Justin.tv is hiring the best and the brightest to hack on our awesome live video site. In fact, we have almost as many graduate degrees as we do college drop outs!
If you're a sysadmin, network engineer, or programmer, you can find work here: http://www.justin.tv/jobs
"In fact, we have almost as many graduate degrees as we do college drop outs!"
Hmm... This post is difficult for me. On one hand, I don't want to negatively impact Justin.tv. On the other hand, I feel obligated to let everyone know that if you don't have a college degree or other qualifying credentials, you probably won't get hired there.
I went in for an interview, and as far as I could tell, I passed. But afterwards, Justin took me to a bookstore across the street and told me that their investors felt they needed to hire "more qualified" developers. So I wasn't brought on board.
My credentials: I dropped out of high school when I got hired in the gamedev industry. When I went in for the interview, I had been in the industry for about three years, and had been programming in general for 8. So if you have credentials similar to mine, it would probably be better to not waste the time in the interview. But if you have credentials that would convince an investor that you should be hired (college degree, etc), then go for it.
Sorry, JTV. I wasn't going to say anything until I saw "we have almost as many graduate degrees as we do college drop outs" ... this gives people a false sense of hope, from my point of view.
One of our co-founders doesn't have a college degree, so that's clearly not a barrier to joining the team. I'm sorry to say I don't remember the details of your interview, but I can guarantee it wasn't the degree. That just doesn't come up in discussions or thought behind the interview.
What do I consider? Basically I use three things to try to decide if someone is going to work out at JTV:
1. Codes fluently and happily. I don't care what syntax or language you use, or if you use pseudo-code, but you should be able to do basic things without much thought and you shouldn't be offended or unhappy to spend time coding in an interview.
2. Grasps algorithms. Recursion, trees, lists, big-o notation, etc. I don't care if you can recite the Master Theorem, but you should be able to estimate runtime for a recursive algorithm. I don't care if you know Dijkstra's algorithm, but you should be able to find a shortest path in a graph.
3. Excited to work on the kinds of problems we have at JTV. This is the hardest to judge, obviously. If you don't have any ideas, before or during or after the interview, about something you'd like to do or change at JTV, that's a bad sign. If you don't have any interest in working on our website or on video or on chat, that's a bad sign. If it just doesn't seem like you genuinely want to work at JTV, that's a bad sign. None of these are disqualifying, but they lose a few points. I try not to weight this too highly because it's so easy to read too much into someone's surface personality, but this is the thing I think we've made the most mistakes on in the past.
That's what I go by in hiring, and that's the kind of thing I see discussed when we email about the candidate. So I'm reasonably sure that's what everyone else goes by as well.
What is your point? That your single case of not getting the job means that it is not true that they hire college drop outs?
I mean there is plenty of other things than just experience related to hiring someone. "More qualified" may well be a nice way to say "you don't seem to fit in" or whatever their reason not to hire you.
"Listen bud, you're talented, but not quite right for us due to X, Y, and Z."
... or ...
"Sorry, we want to hire you, but our investors won't let us."
If that was the case (and I don't think it was), then the latter is a cop-out. You don't make up reasons not to hire someone, no matter how much you want to. You'd be doing a disservice both to the candidate and to yourself.
My single case is just that: a data point. Weigh it along with all your other data points before making your interview/no interview decision.
Fair enough, I guess you were given a straight answer.
Anyway for some reason you original reply sounded to me pretty much like: "these guys did not give me a job, they suxxors! Don't go near them!"
Often you do not know the reason for not hiring. "Just does not feel right" or "gut feeling" may be the real reason, and then you try to rationalize it somehow. Hiring is not an exact science.
"these guys did not give me a job, they suxxors! Don't go near them!"
No sir, that wasn't my intention at all. :) JTV's interview was extremely rigorous, and they all seem like great hackers. In that regard, they r0x0rz. Unfortunately, their investors may have the final say as to whether you are hired or not, which is what I wanted to tell everyone.
What's your email? I don't want to go into salary details publicly.
On low pay: when I first arrived at The Corporation, I made nothing for the first nine months. I was an "intern", and they don't pay interns. I'm not complaining. It was excellent experience. After that, I was paid a very low salary. A year and a half after that, I was paid "slightly less than low, but still half of what an average developer makes" salary. So the pay wasn't especially good. I was there for the experience anyway, not the pay.
On incompetent management: We had a "daily report" to fill out each day. The idea was to list what we did, what we were "blocked" on, and what we will do soon. On Fridays, we had to fill out a weekly "time allocation sheet". We would assign percentages to various categories of what we spent time on. (e.g. "50% primary tasks, 30% debugging, 10% meetings, 10% other".) We also had many, many meetings. One day, a few months before I left, all developers spent over four hours in meetings. (The "Monday Morning Meeting", followed by the general "Developer's Meeting", followed by the "Version-one-point-something Product Meeting"... Over half the day spent in just meetings.) Our direct manager was very controlling. A few times, he walked by and asked people to implement a brand-new feature, claiming that "it would be easy". So he was apt to gloss over details, and the details are often the hardest part of software development.
The biggest reason why I left The Corporation is because I wasn't learning anything anymore. The three years I worked there were filled with nonstop learning... up to about six months before I left. At that point, it became hard to be passionate about the job, because I wasn't doing much that allowed me to grow as an engineer.
Are the conditions at your gamedev job pretty good? I heard from a friend that The Corporation was an outlier, and that every one of the five other gamedev companies my friend had worked at were a lot better, so I'm still holding out hope for the gamedev industry in general.
If you're a sysadmin, network engineer, or programmer, you can find work here: http://www.justin.tv/jobs