Preface: I am a virtual recruiter.
Employers have found success at shrinking their candidate pool when adding even the slightest text in their copy when it comes to ability requirements. Some of my early jobs required skills and qualifications I never achieved or experienced; but I landed the job because my resume was slammed pack with solutions, and details of problem solving (as opposed to creating a resume that told the hiring manager nothing more than what my daily tasks were)
Dropbox may have plans to groom this web engineer into a larger role within the organization, and that often works well within organizations; providing the avenues for upward mobility. However they'd do themselves, and their potential job candidates a favor by indicating this up front instead of effectively discouraging great prospects the opportunity to apply simply because of a degree requirement that will lead to a career trajectory that far overshoots roles and responsibilities listed.
A four year degree in computer science for someone to be a web developer and an end-user support technician is asking for overqualified candidates who will very likely get more attractive offers later on down the road. But that's not to say Dropbox wont make their stay worthwhile, overqualified or under.
Shameless: I'd love to reach out to the DB team and talk about this.
Some people apply to job postings with the assumption that the requirements are only a rough guideline, while others apply only if they exactly meet the qualifications.
When you hear hiring managers complaining about how they put up a job posting for a Perl developer with 5 years of Perl experience, but got 100s of applications from people that are fresh out of college and haven't even heard of Perl, hiring practices like the ones you advocate are at fault. If job seekers can never know when to trust that the qualifications being asked for are really the ones that employers want, then there will always be a disconnect.
obviously if you are an amazing engineer without a degree, of course come talk to us. arash, my cofounder and the slacker that he is, does not have his bachelor's degree :)
so hope you can give us the benefit of the doubt that we didn't intend to exclude qualified people
asks someone who barely has the UK equivalent of a high school graduation (because he was programming for his first startup at 16), no degree, and had a very successful engineering-orientated career so far
I already had been doing front-end stuff for several years. I wasn't any less able to perform the job than the CS graduate peers who started in the same role the same time as me.
11 years later, I've not done badly for someone with no formal CS training.
I have a BS in CompSci, and I don't feel like I needed to get it to do quality web programming. Design patterns, AVC, etc were all things that I learned outside of my degree.
I mostly don't have an agenda other than I don't take this internet stuff nearly as seriously as everyone else, and just want to use it as a medium of expression before it becomes too hard to do it. Whether that's writing, music, code, or just making funny sites poking fun at obnoxious blowhards, I'm enjoying it while I can.
Not only that, but lots of his projects are relevant to HN... mongrel2 seemingly started out as a fun little "how can I put these things together" project, MulletDB is similar, etc.
I guess he found thre DropBox job too "sys-adminy". I think this is a big problem, companies hire all programmers when they should really be hiring more sys-admins (and testers). Hackers don't want to be sys-admins or testers. Hire people who do want to do these jobs.
For example, peetercooper's obsession with me probably means he has a little drawer where he keeps a picture of me under his socks so he can look at me late at night. He's a weird little dude.
See? You can take any public persona, and since nearly everyone is these days with the internet, and say anything that's obviously not true, or mostly true, or a parody.
But, it cuts both ways. In order to say something about me, you have to then become a public persona, which means you're also fair game, and, well, I'm just better at this than most people. :-)
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/box.net+dropbox.com/
no thanks.
Check their quantcast figures and you see a drastically different picture, with box.net way ahead. But in any event, page views probably are a very bad measure of these sorts of companies.
btw my post isnt trying to suggest either company is > than another, lets not get into that.
What's with the CS degree _requirement_ too? You don't really need 4 years of algorithms, data structures, operating systems, etc. to do what they want.
Meh, do not want.
As for the CS degree requirement, not having one myself I run up against this all the time. A good company will be able to test for equivalent capabilities. A CS degree from DeVry in 1995 is probably not the same as one from Stanford in 2006. But by setting it out as a requirement, you're sending a message to candidates. They don't want a programmer that stumbles about their job. They want one with certain analytical skills and a calculated approach to their job. No, you don't need a CS degree necessarily. But you probably want to be familiar with the material that having a CS degree would suggest you are familiar with.
No hiring manager worth their salt would turn away an exceptional candidate because of a lack of formal education unless there were some very specific professional requirements (e.g., you're hiring a professional engineer in countries that recognize them and you need somebody with a B.Eng. degree).
As for the CS degree requirement, no candidate worth their salt would send their resume to a place knowing that they lack the first item on the requirements list. You need to make it clear that you read and understood the post before applying (a.k.a. following simple directions).
They didn't put it under "nice-to-have", they didn't tuck "or equivalent experience" at the end. It's the first bullet on their "minimum-requirements" list.
I do not have a CS degree either, but I believe I can code with the best of them and I can rock their front-end world (I do not want this job though).
Had I been seriously looking for another job, I would have simply ignored their post and moved on regardless of compatibility because of that one liner.
My aesthetic skills are weak, and I am pursuing other goals long-term (much closer to the hardware), but do people think it would be a worthwhile tool to help prop myself up in the short-term?
So is HiiDef, creators and operators of Flavors.me, Goodsie, Dashboard.me and more!
Django, JQuery and/or *NIX administration.
We are distributed around the east coast of the United States, Canada and Australia. Everyone works on multiple sites simultaneously, making for a uniquely challenging and constantly changing work environment.
Email: jonathan@hiidef.com
I just can't figure it out, and it is bugging me. (Guess I won't get the job...)
function countdown (num) {
for (var i = 0; i <= num; i += 1) {
var make_cb = function (n) {
return function () {alert(num - n)};
}
setTimeout(make_cb(i), i * 1000);
}
} function countdown(num) {
if(num < 0) {
return;
}
setTimeout(function() {
alert(num);
countdown(num - 1);
}, 1000);
}
function countdown (num) {
for (var i = 0; i <= num; i += 1) {
setTimeout(function (i) {
return function(){ alert(num - i); }
}(i), i * 1000);
}
}
countdown(5); function countdown (num) {
for (var i = 0; i <= num; i += 1) {
let (j = num - i){
setTimeout(function () {
alert(j);
}, i * 1000);
}
}
}Traditional closure closes over the current variable values of a frame environment at each creation of an inner function instance. A new frame environment is cloned for the function instance with all the current variable values sealed. That's why it's called a closure; it's closed, sealed, that no one has access to it except the particular function instance.
Javascript cheats in its closure implementation. It doesn't create a new frame environment for each inner function instance, instead just references back to the parent's frame environment. Thus all inner function instances share the same frame environment. Any code in the parent function or in any function instance modifying a variable will instantly affect all the function instances. Closure has lost its meaning in Javascript. It should be called Shareture.
>>> map(apply, [lambda:i for i in range(5)])
[4, 4, 4, 4, 4]
* (mapcar 'funcall (loop for i from 0 to 5 collect (lambda () i)))
(6 6 6 6 6 6)
>>> map(apply, [lambda j=i:j for i in range(5)])
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
* (mapcar 'funcall (loop for i from 0 to 5 collect (let ((j i)) (lambda () j))))
(0 1 2 3 4 5)Grokking what's going on here is one of the more important parts of using closures without introducing unexpected bugs.
there is an entire section dedicated to jobs at yc companies, it is not off topic
Anyhow, there is one spelling mistake on the second line under "Nice-to-Have's." IT should be proficient and not Profiient.
Not a big deal really but might turn away some language nazis.
I'm a very happy user of Dropbox's free products and I'm glad to hear they're growing.