The people who matter aren't going to comment on this, but I'm out celebrating, so what the hell. I was actively looking for a job until about 6 hours ago. I read lambda calculus papers for fun. Hayzap, and the class of companies hayzap belongs to, is not even on our radar. Hayzap does not have hard problems and does not need a team who can ace this interview, and those of us who can ace this interview are uniterested in you. We don't want to take your worthless equity and we don't want to take a 50% pay cut for the privilege of working for your startup.
I think I understand what you are saying, but I don't understand how it relates to the article. For example, the article doesn't seem to say anything about Hayzap being boring and a turnoff to engineers on account of paying 50% of market and offering worthless equity.
It sounds like there is some personal history here. Is there?
(parent again) even though my comment seems popular by votes if not comments, i wish i had checked my tone more carefully, i blasted it off from my phone from a restaurant. i'm just reflecting that there's just an awful lot of startups--perhaps with an interesting business challenge but straightforward technically--who talk about how they only hire A players and how difficult it is to hire, when really they need a competent ios or rails guy, and the contracting market is swimming with them, and they're making a ton more money contracting than the type of startups i'm familiar with wants to pay. the devs who know lisp and haskell aren't building apps, they're architecting enterprise integration contracts or building databases.
*i don't have a relationship with hayzap and i've never worked for a CMS company.
EI is when you take existing large systems and you make them work together, and its really hard because the systems aren't designed to work together, and made harder because bigco internal teams aren't exactly known for the quality of their infrastructure.
Relevance is one famous company that staffs world-class engineers and does EI[0]. They also write databases[1]. and languages[2].
I find it rather sad to see such bitterness and cynicism. Somebody took the time to write a blog post in order to help people, and the reaction above was one of anger.
I think the blogpost is worse than helpful, as the author is simply parroting common hiring tropes, then adding misleading advice. Consider:
* He recommends CLRS for learning the basics of algorithms. This is like reading baby Rudin to learn about the basics of numbers.
* He edited his post 2-3 times because he can't identify whether Common Lisp is a purely functional language or not.
* He mentions that side projects don't need to be complex, then suggests "simple" iPhone apps or open source libraries. In practice, neither of these is "simple."
Please refrain from such personal attacks. I don't understand what prompted the OP's comment (but in my experience it's largely true). That said, there's another axis of motivating job: those with social impact. wingspan.org offers a "24-hour anti-violence bilingual crisis line". It clearly appears to be a socially rewarding job.
And you left out his earlier job, at a company which is known for significant "engineering challenges".
