I applied but didn't get in to MIT undergrad for computer engineering. I ended up attending a good state school instead. Years later, I attended MIT for grad school.
With that context, my advice is twofold:
1. Surround yourself with people who will challenge you
2. Make financial decisions using net present value (NPV)
I've taken classes on four campuses over the years and found the quality of the instruction in the classroom was universally high and uncorrelated with the prestige of the institution. However, I found that I learned more deeply and tackled more ambitious goals when I was surrounded by other students in the most challenging programs. Furthermore, I continue to observe stark difference in the post-college opportunities for graduates that are highly correlated with each institution's reputation.
As for NPV, your chosen field means that the money you save or spend in the next few years will be swamped by your income later in life. Make a spreadsheet that stretches out over your working life and calculate the NPV of both paths.
Steadily | Full Stack Engineer | Austin, TX or Remote | steadily.com
Steadily is 6-month old, $4M-funded insurtech building a full-stack insurance service for landlords. We’re fast, affordable, and amazing at customer service. Our customers love being insured by us, even when they have a claim.
Why join us: you'll be in good company. Not to toot our own horn too much, but the founders are pretty solid engineers. Our VP of Engineering started as junior dev at his company when it was 15 people and grew it up to more than 2,000. The president has gone through YC twice and had two exits.
http://picktrace.com/ (YCS15) was in our batch. Both the founders grew up on a farm and build tools for people to use out in the field like how to accurately keep track the number of baskets of strawberries a worker picked so they get paid the right amount when there's no WiFi or cellular connection.
Our Assessments team has a simple mission: help candidates get the right job. We let people build a profile to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities using job assessments… we’re trying to make the resume a thing of the past.
Our Assessments team (former YC S15) has a simple mission: help candidates get the right job. We let people build a profile to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities using job assessments… we’re trying to make the resume a thing of the past.
Our team is highly distributed geographically so this position is open to remote candidates anywhere in the US, Canada, or Brazil as well as in our offices in Austin and San Francisco.
Our team is nimble and scrappy. We ship new capabilities often and quickly by explicitly asking ourselves the 80/20 question a.k.a. the Pareto Principle.
Indeed Assessments is the new Interviewed (YC S15). We are a rapidly growing and highly capable engineering team building the most popular job site on the planet. Every month, over 200 million people count on us to help them find jobs, publish their resumes, process their job applications, and connect them to qualified candidates for their job openings. With engineering hubs in Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Tokyo and Hyderabad, we are improving people's lives all around the world, one job at a time.
I registered an alias with my middle initial: Darren.n@ that I give to anyone non-critical. It forwards to my main email and I have a filter to automatically put those messages in my "low priority" folder that I check once a day.
That with keyboard shortcuts to mark all as read and archive does the trick for me.
Watching the graphics quality of the Zelda demo, I can't help but think: If only this weren't on Nintendo. The graphics look equivalent to Elder Scrolls: Morrowind (2002). As with so many Nintendo demos; I find myself wishing they were a cross-platform game studio rather than a lagging hardware company.
Interviewed builds job assessments that let candidates demonstrate their real world skills so that hiring managers don't have to rely on resumes, behavioral interviews, and personality tests -- which are inherently flawed. By completing job simulations, instead, the best candidates stand out regardless of their educational background or years of experience. Our customers love it.
Over the last year, we've added fantastic customers like Uber, Fidelity Investments, Upwork, Thumbtack, Zillow. We need to expand our account management team to ensure all of their needs are met.
Here's what you'll do as an account manager:
- Own a set of key accounts and ensure that they are delighted with Interviewed and are achieving success in hiring by using us. That means proactively evaluating their hiring process for better strategies, responding to questions and requests, and frequent check-ins.
- Onboard new accounts by building out their hiring pipeline (jobs, assessments, automation, correspondence templates) and training new users.
- Ensure job candidates are having a smooth experience by troubleshooting issues and providing guidance to job seekers on behalf of our customers.
- Create assessments by researching and writing scripts for new assessments, proofreading and editing for other members of the team, and updating FAQs and macros.
We don't really care about your background because, after all, we are trying to help companies move away from traditional hiring. Some of the best people we've worked with came from recruiting, sales, and the arts. They have the dedication, endurance, and above all, enthusiasm needed to succeed in a dynamic, multinational tech company. If you are a great communicator, work fast, and are willing to take risks, we’d love to talk!
Our hiring process uses our own product and it usually only takes about one week from first contact to final decision!
Round 1: We'll send you an invitation to complete some questions online. These are designed to show us how well you communicate in writing (really important for a remote team).
Round 2: We'll schedule a short phone call to get to know you and let you ask questions about the role. We'll also invite you to a 1-hour work sample (a mini project) that is a simplified version of something you will do if hired.
Round 3: We'll schedule a day that's convenient for you to take on the role of account manager. You'll work with the rest of the team on three projects that will produce concrete deliverables by the end of the day. The projects are challenging but fun. This is your chance to see what we do, up close, and get to know the rest of the team. We provide a stipend to thank you, too.
Our generous compensation package will include stock options, medical and dental insurance, a 401K plan, and paid vacations.
We're Interviewed (YC S15) and we build job simulations.
We're taking the parts of hiring that work for developers and applying it to non-technical jobs. We know that resumes don't predict who will be a great hire. Instead, the way to identify the best candidate is to let them work on real-world problems in their native habitat. We think the same thing is true for customer service, sales, marketing, and lots of other roles. That's what we do…
Here are some of the engineering challenges on our roadmap:
- Reduce the latency for transcription of audio files to near real-time
- Design sophisticated UIs using React + Flux or Backbone to let our customers build their own simulations (imagine Wufoo on steroids)
- Chat bots (text and voice) that simulate complex customer interactions and are tailored for different roles
- NLP and machine learning algorithms to analyze emails, chats and voice recordings, score them across a variety of dimensions and predict who the best candidates are
We switched to Cloudinary.com a few months ago. We're in love with them. They have a slew of integration libraries and support things like document to image conversion out of the box.
I'm halfway done creating my living will. I appreciate the contextual information like "Unless you specify otherwise, most health care documents state that you wish to receive all treatment necessary to keep you comfortable and alleviate pain."
Right now that info is hidden in a tooltip. Although it will lengthen the page, I think it should be visible.
It sounds like you would benefit from offering a menu of registration choices:
- Facebook / Twitter / Google
- Email+ other
As with AirBnB registration, you would strongly encourage users to register using a social media auth but allow them to use an email + nothing else if they desire.
You can then apply a simple risk scoring model that says (I'm simplifying here):
* Facebook + 200 friends + > 3 year account age = auto-approve
* Email flag; manual verification
Critically, you don't reveal to red-flagged users that they've been placed in a sandbox.
It's interesting that you "have tons and tons of ideas for mobile apps, web applications" but don't see them through to completion.
I'm the opposite: few worthwhile ideas but consistently finish the side projects I start, however minor -- I don't allow myself to start a new one until I've finished the last one.
Build embedded insurance at a Series B startup as first product hire.