rachofsunshine

7 ms·

1.
What our data says about timed coding problems(otherbranch.com)
3 points by rachofsunshine 10mo ago|1 comments
2.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
To where are you local, what are your desiderata, and what does your resume look like? I can take a look privately if you'd like, or publicly here if you want broader opinions / to serve as a data point for others.
3.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Rationality on an individual level is not the same thing as what produces the best long-term outcomes for both parties. On an individual level, bringing up comp immediately significantly reduces your chances of being moved forward. It shoul
4.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
This is a specific application of a good general principle. Big companies need to watch for failure modes. Small ones need to watch for success modes, because the default is always failing.
5.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
We can. That's kind of the entire point of our business. Check back in a week or two - we've got another blog post on some of our interviewing data in the pipeline.
6.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Yeah, so did I. Being both a ride-or-die leftist and the owner of a company is a weird place to be sometimes, and it's basically the way I figured I could best implement the world I want to see inside the world we have.
7.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
It isn't, but neither is the original post! It's an important addition.
8.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Those things are fakeable, but there are plenty of people who will aggressively signal a LACK of hunger. It's more of a negative predictor than a positive one.
9.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Yeah, to some extent you have to be willing to deal with this stuff in recruiting, which is why I've taken on the clients under discussion at all. In my Triplebyte postmortem (also on the blog), one of the mistakes I talked about was t
10.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
It doesn't even need to be "good enough". People SHOULD be picky about founding engineers. But they should be picky about HIRES, not about top-of-funnel proxies for skill.
11.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
This is a good addendum. Do you mind if I add it to the post (credited, of course)?
12.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Depends on the business. Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configured myself, and it's been sufficient so far; better tech
13.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
There is some truth to this, but I would argue (with a considerable amount of data on both assessments and hiring behaviors) that it is less true than people might like to hope it is. I very intentionally did not write anything about find
14.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
There's a bit of doublethink involved. On the one hand (and as I mentioned in the post), yes, most employers are not as dumb as I'm making them sound. In principle they know they need to comprpmise - but in practice, they often ba
15.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
And, more to the point, that they'd hire a _better_ imperfect candidate by taking those four months doing tough interviews with lots of imperfect candidates (rather than hiring one in desperation later).
16.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
The market is definitely not dead. It started warming up last summer and has continued to do so throughout 2025. But the market is two-tiered in a way it hasn't been before, particularly w.r.t. remote hiring. Almost all engineers want
17.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
I've been in recruiting for seven years! If I weren't frustrated with clients sometimes, there'd be something deeply wrong with me :)
18.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Author of the OP here - to put some more empirical backing to this, virtually every single engineer in our candidate pool values illiquid equity at 20% or less of face value, and about one in three give it no weight at all. Totally off the
19.
You don't want to hire "the best engineers"(otherbranch.com)
394 points by rachofsunshine 1y ago|319 comments
20.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Sometimes simple points are important, especially when those simple points are not generally agreed-upon. A proposed law declaring pi to be 3.00 would indeed be bad, and the simplicity of its badness would not make it any less bad.
21.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Zero-knowledge proofs allow unique consumable tokens that don't reveal the individual who holds them. I believe Ecosia already uses this approach (though I can't speak to its cryptographic security). That, to me, seems like it cou
22.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Everyone's just playing a bunch of investor signaling games, because founders/VCs by nature are living in the world of finance, not the world of decision-making (at least in their public personas). It's part of why I opted ou
23.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
> Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. People who are learning a new topic are precisely the people least able to do this. A friend o
24.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
New networks always start on top of old ones - presumably someone will, at some point, standardize an agent interface for these sorts of systems. Funnily enough, we already have a precedent for computers communicating by phone: the modem! T
25.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
What makes Goodhart's Law so interesting is that you transition smoothly between two entirely-different problems the more strongly people want to optimize for your metric. One is a measurement problem, a statement about the world as it
26.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
> The private citizen has the option to pay cash, bitcoin, trade goods or services, etc...everyone is[n't] entitled to convenience in every situation. These options aren't small impositions, they're sufficient added overhe
27.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
Because we know that not doing so leads to bad outcomes, and in some cases, to outright catastrophe. A person who was not invested in subprime mortgages in 2006 had no skin in the game - yet the fact that others did invest in subprime mor
28.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
"Small" is doing a lot of work there. Large entrenched companies have leverage small businesses do not, in the same way that a large moon orbits in a way a test particle of infinitesimal mass does not. We already recognize this wi
29.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
I think there's also a sampling bias here? ATLAS, the survey that discovered the comet, is specifically looking for potential Earth impactors. One assumes that would involve looking close to Earth's own orbital plane.
30.
by rachofsunshine 1y ago
We know how fast it is moving and how far from the Sun it is. If its velocity is greater than the escape velocity of the Sun at its current distance, it can't have gained that velocity just from its orbit around the Sun (because by def

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