One of the things I rarely see mentioned when discussing career prospects of startups vs large corporations is how different their hiring filters are.
If you are self-taught, lacking credentials, and don't live in a major market, it can be difficult to get in the door at a FAANG. Whereas start-ups can be much more likely to take a chance on someone with a non-conventional background.
So for some of us, large corporations aren't even an option until after we've taken that startup job and the startup has done well enough that people have heard of it.
I just went through the job search again, and I found the exact opposite to be true. for context, I went to a regionally-known (at best) state university and have just a few years of experience at a small company you've probably never heard of. so not quite "self-taught" but pretty far from what you'd think of as a the typical FAANG employee.
I applied to at least twenty roles at startups and small/medium-sized companies that seemed like a good fit for my skills and wrote thoughtful cover letters for each one. not a single one of those employers responded, not even to reject.
I also applied to a couple FAANGs, thinking it was a pretty long shot. but I ended up getting two on-sites, one of which I converted to an offer. there's definitely some truth to what people say about the unreasonable/irrelevant DS/algo problems, but I found it comforting to know for once what I was actually being assessed on.
not sure whether I got lucky with the FAANGs, unlucky with the smaller companies, or what, but just thought I'd share that anecdote. not the outcome I was expecting at the beginning of the process.
> If you are self-taught, lacking credentials, and don't live in a major market, it can be difficult to get in the door at a FAANG. Whereas start-ups can be much more likely to take a chance on someone with a non-conventional background.
Don't self select out of these jobs. I've been an interviewer at FAANGs. We take talent where we can and count ourselves lucky.
Our recruiters call everyone given enough time. Reach out to one directly on LinkedIn for an even better chance at an initial screening call. Ask for a referral from someone already working there in your wider network. Ask for a referral from Blind. Ask for a referral from HN.
From there it's your ability to pass the interview, not any set of credentials (different thread please on the interview process).
This has reverted in the last decade. Albeit the competition for companies with big names like hard makes it virtually impossible to pass the filter without a referral.
I suppose it depends on the method used for backup and restore. If you replace the entire graph.db directory with one from a backup, ids are kept intact.
I was relying on this just yesterday. We use graphenedb for our production database and I needed to load a production backup locally for testing. It was really useful that I could query a node by id both locally and on prod and get the same result.
Yeah, for debugging it's ok, but we once had to migrate between versions where we couldn't keep graph.db but had to recreate all nodes and relationships. Relying on id's in production anywhere outside of single transaction is too unreliable.
I feel like the pattern of "solve this puzzle, get an interview" has fallen out of fashion in the past few years.
In 2012 I got an interview at facebook by solving a puzzle that involved adding weights to a recursive arrangement of levers on top of levers. I remember both having a lot of fun with the puzzle and knowing that I would have never landed the interview any other way because I was coming from a non-traditional background and still relatively junior.
I think Google's foobar came out a few years later. I had some fun with them and got through the first rounds, but by that point I already had a job and never got around to finishing it.
I also remember doing some fun puzzles on codeeval, hoping their business model of linking people to companies would gain some steam, but the companies they signed up never seemed to be very interesting.
Ya i remember doing them pretty often 5-6 years ago. When i went to remember some of the fun ones for my friends who like puzzles, i couldnt find any of them, so i posted this.
Unfortunately, all of the programming jobs here are either in publishing (low pay) or government contracting (bureaucratic headaches).
And while the cost of living is less than NYC and SF, it ain't exactly cheap either.
Amazon's decision to come to Crystal City makes sense to me because there are a bunch of young college grads and no competition from the other FAANG companies.
If you're a young, ambitious, programmer trying to decide where to start your career though, I'd suggest going to SF/SV, NYC, Seattle, or Boston because those places provide more options.
For all the helpful advice offered both here and on Reddit about how to do this, I wish there had been more time asking if this was something the OP should be doing in the first place.
I completely understand the frustration if this is indeed the above set of films and it's been over eleven years since the digitization agreement and files have not yet been made freely available to the public.
That said, planning to use a researcher's pass to "set these treasures free" and blaming Amazon for not having generated more revenue from these films makes it sound like the OP thinks he knows better than the staff of the National Archives how to best care for these assets and that he knows better than the folks at Amazon how to turn a profit. To me, it sounds more than a little arrogant.
