> 1. Dodged a bullet (booo on any company that would reject someone with this level of passion).
Passion is a double-edged sword: When a person's passions align closely with the company's needs, it's wonderful.
But if a person's passions conflict with what the founders want, the passion can amplify the conflict.
That's why it's important to understand exactly what the candidate is passionate about. If they're passionate about helping the company wherever necessary, that's one thing. If they're passionate about something tangential and they expect the shift the company in that direction by joining, that's something else.
Codeamigo appears distinctly different than Codeacademy in some key areas, as the author explains, so I wouldn't assume that his passions aligned exactly with what Codeacademy was hiring fire. I think it's best to give the benefit of the doubt to Codeacademy in this case.
Remember: Being rejected from a job doesn't mean someone is unqualified or a bad developer. There's more to matching candidates to a team and not every candidate is a good match for every team.
> If they're passionate about helping the company wherever necessary, that's one thing.
Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation? Sounds like a great way to be exploited. People are passionate about enjoyable activities such as programming, not companies. They help companies with their problems because they get paid for it.
> Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation?
Corporations are made of people, many of whom have a moral compass, and operate by that moral compass. If you believe in the mission of a company, the company is filled with people who also believe in that mission, and you're making real progress on that mission...then why wouldn't you be passionate?
Sure, you could be "exploited", but many people don't really care whether or not they're being exploited, if they're being treated well and doing meaningful work with people they like -- even more so if they're working towards a goal that can only be accomplished by a larger organization.
Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation?
Speculating that it's perceived risk mitigation. If you're perceived as loyal, helpful, and even somewhat capable, they'll keep you around! This is in fact the perfect role for that person who gets a lot of juice out of supporting someone else achieve their goals. It is also probably a personality thing.
Of course, you have to answer a generalization of your own question: why be passionate about anything? It doesn't seem to be a necessary, or indeed very useful, to improve darwinian fitness.
> Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation?
This is quite evident in the entertainment (video games, film, music, etc.) industry. It has been established that many creative resources go to companies that produce most of their favorite work.
Sadly, it is quite common for those companies to have rather diverse and relaxed ethical guidelines around crunch and overtime.
I've seen this first hand. Even heard a manager asking a whole company "don't you want this game to be good?!" when challenged regarding increased overtime.
Luckily, my own experience is moving away from a company with crunch and a product I didn't particularly care for to a company strongly against crunch making a whole array of games I really love.
Why is it best to give Codeacademy the benefit of the doubt? They likely hire by committee, like any tech company. In that scenario it's entirely dependent on who the committee is. It's not like Codeacademy, or any company for that matter, has some idempotent interviewing process. If you changed the interview panels, or some of the questions, the candidate may likely have received an offer.
Have you hired anyone? Asking because your comment make it sounds like there's science to it. I don't like the committee hiring as well but team or manager level hiring can segment the company culture. Also individuals can be biased and hire based on vibes or who is like them etc. - committee brings a check to that, that's why it's common.
The truth is - you'll miss some great candidates because they simply interview poorly and of the flip side sometimes get a professional interviewee that cannot deliver once hired.
You can also get a brilliant 10x candidate but a complete asshole (e.g CEO wanna be) that will destroy your team once hired.
Hiring is hard. We, as an industry, simply cannot interview.
We don't know how to accurately gauge a candidates experience, personality or knowledge. We can only make them perform monkey-see-monkey-do on a whiteboard or through stupid, asinine puzzles and leetcode style exercises.
To make matters worse, we often place our most senior software developers on interview circuits. For better or for worse, engineers trend towards more anti-social traits. It makes the whole process of understanding one's personality, how they think, and whether or not they'll be a fit for the company a complete crap-chute. This is literally the only industry I have been apart of that sucks this bad at a process that is so fundamental to professional life.
I would rather interview at McDonalds or for a call center (having had both of those jobs).
