
Calling All Engineers (Twilio is Hiring) - dmor
http://blog.twilio.com/2010/08/-calling-all-engineers-.html
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johns
I've been on Hacker News much longer than I've worked at Twilio so set aside
my bias for the moment and hear this from a fellow community member: Twilio is
an awesome place to work. Our engineers work on interesting problems building
really useful products and services (you should see what we have in store for
the future). We _genuinely_ care about helping our customers be more awesome.

Personally I've never worked at a place where my input has been so highly
valued and I'm not particularly high on the totem pole (and I work remotely to
boot). It doesn't matter. Everyone has something to contribute and everyone's
contributions are equally valued. I've learned an immeasurable amount in just
a few months from the ridiculously smart people I get to work with. This is
the smartest, most committed crew of people I've had the pleasure of working
with. They're fun people too.

Maybe working for someone else isn't your thing, but if your circumstances
require you to do so, there are few better places to work.

If anyone has any questions about what it's like working at Twilio, feel free
to contact me directly at jsheehan@twilio.com or ask your questions here and
I'll answer what I can.

~~~
dmor
As your boss, I just want to say that you made my day. Ask him anything (just
not how much coffee I drink)

~~~
jf
How much coffee do you drink?

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dmor
hey, you back from vacation?! My answer: to f*ing much

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Anechoic
They're not calling "all engineers" their calling all _software_
engineers/devs/programmers/etc. I suspect that if I sent in a resume that
documents my MIT MechE degree, MA PE license, 15 years of acoustical
engineering experience, and basically 0 software development experience, it
would take all of about 5 secs for it to wind up in the Trash folder.

Yeah, it's a nitpick, and go ahead and downvote me, it's just that I'm annoyed
at the propensity for tech firms to equate "engineer" with "software dev". A
software dev may be an engineer but the relationship is not reciprocal.

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yanilkr
"disrupting" will replace "ninja" in recruiting job ads for Software
Engineers.

~~~
dmor
wait, what about "geek pasture"?

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sliverstorm
Am I the only one who gets a little befuddled when people refer to software
developers as 'engineers'? Not that I feel software devs are undeserving or
unworthy, it just doesn't seem to fit and confuses me.

Their appropriation of the word 'engineers', as if the type of engineer they
are looking for was the only kind of engineer, also kind of offends me.

~~~
drgath
Seems perfectly normal to me.

Is your argument that the only people who are allowed to be called "engineers"
those who have a degree with the word "engineering" in the title?

Via Wikipedia:

"An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with
applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to design and develop
solutions for technological systems problems. Engineers design materials,
structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by
practicality, safety and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin
root ingenium, meaning "cleverness"."

~~~
sliverstorm
No, my argument is twofold:

1) Fallaciously or not, I typically associate engineers with the physical
world. As I am familiar with them, engineers typically design tangible things.

2) I commonly hear of math and cs degrees being considered very closely
related, and math is not engineering. It is vital to engineering, and I have
mad respect for mathematicians, but a mathematician is not an engineer, hence
why he is called a mathematician.

2.5) do cs majors really apply science? I thought it was almost entirely math
and logic.

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danielha
> do cs majors really apply science? I thought it was almost entirely math and
> logic.

Yes, they apply computer science. Unless science needs to have flasks and
microscopes involved.

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iamdave
"Front End / Web Software Engineer"

I'm having a bit of a time wrapping my head around this particular job title,
is the ideal applicant a front-end developer or a web software engineer? The
description is heavily in favor of the latter, and makes a passing reference
to abilities in creating user interfaces.

While on the one hand, I understand the financial merits of wanting a staff
member to maximize their contributions by wanting a front-end developer who
can also double as a back-end developer, but at the very least shouldn't the
job requirements be just as balanced? Or just go ahead and hire a person to
focus on user interface and ensuring the integrity of effective user
engagement, and having someone "build libraries"?

Maybe I missed the memo why this is such a popular trend.

~~~
drgath
"Front-end Developer" or "FE Engineer" are pretty standard titles these days.
It essentially means you deal with the whole web stack (from Apache on up to
CSS/JS) on servers that talk to a backend API. Your code typically won't deal
with accessing databases directly or creating APIs.

Don't think of FE vs BE as HTML/CSS/JS vs server-side code. It is API client
vs API server code. Architecturally, these stacks tend to be completely
separate.

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zb
OT, but could there be anything more irritating than a giant "Feedback" button
that hovers over the text you're trying to read?

How about if you clicked on it to give feedback about the feedback button and
discovered that it didn't actually do anything except hide the embedded
videos? OK, you win, I guess that would be even more irritating.

(Same behaviour in Safari 5.0.1 and Firefox 3.5.5 on the Mac, if anyone is
interested.)

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dmor
Thanks that is helpful feedback - definitely don't like annoying widgets and
just stopped noticing it after awhile. I just took that out - it was supposed
to be linking to our GetSat forums but was broken, as you said.

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russell_h
Two things on the Jobs page (Chrome 5.0.375.125 on OS X):

1\. If you click the "Next Geek" button in quick succession, the geeks start
queueing up vertically while the current one fades out.

2\. The "Our DNA" box near the bottom isn't lined up with the one above it.

Neither of those would stop me from applying if I were in the market for a job
right now, I've heard nothing but good things about Twilio.

~~~
dmor
thanks! repro'd and ticket filed for each

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tzs
But what if I don't like walnuts and don't want to lose my thumbs?

(I'm really curious if anyone is going to catch that reference)

~~~
YogSothoth
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0559769/quotes>

