As a candidate, when there are companies I'm interested in working at I research the hell out of them. A lot of companies will put employees on their website and I will research the profile of every person on it. If they don't, I find all the employees I can other ways. If they have an engineering blog I read everything I can, then I research the authors. I research the investors, the market, including competitors and any analyst commentary I can find. I look for past employees and try and calculate a rough idea of churn rate. I basically build as perfect a model of the company as I can as an outsider, and then I test the model throughout the interview process, updating as I go. I make it clear to people that I've done this through ways both subtle and obvious. "I noticed on your profile you were at X last, did you work with Y?" "From my research it seems like your CTO left earlier this year, can you tell me the story behind that?" "This journalist says you're doomed, which is funny because you don't look doomed, but what would you say to them if you could talk to them directly?" Etc.
Yes, this involves a lot of online stalking people. Honey badger doesn't care.
> As an interviewer, how can I test for these traits?
This is one trick I haven't figured out.
I can ask problems that require tenaciousness to dig all the way to the bottom. BUT motivations and incentives in a 45min interview and an ongoing job are very different. There's a higher reward in the job interview, and you know an upper bound to how much time it'll take.
I've hired people who aced that, but then were pretty lazy day to day, even for looking up trivial stuff like "you submitted a python code review that wouldn't even run because you made a typo in the method name."
Stories can help, but stories are (even assuming true and not borrowed) from a past version of the candidate which may not be the same as the present version.
So I just do the best I can, but also recognize that I won't necessarily get a 100% perfect employee no matter what questions that I ask. But "pretty good" is about all you can realistically hope for, I think.
In my experience, a lot of interviewers will ask questions along the lines of "What's the trickiest problem you've had to deal with?" I feel like those kinds of questions are excellent for bringing up this sort of thing if the candidate is so inclined. If they go in a different but still not disappointing direction (e.g. coming up with a process for stable development an environment where requirements are constantly changing), you might re-ask with the focus more on problems encountered while coding.
And, to paraphrase another poster, be a honey badger about it. "And then what happened? And then? Why did you do it this way? Why did that fail? Why did <cause of failure> happen?" until you get to the bottom of the story or hit a wall ("dunno. My boss took care of that"). If the candidate can explain what the root cause of the problem was, how they identified that root cause and then proceeded to fix it, that gives you a pretty good idea of how tenacious they are.
Looks like a well thought out tool. Though to get me or my team to adopt it I'd need at least a sprint or two of a free trial. I hope it gains adoption. It probably says more about me than the business strategy, but I don't think I've ever bought a tool that I couldn't try or play with first for free.
What I'm not sure it does, and would hope it does, is provide a WYSIWYG way of CSS layout. I.E. under the hood it's using css3 to layout, but in a way I don't have to think about it, and could output it after I get the design the way I want.
Check it out, and if it doesn't work for your team we'd be happy to issue a refund.
Re: WYSIWYG CSS, we initially started w/ flexbox but things like the difference between margins, padding, and absolute positioning confused tons of designers coming from Photoshop/Sketch.
We ended up implementing our own layout system, which can be used directly in production (if you want to ship a runtime), otherwise it's possible to map layouts to something like flexbox+grid or native engines if your designers stay away from things that are hard to implement on those platforms (e.g., aspect ratio).
Our goal is to help people think about layout directly, not try to hide the inherent complexity from them.
At the end of the day, most all digital products require close collaboration between designers and implementors.
We need to focus on folks who're sufficiently motivated to solve this problem. If a refundable $25 is too high a hurdle, it's unlikely those folks will actually attempt to use the tool, reflect on their workflow, or otherwise help us build a compelling product.
First, I won't say your product is a commodity, but there are many, many, many layout and design tools out there. I'm not going to pay $25 to evaluate each one. It's as much about the sign-up-and-hand-over-the-credit-card process as it is about the money.
Second, the fact that it's refundable doesn't matter. I'm never going to ask for a refund. The hassle and the back-and-forth isn't worth $25 to me.
Third, I'm willing to pay way more than $25 if your tool actually solves my problem. There are tons of UI tools out there, but I haven't found the one. It's totally worth it to me if you save me hours of work.
So don't add any friction to the process. Feel free to time-limit or cripple the tool so I have to pay to do any real work, but don't waste my time, and don't make me pay you for the privilege of sinking a bunch of my time into determining if your product works or not.
Find a way to do free trials, and do it in such a way that your costs are minimal. It's worth it.