> > the whole process of understanding one's personality, how they think, and whether or not they'll be a fit for the company
It's a chute you shovel crap into (or out of), with no justifiable expectation of useful results. The interview process as a whole is a crapshoot, but the process of understanding the candidate is a crap chute.
I have -- quite a few times in quite a few different jobs. There actually is a lot more science to it than we usually take credit for. There have been studies that our typical interview process gives us 17% predictability of how they will perform, but if we do a contract-to-hire (of just one week) that improves to 80%.
We have proven time and time again that certain times of interview questions are not helpful.
If you look at the best investors, their job is similar, I would say that most notably as YC being crazy successful and found similarly in my own hiring is that passion for a given space is one of the best predictors of success.
> There have been studies that our typical interview process gives us 17% predictability of how they will perform, but if we do a contract-to-hire (of just one week) that improves to 80%.
The pool of candidates interested in full-time jobs is not the same as the pool of candidates interested in doing contract-to-hire positions.
Contract-to-hire selects for people with the ability to risk working for a company for a period of time without a high risk of near-term unemployment if it doesn't work out. The people willing to take those jobs are usually more qualified to begin with because they have more career options open to them if the contract-to-hire doesn't turn into a contract job.
So you're basically pre-selecting your candidates.
There are two different types of "contract-to-hire". This type, I'm talking about working for 1 week, most people think of "contract-to-hire" as a 6-month gig that _might_ turn into a position. This is more of a "trial week", but is still technically contract to hire. They are not two different types of people, but it is true that it is much harder for someone who has an existing position to take off 5 days -- but we did it in our company and made accommodations to make sure we fit. It also weeded out people who wouldn't fit.
I think they were trying to convey the idea that not all very qualified candidates would even consider a contract-to-hire option. I know I wouldn't. That’s an unnecessary risk for me to take.
Turns out I still had it open, half read, in one of my 100+ browser tabs :-)
Nice to hear that you recommend it. (Hmm I wonder if maybe some of the other things you've read were also based on Schmidt & Hunter, 1998?)
I have in mind to do as they recommend (incl work sample tests and structured interviews and work knowledge tests), when/if later on I'll look for people to help me with the software I'm creating.
I wonder b.t.w. if you know about any automatically generated GMA tests?
(Edit: I found some, I can post a link if you want.)
It'd be nice if there were ways to auto generate GMA tests. Then maybe it could be just fine if everyone was allowed to practice as how as they wanted -- if there was an unlimited supply of new questions, because they were auto generated.
Maybe something with generating random 3D shapes and applying rotations.
But then it seems to me it's necessary to measure how well begin good at such things, correlates with being able to learn and get good at software, and scrap any poorly correlated tests.
Some people prefer to work as contractors since that tends to pay a lot more, and they might have many many offers to choose among. And, paired with (not in the US) a well functioning social welfare system in case of really bad luck
This is why it's important, in the corporate world, to cultivate a VB programmer's or PHP programmer's mindset, no matter what language you're working in: your passion should be with the business and solving exactly the business problem at hand, and treating your programming tools strictly as tools in service of the business.
I think one should be passionate about the mission. If someone is just passionate about the company and is willing to follow any orders from management, then the original vision can easily be corrupted in a way no one notices. Having universally agreeable employees also puts the target demographic at risk of being undermined by the employee based who never cared about the mission
This is where you take a gamble and hire them, then ask them to leave if it really doesn't work. The chance you're giving up on a 10-100x leverage hire is just too high in such a case.
I can only concur, having someone who's extremely passionate about a project but whose vision diverges drastically from the project's leads is hell all around.
Given GP seems to indeed have quite divergent opinions about the product's focus:
> What bothered me about the platform was that I didn't know or connect with my teachers. I wanted to connect with members of my community and learn from them, instead of just digesting information from a black box.
then it's probably a better thing that they went and created their own version focused on what they think is important.
I'd argue that Codecademy dodged a bullet. Calling them out by name is in really bad taste IMO.
