We're Mambu, a SaaS company providing the core banking engine for modern financial institutions. Our platform is cloud-native and helps banks, fintechs, and lenders run their business efficiently.
We're looking for Engineering Managers and Software Engineers, preferably with experience in Java and MySQL, and ideally with a background in financial services or large-scale systems. The roles can be upgraded to Senior for the candidates with the right skills and experience. Our stack is fully in the cloud, and we're remote-first but we also have offices where you can come work every day if you'd like. You'll collaborate with smart, driven people and help build robust systems as we continue to scale. We have a writing and document-based culture. We value accountability, customer obsession, and embracing challenges.
Tech stack: Java, MySQL, AWS/GCP/Azure
Location: Remote, but you must be based in Netherlands, Romania, or Lithuania. No relocation provided, and no work visa sponsorships provided.
Interview process: Coding interview, system design interview, company culture interview
Competitive compensation tailored to your location.
No agencies and no contractors.
Apply here (tell the recruiter you found this through Hacker News):
The work that you're saying you do daily from 7am-1pm, do you feel satisfied about it at the end of the day? Does it create meaning for you on the grander scheme of things? (based on what your personal values are, and you personally find meaningful)
If not, then it's probably time to switch employer, to one that has a product/mission that is aligned with a topic/field that would bring more meaning into your life.
If that's not possible, you could try spending one less hour per day on that job you have, and invest that hour in something that creates meaning in your own terms.
For structure and content, start by copying stories you like. Take well-respected short stories, even fairytales, and think what make the stories interesting to you. Then work with these elements to build your own short stories.
For verbal delivery, go find some highly-rated audiobooks for kids, and pay attention to how are the narrators using their voice to tell the story. Then, same as with what I said above, take elements that you think work and that you like, and incorporate them into your own style.
Finally, you need to practice a lot, and try new things as you discover them. Once in a take, sit down and take notes on paper or in a file of what has worked and you should keep doing, and what hasn't worked and you want to improve or stop. Rinse and repeat.
Can you provide two examples of situations or conversations in which you found it hard to trust someone's words?
And if possible for each example, specify what made you mistrust them, and what would have made you trust them.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, do you have two examples of situations in which it was easy for you to trust someone's words? What made you trust them?
If I'm on the go on my phone and there's a cool idea in the podcast I'm listening, then I take a screenshot of my locked screen as it shows my audio player (with the button shortcuts). And then later on I go back to those screenshots and I know which podcasts and which moments had important ideas.
If I'm doing active listening, i.e. listening to a podcast or watching a talk and actively taking notes, then I use https://sidenote.me
The biggest threat to DigitalOcean is that AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all going vertical by designing and manufacturing their own chips. Over times they'll be able to get hardware for cheaper, and also more specialized hardware that uses less power.
DigitalOcean will have to buy CPUs from Intel or Nvidia/ARM at a higher cost, and eventually maybe even from AWS or Microsoft, essentially giving money to their competition.
If DigitalOcean doesn't get into semiconductors quickly, the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by a major cloud provider as a low-cost branch, like airlines do.
I try to always formulate my questions using the classic STAR behavioral question format (specific situation, task, action, and result). You can look this up, there's plenty of articles about it online.
Then I ask questions that give me insights on the company's culture and how they perceive themselves. Below are some examples of the themes and questions I use. I generally ask only 2-3 questions at the end of an interview because of time limitation, so I always pick the ones that will give me information about the aspects I have the most concerns about and feel the need to dig into.
One extra trick: when I know I'll be meeting multiple people in multiple interview rounds, then I keep one of the questions the same across all rounds. I do this to see what different types of data I get from various people, and if the information converges or diverges. If they all have the same answer more or less it's a good sign, but if the answers differ, it means they're either mis-aligned internally, or they're trying to bullshit me in some way (sometimes they might have randomly different answers, and it doesn't mean anything).
Also, I sometimes use the answer to one of my questions from one round to narrow down another question in another round. For example, once I asked a developer about recent unpopular decisions (see below), to which he replied the founder asked all employees to show up no later than 10am, and the tone was perceived as top-down and not well received. So then in my chat with the founder, I asked him what he thought of the reaction people when he announced his ask for them to show up no later than 10am, and I was able to get insights as to what makes him tick (which I wouldn't have been able to ask if I had not collected that information in a previous interview).
