I think this is a rather harsh take. Most of the people working on automating it understand how hard it is and are striving through it. You need some of these irrational believers for progress!
It looks like he has contempt for the people trying to automate something. He doesn't realize how hard they are actually working, nor they insight they have into the problem. From his perspective he thinks they are wrong for thinking they are taking on an easy job.
Robots that can identify and pick up things in the environment haven't materially improved since the 60s. What has changed is how factories and warehouses are built, so that the 'environment' and the 'things' are strictly constrained to enable robotic arms to grab and move them. But let one thing get a little out of place, or worse, let a human get between an industrial robot and the thing it's trying to pick up and.. well. RIP.
That simply isn't true - the machines of the past were pretty much blind but safety interlocks are able to detect an approach. The reason for the constraints are efficency in manufacturing is preferrably reducing the process to simple repetitive actions for improved throughput and reliability.
Exactly, and those actions are able to be simple and repetitive because the machines don't have to try to identify objects in the environment, they just reach X meters, open their grappler Y centimeters, close it until it reaches Z Pascals of pressure, move, repeat.
It always seems like incumbents have it all (resources, distribution, talent, etc) until they don't. For ex, the "iPhone" theoretically should have come from Nokia by that logic. AR particularly requires truly novel innovations for it to work in mass-market. There might be niche-cases that work for AR (studio/arcade games, sports tech) before the mass market use-cases.
Apple is well documented (for it being a secret project) as throwing tons of resources into compelling AR products.
I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but they're certainly trying - unlike Nokia, who was in the middle of a massive internal war over Symbian when the first iPhone hit.
ha, I agree we are a recruiting company. However, we do believe we are solving a couple of different pain points.
a) For companies, resume doesn't convey the complete picture and any additional signal would be super valuable. We believe the level of signal you get from a senior interviewer is far more valuable than resume-based signals or coding test-based signals.
b) For candidates, they get feedback directly from the senior engineers about what they are good at and what they should improve on. Most companies provide no feedback at all and that can be frustrating!
In addition to that, if you do well, you get a direct referral from the senior engineer to all startups. And because of the referral, you get fast-tracked to onsites!
Hired, Vettery and other recruiting websites typically connect candidates to companies based on almost little to no vetting (Their vetting is based on your resume: essentially pedigree).
On HiDimensional, as a candidate, you interview with a senior engineer in your field and based on what you are strongest at, you get a personal referral from that engineer to the companies we work with. The engineer fills out an evaluation highlighting your strengths and we match you with the companies looking for your strengths.
Also, you get very clear feedback about what you are good at and what you can improve on from the senior engineers directly. For example, if you are an ML engineer, do you believe it'd be useful to interview with and get a direct referral from the former Head of ML at Quora to all startups?
The end goal is the same, but this approach yields a better experience for all parties.
Also, this will definitely work great until you scale and when you are out of qualified engineering leaders who can help you vet candidates. How do you plan to manage that?
Yes, I'd agree they are a closer comparable. Our primary difference is that our interview process is personalized to each individual candidate because we match candidates to an independent interviewer relevant to their domain and field of interest. We don't specify what the interviewer should ask. Instead our direction to them is: "We matched this candidate to you because they expressed these skills/interests. Try to identify where their strengths are and if you would recommend them for a role in your specialty."
The evaluations our interviewers write as a result gives us a lot of nuance and evidence to match candidates with the best roles for them.
The fact that the interviewers are independent is also another differentiator. This gives candidates an opportunity to make a valuable connection, and we expect interviewers to take ~10-15 min at the end to share feedback on the candidate's performance, how they can improve, and answer any questions / share personalized advice. We have heard many frustrated accounts from our candidates about receiving rejections with no feedback and how this is one of their most valued benefits of our approach.
On the scaling point - it's a very good question. We are collecting a lot of data about each interviewer and specifically their skill at evaluating skill (i.e., how predictive is their evaluation). So over time, we will be able to understand interviewer strength and what they are qualified to evaluate, and seniority of the interviewer becomes less important.
Sure, but without seniority of the interviewer, would his/her reference carry as much weight?
Instead of banking on an interviewer's reputation, you would in essence be asking companies to trust your ability "to understand interviewer strength and what they are qualified to evaluate". Not so sure how well that'll work...
Fair question. We collect data about every interviewer (at a very granular level to understand what skills they are good at evaluating and how predictive they are).
Also, we provide interviewing history data as part of the evaluation. For example, if you knew the last 10 candidates a particular interviewer has endorsed have ended up at companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Google, Facebook, etc, would the interviewer's reputation still be in question?
We are the co-founders of HiDimensional. Very simply, we pair engineering candidates with senior engineers in their field and the senior engineers refer the top candidates to the 40+ top startups on our platform. It's common knowledge that referrals are important in hiring, and we believe this is a more efficient and meritocratic approach to increasing access and impact of referrals.
Would love your feedback and check out our blog post for more info.
I think the code is written for the case where it fits in memory. For that case, the solution is O(n) in terms of time complexity. From the feedback it seems that they only spoke about the solution where the data doesn't fit in memory.
"To test further, I asked her how she will approach the problem if the array was too big to fit in
memory ... She then worked on adapting
her original code to work with left and right batches, swapping ... back to disk." (Emphasis mine.)
Couldn't we train it on top of resumes itself? With every resume, you know where they worked before and you have the data of where they worked until then. Granted, it would be muddled with noisy data (like skills, etc that they didn't have in the past). It wouldn't be very hard to collect enough resumes as training data.
While I agree that interviews have high variance and a lot of times the interviews don't test what's required for the job, mini projects are a huge time sink for candidates too. Most candidates aren't going to spend a couple of days working on a project just to apply to a company. Unless all companies decide to just switch to using project-based interviewing, interviewing is here to stay (despite its quirks).
2. Second CS exercise - phone screen (1h, optional)
3. Onsite (full day of CS exercises on a white board or on a computer)
4. Sometimes you get an extra coding assignment when they still can't make up their mind
What I'm saying is that all we need is step 4 + culture fit, which could be done in one single day. So we could get rid of all the other useless steps.