Let's be honest: if he had launched a coding tutorial website thing and it didn't have the "comeback story" marketing narrative then no one would care.
If it's so easy to build a coding tutorial website, then what advantage does Codecademy have beyond name recognition? So you're not competing with their tech, you're competing with their marketing. You say bad taste, I say good marketing.
I don't think it's objectively good marketing. But then I guess it depends on what your philosophical stance is on "succès de scandale" (a logical extreme; there isn't much controversy here).
My stance on the ethics of marketing is that "anything goes" until you start tarnishing the names of others to get ahead. This is why trash talking past employers/coworkers has always been an insta-no-hire in my book for example.
Now I don't know to overstate what this guy did. Obviously he's not outright trash talking here. But I think once you form a company and start marketing then you should be held to some ethical standard. If you mention other people or companies by name then consider how what you're saying could be perceived.
Just look at the comment above mine: "booo on any company that". Some people will perceive his rejection as bad hiring practices on Codecademy's part.
Every comeback story needs a bad guy that rejects or pushes down the hero before they rise. That's what makes this post interesting.
It's certainly not the content; creating a web app of stitched together NPM packages isn't exactly a major challenge these days. Especially if you're copying something else feature-by-feature.
> Some people will perceive his rejection as bad hiring practices on Codecademy's part.
FTR, I have no opinion for or against Codecademy.
Whether it's a bad or good hiring practice depends on what you think of this guy. The information on whether any company hires or rejects a certain applicant is not a trade secret. If you read this and think, "this guy's a douchebag," then yes, the company looks sane and reasonable, the opposite of bad. If you read it and think, "this guy is perfectly reasonable," then yes, the company looks bad.
This poster isn't saying anything about whether Codecademy is good or bad, they're just stating the facts, which were created as a result of the company's hiring decisions. If the facts make them look bad, that's on the company for making the choices they did. If they make them look good, the same applies. Again, I have no horse in this race.
They're stating their projected version of the facts. It's the narrative as they see it. Important details could be missing.
Suppose you and I made a few attempts to start a company together and it didn't work out. Then I went off on my own as a solo founder and got seed funding. Then imagine I made a blog post titled "I tried to start a company with ironmagma 3 times and failed, so I became a solo founder instead and succeeded".
> Again, I have no horse in this race.
There's no race? Just commentary. It's an interesting discussion IMO.
Okay, but in that sense of projection, all stated facts are projected versions of the facts. In your opinion, should we just not discuss our experiences with companies at all, since the descriptions will be mere projections of what actually happened?
> In your opinion, should we just not discuss our experiences with companies at all, since the descriptions will be mere projections of what actually happened?
I don't think I can answer that question without more context. It largely depends on the situation.
In this case he could have simply omitted the name of the company:
> I was rejected by <insert succinct description of what these coding tutorial sites are> three times, so I built my own
He's sharing the same story without throwing jabs at a particular company. I could have done the same in my above example with the same result:
> I tried to start a company with someone 3 times and failed, so I became a solo founder instead and succeeded
--
IMO it comes down to professional etiquette. Don't broach muddy topics in public because the audience doesn't have enough context to see the complete picture. It's sort of like airing your dirty laundry in a public restaurant.
> He's sharing the same story without throwing jabs at a particular company.
I would argue it’s not the same story. He wanted to join this other company but couldn’t, which means that his product or at least personage is going to be different in a way that is irreconcilable with Codecademy. They are thus his direct competitor, which is extra information conveyed by this title.
> the audience doesn’t have enough context to see the complete picture.
No one has enough context to see the complete picture, though. The logical progression of this is, “don’t talk about things in general,” which I rather fundamentally disagree with. If someone is unhappy, that can be a good motivator for a story. The same is true for happiness IMO, by the way.
1. Dodged a bullet (booo on any company that would reject someone with this level of passion).
2. Created your own product (which you seem even more passionate about)
3. Did all the heavy lifting to make it interesting out of the gate (provided content).
Wishing you all the success!