A big reason the National Archives enters into agreements like this with companies is that digitization, especially on their scale, is expensive. If it weren't for agreements like this, Amazon would only want to digitize the films for which they knew they could turn a profit and the vast majority of the collection would sit un-digitized and be at risk of loss. The tradeoff is between the immediacy of access vs the number of assets digitized and the team at NARA made the decision that it was better for the American people to have more assets digitized.
I'm worried that the next time NARA is in talks with someone about a digitization agreement (for example, if there's a large number of early jazz audio recordings on 1/4" reels and Spotify is interesting in paying the cost of digitization in exchange for 2-3 years of exclusivity) that the company will point to this example and say "didn't you just let a researcher publish the entire collection Amazon digitized? How can you assure us the same thing won't happen with these recordings?" The result will be the National Archives clamping down on researcher access. I think that would be a net loss for everyone.
A reasoning that doesnt require (too much) arrogance: contracts and business rules hold despite changes in context. Plans change, people leave, things are forgotten. But the contract, and its limitations, go on.
Since amazon was only looking to get its investment back, but not a profit, then clearly the intent of both parties was to eventually have it release to the public. Whoever on amazon’s side pushed the deal presumably thought they would be sold, but it clearly didn’t happen. It’s much more likely this has been sitting on a backburner somewhere, left as some forgotten plan, than some kind of long-term strategy to induce sales.
Thus, by virtue of an ill-written contract, we’ve entered a situation that no one wants. Amaxon no longer cares about it, the museum presumably prefers releasing it, and the public can only benefit from it.
By virtue of that same contract, there’s an escape hatch that might bring us back to a state where everyone is content.
It would make sense to exploit it.
Ofc, this is assuming Amazon doesn’t care. But amazon is a company, and the larger a company is, the less distinguishable it is from a government. And governments certainly have control over things it has collectively forgotten about, as it only rarely operates a single, like-minded, cooperative organism.
And amazon is indeed a very large company. It would hardly be unsurprising for Amazon to not even be aware this contract still exists.
> The result will be the National Archives clamping down on researcher access.
Or maybe the National Archives will stop making deals where free distribution of the material is unlikely to happen for decades and will instead open up greater access to researchers.
Or they could make the same deals but put a deadline on them to prevent the exclusivity from sitting in limbo forever. That would at least give Amazon an incentive to distribute the material rather than just squatting on its monopoly.
> A big reason the National Archives enters into agreements like this with companies is that digitization, especially on their scale, is expensive. If it weren't for agreements like this, Amazon would only want to digitize the films for which they knew they could turn a profit and the vast majority of the collection would sit un-digitized and be at risk of loss.
And yet there are researchers willing to do this quickly and for free, so why do we even need Amazon in the loop?
I don't know why this popped up on the front page of HN today, but for anyone who enjoys the history of audio recordings, I highly recommend checking out UCSB's cylinder preservation and digitization project:
And the Great 78 Project is preserving 78 RPM records. http://great78.archive.org/ There are over 100,000 recordings available to stream online now. https://archive.org/details/78rpm (This collection also includes the Cylinder Archive for some reason.) The ones from George Blood are ripped 4 times at once with four tone arms with different needles, then each of the four gets equalized by a sound engineer and one is picked as the best. All 8 copies are uploaded to the Internet Archive. http://great78.archive.org/preservation/
I tried doing something very similar to this. It ended up being so draining I couldn't do it long-term.
Specifically, I was in Washington DC and the startup I wanted to work for was in San Jose. My then-girlfriend (now fiancé) has the kind of job that can only be done in DC. I agreed to fly out for a week every month or so and work remotely the rest of the time. I did it for a little over a year but the travel wore me out and I struggled to find a healthy routine working from home.
I see threads like this and think that the solution to this problem has to be more remote work. I just wish I could be one of the people for whom it works as well in practice as it does in theory.
The solution is equal parts "more remote work" and "you don't need to be based in the Valley to be a tech company, so go make your physical location somewhere that people can afford". It's this whole chicken vs. egg of "The valley attracts talent so we should be where the talent is".
