Lessons From A Silicon Valley Job Search

Reference

• Finding the right level of confidence between over- and under-.
• Some people and companies are better or worse at interviewing candidates than others.
• Some companies pay out for the interview.
• Be quietly confident: there are still not that many Rails apps makers and maintainers.
• OSS and active StackOverflow and cool blog.
• Always assume that “experience with any of our technologies is just a plus.”
• Engineer crunch: There are lots of jobs for engineers but not enough people with skills to do them all.
• Cover letter will matter only to get you through the door. Do quirky things there.
• Where to look: HN Who’s hiring, AngelList, LinkedIn, Hired.com, “Hire me” on the blog.
• Just make interviews even if you get annihilated.
• Standard questions:
  • Yourself
  • Next product/team/technical challenge
  • Scaling applications
  • Cool project worked on recently
• Algorithms, phone screen process, distributed systems
• Possible questions: Infrastructure for a link-shortener and what happens when you go to Google?
• Write about the interview.
• Find out next steps. Actually scheduling and/or doing phone interviews are really tiring.
• On-site: takes a really long time!