perspective it really helps with updating these dependencies in your own code - a quick look tells you whether it's just a simple bugfix/patch that probably doesn't affect you or something more serious that you should be careful with when bumping dependency version.
Because of that, I wouldn't call it an anti-pattern. I'd say it's rather one of possible approaches that will work fine in some cases and not so well in other.
Personally, I think of buying a domain as a form of procrastination rather than the first step of starting a business.
It gives a feeling of achievement while staying in your comfort zone (seriously, it's just choosing a name and paying ten bucks, how difficult is that?).
What I noticed to work is reaching out to people, telling them about your business or project and getting their interest.
Getting the first clients puts more pressure on you, but also gives a huge motivation to continue working on it.
Buying a domain makes you pick a name and I think having a name helps with morale and motivation. Buying the domain also helps because you've spent some money and you have this thing there, waiting to be used.
agree.. and I've found the more I invest, the more dedicated I am to the project.. spend little, and it just turns into, 'eh, I'll start that project next week'..
At my current top-side-project, I accumulated so many placeholders of "whatever I'll call it", "demain name comes here", "$DOMAIN", etc, that I had to quit coding for a while until I settled down on a name and brought it.
But yes, even getting a no from a potential customer will push you much more than getting a domain.
I didn't realize the importance of all the "admin stuff", before the our newly hired sysadmin came to me and asked if I could help him figure out how to deploy the project I was working on.
This ended up being a looong chat about monitoring, redundancy, architecture, security... you name it. What I've always thought of as installing and configuring software turned out to also touch designing the software so that it works reliably and is easy to maintain.
I don't think I'll ever have plenty of sysadmin skills, but knowing even the general idea of what's important to sysadmins helps a lot. Also, being able to become another interruption in their day and consult ideas is priceless. :)
u2i LLC http://www.u2i.com @ Przemysłowa 12A, Kraków, Poland
u2i is a consulting firm with a focus on developing technology driven websites and web applications.
We collaborate with our clients to come up with creative solutions to their business needs, using our flexible and down-to-earth approach to delivering projects. We have experienced developers who are skilled in developing robust, scalable applications.
# Junior/Regular/Senior Developer ONSITE
We’re looking for passionate developers (either with experience or looking for a first job) to join our projects for Nielsen Social that provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. In our work we process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The application is currently deployed across more than 500 AWS machines. On the project we work in small teams and do pair-programming, moreover we have a daily contact with product team.
Ruby, Rails, Hadoop, Hive, SQL, Git, Linux, AWS
# Quality Assurance Lead ONSITE
We’re looking for a QA Lead to work on automated testing and data validation processes. The project you’ll be working on provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. We process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The quality of data in these reports is extremely important to our clients, so we need to have the best possible validation and testing processes. But the job is not all about technical skills - you’ll be the foundation of our Quality Assurance team, responsible for planning the release process and managing the QA team. You’re going to work with both the development and product team in order to assure the highest quality in the software we deliver to our clients.
Ruby/Python/Groovy, SQL, Git
More info at: http://www.u2i.is/hiring
u2i is a consulting firm with a focus on developing technology driven websites and web applications.
We collaborate with our clients to come up with creative solutions to their business needs, using our flexible and down-to-earth approach to delivering projects. We have experienced developers who are skilled in developing robust, scalable applications.
# Junior/Regular/Senior Developer ONSITE
We’re looking for passionate developers (either with experience or looking for a first job) to join our projects for Nielsen Social that provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. In our work we process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The application is currently deployed across more than 500 AWS machines. On the project we work in small teams and do pair-programming, moreover we have a daily contact with product team.
Ruby, Rails, Hadoop, Hive, SQL, Git, Linux, AWS
# Quality Assurance Lead ONSITE
We’re looking for a QA Lead to work on automated testing and data validation processes. The project you’ll be working on provides analytic insights into social media, focused around tv-related activity. We process the whole Twitter stream in order to generate various reports on TV and advertising. The quality of data in these reports is extremely important to our clients, so we need to have the best possible validation and testing processes.
But the job is not all about technical skills - you’ll be the foundation of our Quality Assurance team, responsible for planning the release process and managing the QA team. You’re going to work with both the development and product team in order to assure the highest quality in the software we deliver to our clients.
Some time ago I've noticed that a few of my friends really enjoy going through newsletter emails and finding out about items that are on sale etc. They wouldn't necessarily look for a newsletter signup form on a website, but when a popup appears something clicks in their brains ("OMG, I really need this!") and they sign up.
I don't like these popups but well, most of the time I'm just not their target.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that there were times when I actually got converted by a popup.
When you think of that, if it offers something that's useful to you, clicking on it feels so natural and you don't analyze it too much.