I spent a lot of time asking myself the question "would this company be successful if it had been started in St Louis?". On the one hand, they could offer an incredible salary to cost of living ratio. However, when I thought about my coworkers, a good number of them had spouses/significant others who worked for Facebook/Apple/Google. Also, there was a lot of value in knowing that if this company went belly-up, there would always be another company nearby to work for.
At least in this case, the decision to be located in the valley was rational at the individual level, even if it may be irrational collectively.
I think Seattle, Boston, LA, and NYC also have critical masses of talent that make them acceptable for starting a tech company, but unfortunately those places aren't really affordable either. The decrease in proximity to talent and capital probably isn't worth the marginal savings in cost of living.
If anyone is going to break the chicken vs. egg cycle and set up shop somewhere truly affordable, I think it will have to be one of the big companies, opening up a satellite office and offering employees the ability to choose where they want to work. They're all so profitable that they don't seem to mind the money that's going to Bay Area landowners. I wonder how expensive things will have to get before they start to get creative.
The Valley attracts talent only because that’s where all the startup jobs are. If you don’t want to work in startups, or if startups would branch out and stop glomming on to single locations, this would equalize more.
It's really more the established tech companies that draw the talent out here. In this generation, that's Google/Apple/Facebook; before that, SGI/Tandem/Sun/Cisco/Oracle/Yahoo; before that, HP/IBM/Ampex/Shockley/Lockheed/Stanford. They're the ones with generous relocation packages, a national brand name, and the ability to give an attractive offer to anyone in the world.
The startup ecosystem feeds off of that and California's outlawing of noncompetes. Employees get bored at working at a big company and have an idea for some way to employ the technology they've learned towards another industry. There's ample angel investors & VC floating around because of the profitability of previous companies. Oftentimes they have a spouse at one of the big companies who can continue to provide stability & health insurance.
The list of famous companies out here that can trace their ancestry back to one of [Shockley, Ampex, Stanford, IBM, HP] includes Fairchild, Intel, AMD, NVidia, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Atari, Dolby, Oracle, Salesforce, Memorex, Seagate, Apple, General Magic, Radius, Claris, E-Bay, StumbleUpon, Uber, Danger, Android, Nest, Be, NeXT, SGI, Cisco, Sun, Tandem, Siri, Yahoo, Google, Odeo, Twitter, Square, YCombinator, Netgear, Netscape, LoudCloud, Ning, a16z, Instagram, Whatsapp, Paypal, Slide, Yelp, Palantir, YouTube, LinkedIn, and likely many others. That's using a definition of "trace their ancestry back" as "a founder previously was an employee of or student at one of the other organizations in the set." Pretty much the only major Silicon Valley companies that are not included are the various YC companies (Reddit, AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, etc.) and Facebook, all of which would be if you extend the definition of "ancestry" to include "seed funder was in the set". (YC is in the set via Stanford => Yahoo => YC, Facebook's first investor was Peter Thiel, who got his BA and JD from Stanford.)
My video conference rig is a Micro Studio Camera 4K, Video Assist 4k, and Arduino shield all going into a Decklink card on an Ubuntu desktop machine. The Studio Camera, Video Assist and Arduino shield all get pretty hot, so I don't run them continuously. The Video Assist does weird things when it's hot like having the audio meters stop working, even though it's still transmitting audio to the SDI output just fine.
That said, the Decklink has been rock-solid in the 5+ years I've owned it and we had a VideoHub at a past workplace that worked great. I actually recommend all the Blackmagic stuff I've worked with, but have seen heat consistently been an issue.
If this works as described, it will be a lifesaver.
I've been running nuts on Heroku for my Electron app and never got it fully working. (It was very good at being able to tell there was an update available, but performing the update wouldn't work)
One (perhaps non-representative) data point: I have teammates who live in Villa La Angostura and Cordoba and I chat with them using Google hangouts every day. Their bandwidth has never been an issue for video chat.
If you are self-taught, lacking credentials, and don't live in a major market, it can be difficult to get in the door at a FAANG. Whereas start-ups can be much more likely to take a chance on someone with a non-conventional background.
So for some of us, large corporations aren't even an option until after we've taken that startup job and the startup has done well enough that people have heard of it.