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.
> 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.
If I were to pick flagship schools for Canada for computer science and engineering, it wouldn't be those two... it'd be U Waterloo and U Alberta. Well, ok, U of Toronto, yes, but UBC doesn't come to mind.
But in Canada generally we don't have the same level of status game around school reputations that Americans seem to have. Certainly grads from U Waterloo do very well, but they may have as much to do with their excellent intern program than anything else.
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.
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.
there's a difference between hiring people with a proven track record (especially in this industry, e.g. known projects through github) and hiring your nephew just because he's a great guy.
Although I do agree that knowing about people's projects doesn't say enough about the fit (e.g. teamwork). However, white board code reviews won't really help finding that out either, imo. Parent poster didn't want imply that the whole interview process should be circumvented, only the (or some of the) technical part - I agree.
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.
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
I strongly agree with Banksy's view on advertisement:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
While I think there are some forms of advertisement that are acceptable or even desirable, what we see on the internet is not that, mostly due to the tracking and targeting, which almost every advertisement company is doing, but also because adverts are inherently trying to trick, pressure or encourage you to spend money on something even if you don't really want or need it.
> Maybe try some introspection.
I have. I've come to the conclusion that I judge people who work in industries I find morally questionable.
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.
I’m not making a value judgement on Banksy, just that I agree with that particular statement of his.
Re: second paragraph, I didn’t claim that everyone at google works on ads, you made that up. You don’t have to work on an immoral thing just an immoral employer for me to question your morals.
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.
"Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.
...One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything."
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.
I love your response because I have a PhD in Computer Science. I do LeetCode as and CodeWars problems in the mornings for fun (I like coding and helps me avoid getting rusty) and I have been a hiring manager for over 10 years.
But yeah, other than the "sexiness" of CS concepts it's only because of the "narrative" we want to push.
So you do think Leetcode is useful ? What's up with the flex ? Congratulations on the PhD and job, I guess ?. Looks like you could definitely invert a binary tree.
Leetcode is good for some things, but in my experience is it not a good factor to filter Software Engineers (it is a good metric to filter candidates to form a team for the IOI or similar).
This is a response I wrote elsewhere:
I've been growing Engineering teams for the last 10 years as hiring managers in different startups. At some point in our startup we had those kind of HackerRank questions as filters.
The thing we realized is that those sort of interviews optimize to hire a specific type of very Jr Engineers who have recently graduated or are graduating from CS. That is because those are the people that have the time to churn these types of "puzzle" problems. Particularly, there are 3 types of recent graduates from CS or related fields: The ones that don't know crap, the ones that focus on these sort of problems, and the ones that are "generalists" because they dove into all sort of subjects during their degree.
I found out that the Jr people that excel at those sort of problems have a huge learning curve to climb to be productive in "production", real life environment. On the contrary, the "generalists" work better.
We stopped doing those sort of algorithm puzzles interviews after that realization, and we started getting really good Engineers with great real-life experience.