Here are some examples of questions I ask, categorized per themes:
### Success
- How do you evaluate success? What was the last big achievement that was celebrated?
- Can you give me an example of a person or a team who did something that was very successful in the past year? How was this person rewarded for it?
### Conflict resolution
- Can you tell me of a time when you had a disagreement with someone on your team?
- What tends to create conflict, and how does it get resolved?
### Decision making
- How are decisions made when there’s disagreement and stakes are high?
- Can you describe an unpopular decision that was taken recently, and what was the result?
### Working with the founders (if a startup)
- What do you like the most about working with the founders?
- Do you have an example in mind of how the founders involved the employees in an important decision?
### Process
- Can you give me an example of the lifecycle of a feature? How do you go from idea to final implementation?
### Motivation
- Can you tell me of something that you're really proud of/not proud of?
- What do you like the most about working here?
- What is the one thing you would change about the company?
### Opportunity
- What was the company/department’s biggest challenge last year and what did you learn from it?
Although I image you'd need a significantly larger storage to store all sorts of high quality images, which shouldn't be an issue given how cheap storage has become.
Don't worry too much about this tweet, my guess is that the author wanted to express a strong opinion to provoke a reaction form a certain audience.
Once you reach a large scale, relational databases start being a problem for availability and replication of data across different availability zones. Operations become complicated (you have replication chains, master/slave setups, etc.)
If your data is relatively simple and doesn't require a lot of relations and foreign keys, then something like Cassandra can save a lot of headaches.
Btw, a common trick to make a relational database perform at scale by limiting joins is to "flatten data", i.e. replicate data across different tables to avoid joining them.
Finally, don't let yourself be fooled by anyone who claims they know "the better option." There is no better option. There is only a better option for a particular use case you're looking at, given the specific constraints at hands. That's what engineering is about, including software engineering.
If you want to learn more about designing storage systems by constraints, I recommend that you read the 2007 Dynamo paper from Amazon, and in particular section 2.3 "Design Considerations". Below is a link, you can easily find a PDF online if you need.
It's a French podcast covering a wide array of topics such as geopolitics, journalism, big tech, industrial espionage, economic warfare, etc.
I find it refreshing because the ideas and opinions discussed are very different compared to those you'd find in the usual anglophone media, and just that by itself is a ton of value.
I built something related called https://sidenote.me to take notes on YouTube videos, so I understand what you're trying to solve. Congrats on your launch, your interface looks very sleek!
My feedback about the product itself is that it's trying to do too much too soon. For example, the set interval slider, and all features in the "Pro Toolbar": are they really useful and necessary to your users? To me it seems they're not, and add confusion.
So the question you should ask yourself is: what is the one thing you want to solve for your users, and then make the interface do only this one thing and do it well. Only once you grow a user base you should add new features.
Could it be that the video is embedded somewhere else, without the YouTube interface with its buttons and comments, hence explaining why people don't add their reaction?
Does a view of a video when embedded counts the same as a view directly on YouTube?
We're Mambu, a SaaS company providing the core banking engine for modern financial institutions. Our platform is cloud-native and helps banks, fintechs, and lenders run their business efficiently.
We're looking for Engineering Managers and Software Engineers, preferably with experience in Java and MySQL, and ideally with a background in financial services or large-scale systems. The roles can be upgraded to Senior for the candidates with the right skills and experience. Our stack is fully in the cloud, and we're remote-first but we also have offices where you can come work every day if you'd like. You'll collaborate with smart, driven people and help build robust systems as we continue to scale. We have a writing and document-based culture. We value accountability, customer obsession, and embracing challenges.
Tech stack: Java, MySQL, AWS/GCP/Azure
Location: Remote, but you must be based in Netherlands, Romania, or Lithuania. No relocation provided, and no work visa sponsorships provided.
Interview process: Coding interview, system design interview, company culture interview
Competitive compensation tailored to your location.
No agencies and no contractors.
Apply here (tell the recruiter you found this through Hacker News):
https://careers-mambu.icims.com/jobs/2856/manager%2c-enginee...
https://careers-mambu.icims.com/jobs/2875/software-engineer/...