That's a fair perspective, but that doesn't ring true for me.
I've spent money on Spotify, Prime, Patreon (to support local podcasters and niche YouTube content), Twitch streamers, software (Sketch, Lightroom), Marvel/Invision... all because I got to sample the software or produced content and want to support the artist/developers.
Anyways, good luck. Competition and subsequent innovation is always a good thing.
I'd soon change my number before resorting to most apps. Unless it's like uBlockOrigin where I just feed blacklists into it, I'm not really okay with giving an organization besides my service provider my call history. Read Nomorobo's TOS sometime, it's a doozy.
This is how the call blocking API on iOS works. The blocker app can only provide a static, pre-set list of numbers to block to the OS, and that's it. It has no access to call history, awareness of calls being received/made, etc. The OS handles all the blocking, referring to the blacklist the app provided earlier, and provides no feedback to the app itself about this.
Of course, this means that call blocking apps have less features than on Android. For example, apps can't dynamically look up a number when a call is revived and make an on-the-fly decision. This is in keeping with iOS' philosophy of "privacy/security over features", vs. Android's "everything is completely open to developers, for better or worse".
It also means that the ultimate call blocking mechanism I've always wanted isn't available on iOS: Only allow calls from known numbers in my address book. Frustrating, because to achieve such a concept I've had to resort to DND mode in iOS which then also blocks all push notifications.
> 1.2 Data Privacy. You understand and agree that some of your call information (including, but not limited to, a log of all phone calls made to your subscribed phone line(s) and any requested additions to any customizable phone number blacklist or white list) may be viewable by you, the Company, and by any other person having a phone line subscribed to the Nomorobo Service through the same user account as you.
I don't know that that is actually possible on iOS, though, as iOS doesn't give the call log to the blacklist provider.
>1.3 Contact. From time to time, the Company may need to send e-mails, in-app messages, and/or push notifications to you and automated voice calls and/or text messages to all phone lines that are subscribed to or otherwise using the Nomorobo Service.
Could be innocuous now and be much more annoying later if they decide to change their business model.
>Binding Arbitration. If the parties to the Agreements do not reach a solution through the informal resolution process described in Paragraph 6.3(ii), then any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to the Agreements, shall be settled by arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (the "AAA") in accordance with its Commercial Arbitration Rules, and judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrator(s) may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof or having jurisdiction over the relevant party or its assets.
Must go to arbitration if anything goes wrong and you want to sue.
Overall, not the worst I've seen. There was another one that you had to grant permission to post to your Facebook wall and/or Twitter account. I don't recall which one it was, though.
I'd say do not put your number on a do not call list. That just lets the robocallers know its a real number, and they are likely outside the jurisdicition of enforcement for these laws.
I like to pick up so I can decide for myself if it's a spam call. If it is, it gets blocked and reported (Android). Not sure if Google does anything with the report but at least it is tagged on the next call in.
For the past few years the odd spam call I get has been my number with one digit changed. This came as a surprise when my ex-wife's phone number popped up. I didn't realize it was spam until I listened to the voicemail re: the cruise I won.
Because there are some good reasons for spoofing Caller ID (e.g. providing a master extension for a call made from a company) and, historically, it was hard/expensive to do. That difficulty pretty much went away with VoIP and other technology changes.
I noticed I end up with a pretty high hit-rate; maybe 1/2 of calls come in already tagged. Maybe I'm just lucky the volume is low enough to answer the calls; if they happened more often it wouldn't be practical.
Some sort of "law" probably comes into play with respect to junk phone calls. If there were a lot more, the phone system would simply become untenable. Instead, between legal, economic, and technology limitations, junk calls (including those that are actually legal) have seemed to hover in the annoying but not a lot worse than that rate for pretty much as long as I can remember.
I would add, if you do answer the phone, don't say "Hello" or anything like that. The automated callers are looking for hints that someone is on the other side of the line and give up easily to get to the next number, where a person would usually spend a couple of seconds to check if someone answered the phone properly.
Nowadays if I pick up to a silent line I usually just hang up.
Yeah, I usually answer and put the mic on mute to see if there's anyone on the other end. Usually it's a robot waiting for audio from the other side to proceed, so it hangs up after several seconds without ever saying anything.
That's kind of a dick move to normal people that are calling you because making the caller say "hello?" first is the complete opposite of the normal flow.
As an engineering candidate, how do I display these traits?
As an interviewer, how can I test for these traits?