Yipes, I don't want to discourage anyone from applying. I think I was a special case of desperate/underqualified. That's why the process took me so long - I had to catch up big-time, and was extra paranoid about giving this my best shot (crossing my t's and dotting my i's). That meant spacing out my interviews so I had more time to prepare and improve between them.
Also, just wanted to note that the interview process has been greatly improved since we were able to allocate a person full-time to handling recruiting, scheduling interviews, etc. I don't know stats on our current turnaround time from application submission to offer, but I'm pretty sure it's much better (maybe a couple weeks to a month).
Yes, I found it valuable/important to study basic data structures and algorithms before my interviews. Specifically, I read Wikipedia articles and worked through problems in Programming Interviews Exposed, although there are probably many better resources available these days.
Algorithmic questions, while often not very representative of the work that you'll do as a dev, are really common interview questions at many companies. I think this is in part because they're usually well encapsulated and don't require extra context/specialized knowledge. They're also usually not very programming language-dependent.
Thanks for the comment! Hm, I'm not sure what school you went to, but an ECE degree at Duke is not like an EECS degree at MIT. It leans much more towards the electrical engineering side of things, and very, very few of my peers (in fact, I can't think of any who didn't get a joint CS degree) became programmers afterwards. You can check out the curriculum here: http://www.ee.duke.edu/undergrad/bse-degree-planning.
Edit:
I'd like to also add this point from my blogpost, which can perhaps give a better sense of my ability before I applied:
> Unlike many software developers, I didn’t start programming when I was 10. I started in college at the ripe age of 18 and took a grand total of 4 programming courses during my 4 years there. I was not a stand-out student in any of my programming or engineering courses. No teacher saw promise in me, took me under their wing, or mentored me to greatness.
Just wanted to chime in that we're also hiring general (not just mobile) devs, data scientist-engineers, general product designers, and interns in all of the above categories!
I'm a female developer w/ a EE degree, but mostly self-taught wrt coding.
My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring things even earlier. I think becoming a great {coder, thinker, leader, etc.} requires internalizing that at some level, it's okay to break the rules.
I eventually found my way onto IRC around age 12, where everyone posed as a 17-yr-old female from LA. I was thankfully super paranoid and fended off child molesters by pretending I was a 56-yr-old man from Texas. ;)
Thanks for sharing. After reading the Mercury News article, I googled around and pulled up the following piece by Businessweek. It's longer but more detailed, and, IMO, better written.
Congrats, Jamie and team! As a Khan Academy developer I can attest that this was a substantial technical undertaking.
"While it's possible that within, say, 10 years, internet access will have reached near global ubiquity, that shouldn't stop us from actively finding ways to work around its current limitations, to reach populations in need; waiting 10 years means letting already disadvantaged communities fall another generation behind, perpetuating the global digital divide as we move into whatever its next instantiation may be."
++. Kudos for highlighting (and tackling) the compounding nature of inequality.
She has a physics degree from Duke, and back when we were freshmen together, was considering majoring in CS, among other technical majors. I'm not sure how representative she is of the batch, but for people with existing technical skills/background, 10 weeks of focused coding practice + feedback could be a pretty big help.
Is it really so counterintuitive? I think PG is making it out to be more complicated than it really is.
Solve a big, annoying problem for lots of people. Dropbox was obviously a great idea; look at how much trouble people went through to share files (using flashdrives, CDs, email, spammy uploading sites or ones that enforced a delay) before it got big. Just because there are existing players in the space doesn't mean the problem is solved. There are so many other major inconveniences that people have to put up with that are incredibly ripe for disruption. Healthcare - why is it so damn hard to get an instant, cheap medical opinion on a non-urgent but still worrying issue if you don't have a doctor in the family? Apartment rental (for both owners and tenants).
The hard part is not telling whether or not something is a good idea. It's evaluating whether or not the team can pull it off.
Hi zhemao, thanks for the comment! I'm a Khan Academy developer. I just wanted to add that we do hire educators. Among them are Beth and Steven who are our in-resident art history faculty (http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team). We also have a dedicated School Implementations team (http://ka-implementations.tumblr.com/) working directly with schools to understand how Khan Academy can be integrated in classrooms and to evaluate our performance against independent test results.
I just bought a domain from Name.com yesterday (in an effort to escape from GoDaddy) and I'm surprised at how nasty their interface is. These big registrars really try to make their users suffer.
Also, just wanted to note that the interview process has been greatly improved since we were able to allocate a person full-time to handling recruiting, scheduling interviews, etc. I don't know stats on our current turnaround time from application submission to offer, but I'm pretty sure it's much better (maybe a couple weeks to a month).