Same thing happened to me at Zipline, they give you a basic problem to solve in a take home assignment and then ask you to do something you’re “proud of” or to really show off your skills for the rest of it.
Never heard back after submitting, spent probably 10 hours on it
I would firstly make sure you are recovering from your condition during your medical leave my friend.
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.
A lot of times the actual business emerges from something that started out as an idea that wasn't working. If you are still enjoying working on things in this space and it seems like this idea is running out of steam, pivot to something close to it and see if that has any effect. The one thing you do need to do is treat these pivots like an experiment so you actually learn something from them and can measure success.
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...
Sure as long as you realize you are really betting big, if you’re lucky and after dilution you own 0.1% of the company, posthog needs to sell to someone for a billion dollars for you to make one million.
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
Sure but the burden is on the company to understand what skills they need to hire for well enough to hire for the role, not on the candidate to just prepare for everything and roll the dice in a 9 hour interview
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?
Does Google not offer RSU’s to employees outside of the US? You won’t ever get rich off of salary alone, salary and RSU’s of a growing publicly traded company is a different story though.
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).
No I didn’t bother to read their documentation after seeing their website was apparently made on Myspace.
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?
Ya I have yet to meet anyone who is passionate about analytics plumbing surprisingly, I’m glad posthog has found the 4 people in the world who truly are.
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…
I personally think there are more efficient ways to get a high signal to noise ratio on if you are going to be a good hire or not without having the candidate invest almost 9 hours into an interview process, but that’s just me
Ah ok my mistake, so that’s 8 hours including the review and discussion portion for the super day, then let’s say 45 minutes for the technical interview so 8 hours and 45 minutes of time spent interviewing at a minimum.
Wow. 900 applications down to 10 "SuperDay" participants down to 4 hires. All to work at.... posthog. What a depressing statistic.
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.
No disrespect, it's important to have people paying attention to these things or they would just never get fixed, but that's my take away from once being excited about going potentially going into this field to seeing what the day to day work was like
I wouldn't pivot to security completely, it honestly seems like that field has been boiled down to moving data from automated security jobs into Jira and chasing down engineers to fix dependabot issues.
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
Looks awesome, congrats on your success 200k sales is a huge achievement!
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?
Don't start with web development if your kid is just interested in learning more about how computers work or writing some code. As others have said there are a lot of beginner friendly tools that teach fundamentals better.
Different story if your kid explicitly wants to make something on a website
Unfortunately I used to think this was the main purpose of the interview as well, but have been proven wrong time and time again.
The only thing that matters in most places is getting to the optimal solution quickly. It doesn't matter if you explain your thought process or ask clarifying questions, just get to the solution and answer the time and space complexity correctly and you pass.
Like others have said I think this is a symptom of the sheer number of people applying and needing to go through the process, there is no time for nuance or evaluating people on if you would actually like to work with them or not.