Never heard back after submitting, spent probably 10 hours on it

My strongest advice to you would be to not burn the candle at both ends during this time, and to rest and relax without worrying about what the future holds. It's often only in times of respite that one truly understands what they want to pursue in the future.

Ask yourself if you're embarking on this new career path out of intrigue or necessity. If you're doing this because you're worried where your next paycheck is going to come from in 3 months, then allow yourself the time to think clearly about what you actually want to be doing instead of where you think the industry is going, what jobs will be available, etc...

If you're genuinely interested in AI/ML topics then by all means go for it, but don't think you are "wasting time" by not studying whatever is hot right now because it will always become a back-end CURD work, nothing cutting edge situation if you're not interested in what you do.

I'm only giving you this advice because no where in your post did I see any mention about genuine interest in any of the topics you mentioned, my read on your situation from this post is that you are worried about your eligibility of employment and want to avoid being left behind once AI takes everyone else's lunches.

If it's any consultation I think we are actually very far away from that happening and the vast majority of people who say otherwise have a financial position at stake unless they can get you to think that as well.

TLDR: relax and take some time to think about what you actually want to do vs what is going to be able to get you a job in a few months time, you will be much happier in the long run for it. I know a lot of Crypto / Web3 people who could not wait to get into the space 2 years ago but now are desperately trying to get out after rebranding themselves. Not saying that AI is like this completely, but again know thyself before making any big career moves like this.

For example maybe your hypothesis is that pivoting to an AI tool that will scan your profile and give you a score back as to how optimized it is for finding new jobs would increase the amount of people willing to pay 5 dollars to have their profile scanned. Maybe this is something people are willing to pay for more since you can justify it costing some small amount of money for potentially a much larger return for the user if the suggestions help them get more interviews or become more discoverable to recruiters, etc...

And that’s one million before tax, before the preferred stock gets paid out to the big investors, after the lock out period where you can sell your stock a few months after the deal goes through. That’s not 1B valuation either, that’s someone buying the company for 1B in cash. Not impossible, but definitely unlikely.

If you work at google for 5 years you will almost definitely make more than you would working at posthog and getting acquired in the same amount of time, but yes if lighting strikes twice in the same place and posthog did an IPO and the stock 20xed you would miss out on that money

This is where interviews can and should be done differently. In my career some questions I’ve been asked in interviews are: serialize and deserialize a binary tree, create an in memory cache from scratch, design an elevator system for a building, sequence DNA strands together using dynamic programming, build a flight control system for an airport, recreate atoi function, etc…

Sure enough, none of these interview questions had pretty much anything in common with what work I would end up doing at the company, so this was an inefficient way to hire that wasted a lot of my time.

This would be like trying to find a plumber to fix my sink by having them come over, showing them the sink, then sitting them down to grill them on the theory behind some thermodynamics, Bernoulli’s principle, maybe throw in some design questions about how to redo my sink. This is surely how you find the best plumber because only the best will take the time to really understand what they are doing when they fix a sink right?

Like it or not the vast majority of work in the software industry is e-plumbing where you fix sinks and connect pipes together to start the flow of CRUD from one end to the other, which is why our way of interviewing people is insane.

As an exercise for the reader, see if you can figure out which interview questions I listed above were asked to work at a FFANG company vs small startup companies that are all bankrupt now. Pretty hard isn’t it?

As you alluded to, it’s very rare for even founders to make a life changing amount of money from a company they start, it’s exceedingly rare for early employees to have this happen and should not be a reason you consider working at a small company.

The right reasons to work at a small company are the other ones you mentioned: high impact, like working in small teams, interesting work, cool product, etc… but my point is that the interview process for the small company and the big company are often times very similar even though the amount of risk, scale, future career opportunities, and potential financial gain are worlds apart from each other, which isn’t right.

The level of effort I should have to put into an interview should be proportional to what I stand to gain by getting the job. This is kind of already how it works naturally because more desirable jobs have more applicants which makes it more competitive and requires more preparation. I stand to gain much more working at Google than I do at posthog, so why am I spending around the same amount of time interviewing at each place? Is working on a smaller team and having more impact on a smaller product worth it to me to do that? Personally that answer is no which is why I don’t understand the interview similarities (mainly time spent interviewing and acceptance rate in this case).

As someone who has gone through the roughly 9 hour interview process in the past, was it the docs and open source product that made you want to work there?

I’m not going to work my rear end off for 4 years to get 0.5% of potentially nothing and go through your dog and pony show of an interview cycle

What this really translates to is the founders saying “we think posthog is our golden ticket to becoming rich in an exit event someday, so don’t mess it up for us”. It’s just not politically correct to say that, so it’s expressed as being “passionate about the problems the company solves” or “working on something that feels yours”.

And if you’re not someone who wants to dance and clap along with the founders as they sing “I’ve got a golden ticket!” on the way to the chocolate factory, only to be left standing behind the gate as they enter, then ya go ahead and pivot because you’re killing the vibe here…

This felt like a humble brag to help make their point about hiring good talent and how many people want to be a hogger (or whatever they call people that work there) but this just really highlights how brutal the job market is. Yes the market is also flooded with unqualified applicants and or bots that will apply to any job listing thats posted, but still this is ridiculous.

I really feel bad for the 6 people who had to endure the technical interview AND THEN were given the honor of attending the "SuperDay" which sounds like a full day of at least 5 interviews, 2 - 3 being technical, and still got rejected. Not sure what the technical interview is like at posthog, but assuming this is just an hour phone screen those 6 people still probably had more than 7 hours devoted just to interviewing at this place just to get rejected. That's not including any time spent preparing for interviews or anything else either.

There must be a better way to do interviews. Posthog is not Google, Posthog (or any other startup) does not need to hire to the same standard that Google does.

Let me know when you're on par with Google in terms of revenue or benefits or prestige, or anything else really that Google offers then sure I will jump through as many hoops as you want for the interview. Until then, hard pass.

As a developer you should of course study security concepts and understand how to avoid creating exploits in what you are working on, but being a dev who understands a good amount about security is always going to be more useful to a company IMO

What factors led you to seeking out a publisher, was it mostly getting art for the game or did the publisher bring more to the table that made you decide it was worth it?

What advice would you have given yourself just starting out knowing what you do now?

What did you get stuck on the most when making the game? I know a lot of people who have great ideas for games but a lot of the ideas don't translate well into being able to realistically do them in the game because of complexity. Did you ever have ideas that you thought would be really cool to do but it ended up being too hard / time consuming to do?

How close was the functionality of the game when you released it to what you had envisioned at the start? Did you go through any major design changes while developing it?

Different story if your kid explicitly wants to make something on a website

From my experience there is a brief time where the company is very excited about the growth team, the team is able to show great results from tests they run, etc... but then after this the team kind of stagnates and eventually is disbanded / much of the work is either done by a third party or outsourced.

I've heard of these types of teams existing at almost every SaaS type company so I'm curious if anyone has seen or been a part of one that has been able to be successful long term.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130522

Points: 1

# Comments: 0