... many people are drawing the conclusion that I primarily got a job at Airbnb by being really good at negotiating, or gaming the system, or something like that.
If you have ever done a software engineering interview, you would know that this is completely absurd. There is no way to negotiate or charm someone into passing a software engineering interview. Much less 8 of them.
If you don’t know the ins and outs of object-oriented programming, database design, asymptotic analysis, binary search trees, or how to improve the cache efficiency of an algorithm, then you’re not going to pass a computer science-heavy interview at a top company. You don’t even have a shot at it.
The moral of my story is not “get really good at negotiating and you’ll get a great job.” Negotiating is important, and I certainly encourage everyone to negotiate!
But first, get good at the thing you’re doing. Then worry about negotiating.
I moved to San Francisco from Austin, Texas about a year ago because I decided I was going to earn-to-give. Since then I’ve been relentlessly trying to build a new career for myself, so I could earn more and donate more to charity.
Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.
It’s certainly true that I probably have a mind that’s well-suited for coding. But it’s also true that I outworked almost everyone who was in my cohort. And when I was hired by App Academy to help teach the course, I continued working as hard as I could to get good at this.
I still stayed late in the evenings, I still came into the office on weekends alongside the students just to continue coding and learning more. I started an algorithms study group in the evenings where I taught students new algorithms that I had read about, and wrote specs and instructions to guide them through the implementation. I took over our entire algorithms curriculum and taught well over 100 students the basics of data structures and algorithms.
And of course, I was scared that none of this would matter. That having been an English major, having a non-traditional background, being 26 and too old to transition into tech, competing against 20 year olds who’d been coding since they were 10, I thought I must have no chance.
Thankfully, I was wrong. And I’m very, very lucky that I was wrong, because I was almost right.
> If you have ever done a software engineering interview, you would know that this is completely absurd. There is no way to negotiate or charm someone into passing a software engineering interview.
I'm sure the author is sufficiently qualified to pass such an interview (or 8), but I find this statement pretty bizarre. "Charm" might not be the right word, but under-qualified candidates pass software engineering interviews all the time.
I have come to believe that getting a job is either luck or accident.
Qualification is just the other half of the whole story. And by qualification I mean not just the scale/standard by which I would be measured during the interview but also formal educational endorsements.
Am I qualified to get a job ? Maybe. Am I lucky ? I'll find out. Same holds for any job seeker out there as well. Will I do anything meaningful at work or release more bugs than anybody else out there... Time will tell.
Ugh. This is a good example of how self-promoters operate. Biz Stone makes it sound like it's "him & Ev". But since this came out there have been more revelations about the early days of Twitter. Biz Stone lobbied Ev to get his title inflated to co-founder but the equity stake tells all: 3% (versus Jack Dorsey's 20% and Ev's 70%). "Stone's co-founder title didn't get him a ton of equity, but it did afford him the ability to say he was co-founder of Twitter. That became priceless later on..."[1]
In the linked post, he mentions that the flood gates opened after he got the offer from Google.
So, does one keep the recruiter waiting and apply for other companies telling everyone that you have an offer with Google? How long of a leeway does one have in such negotiations? How long can you keep the recruiter waiting before they close the gates? Is it a good job search strategy?
http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...
Excerpt:
... many people are drawing the conclusion that I primarily got a job at Airbnb by being really good at negotiating, or gaming the system, or something like that.
If you have ever done a software engineering interview, you would know that this is completely absurd. There is no way to negotiate or charm someone into passing a software engineering interview. Much less 8 of them.
If you don’t know the ins and outs of object-oriented programming, database design, asymptotic analysis, binary search trees, or how to improve the cache efficiency of an algorithm, then you’re not going to pass a computer science-heavy interview at a top company. You don’t even have a shot at it.
The moral of my story is not “get really good at negotiating and you’ll get a great job.” Negotiating is important, and I certainly encourage everyone to negotiate!
But first, get good at the thing you’re doing. Then worry about negotiating.
I moved to San Francisco from Austin, Texas about a year ago because I decided I was going to earn-to-give. Since then I’ve been relentlessly trying to build a new career for myself, so I could earn more and donate more to charity.
Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.
It’s certainly true that I probably have a mind that’s well-suited for coding. But it’s also true that I outworked almost everyone who was in my cohort. And when I was hired by App Academy to help teach the course, I continued working as hard as I could to get good at this.
I still stayed late in the evenings, I still came into the office on weekends alongside the students just to continue coding and learning more. I started an algorithms study group in the evenings where I taught students new algorithms that I had read about, and wrote specs and instructions to guide them through the implementation. I took over our entire algorithms curriculum and taught well over 100 students the basics of data structures and algorithms.
And of course, I was scared that none of this would matter. That having been an English major, having a non-traditional background, being 26 and too old to transition into tech, competing against 20 year olds who’d been coding since they were 10, I thought I must have no chance.
Thankfully, I was wrong. And I’m very, very lucky that I was wrong, because I was almost right.