> No notable company names on my resume so I suspect that's why I'm still having a hard time.
Highly doubt having one or two "notable company names" on the resume will determine whether you get hired, especially with only four years of experience.
I went from a life insurance company in the Midwest to a pretty desirable tech company in the last few years. This tweet [0] from patio11 (linked from the posted tweet) basically sums up my path:
> If you’re early career, try to get into a high-status engineering employer or consider a status arbitrage like e.g. a stint at one of the many startups which are known to recruiters but can’t match Google offers and so feel perpetually understaffed.
I went to a YC-funded startup. It wasn't a well-known startup by any means, and there were fewer than 30 employees when I left. I don't think anyone there was ex-FAANG, and they didn't pay at anywhere near FAANG levels. But startup employees are in the talent pool for big tech companies in a way that insurance company employees generally are not.
Anyway, when I had been at the startup for a year, I cold applied for my current position on my current employer's website, and here I am. Zero chance I would have gotten a callback if I'd applied directly from the insurance company, even though I would still have been able to do my current job effectively if I'd never gone to the startup.
Absolutely agree. I’ve found that behavioral interviews are harder than technical interviews at this point. If you don’t have the set of experiences they’re looking for then it’s game over.
This can be ameliorated slightly if the interviewer is willing to accept a hypothetical, but this has rarely been the case for me recently.
Or if your management philosophy doesn’t mesh with theirs.
“Tell me about the last time you had make your team work late for a deadline.”
“I don’t. It’s been my experience as both an IC and a a manager that crunches just burn people out, and you end up getting less quality work out of them. It’s much better to communicate early and either adjust deadlines or deliverables.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Unless there is an external forcing function on the company, everything should be negotiable. Does this happen a lot here?”
“One or twice a year.”
“Huh. It’s only happened to me once in ten years, and that was due to a multimillion dollar contract deadline. If it happens regularly here, then the company should fire the directors of engineering for gross incompetence. They can’t project manage.”
Needless to say, I didn’t get the job, but at that point, why would I have wanted it?
>Classical violinists are already playing at close to a professional level before they start college. At your age (assuming you're older than 8), you don't have a chance at making your hands do those things, or mastering skills such as sight-reading. I started playing music at age 8.
Sort of bewildered by this statement. You can't learn to sight read after age 8?
I think the argument is that someone who started learning music at age 27 is unlikely to ever professionally compare with someone who is also 27 but started music seriously as a career at 8.
Well... in the case of sight reading maybe 8 is extreme. But even with that specific skill, it gets exponentially more difficult to learn after your teenage years. I follow a web forum for the instrument that I play, and people who learned it informally have talked about their attempts to learn sight-reading as adults. I actually get some work because I've managed to maintain my reading chops over the decades.
I'm a jazz/blues guitarist dilletante who can only go by fakebook lead sheets for comping and rigid arpeggios and scales for improvisation... So could someone enlighten me why sight reading is a precarious skill you can learn only if you're a child? Isn't it just combining two skills ear training and tabs reading (and recalling from memory what pitch it was) ? Thanks!
It is those skills, with the added nuance of doing it at speed. In this sense I think it's like getting fluent at reading and speaking a language: For some reason it gets harder as we get older.
Naturally there are some social barriers as well. The joy of playing music as a kid is that you're allowed to suck and everybody claps. As an adult, you're conscious of your own suckage, so you have to work on your skills alone. And when adding a skill like reading, you can already play and the reading is making it noticeably worse not better, until you get over that hump. Learning it by immersion gets harder when people expect you to be good at it.
Not saying it can't be done, but it just gets harder. It can certainly be done starting at middle school age, which is when most wind players start.
Now, get that fakebook out again, and use it for reading practice. That's a valuable resource. There's also a huge pile of classical guitar literature including etude books that are graded by level, so you can work through them progressively.
The weird thing about jazz is that the opportunities for doing actual reading are disappearing as the whole jazz and live music scene evolves. I've been lucky to play in larger jazz ensembles, where the charts are largely written out and reading is a vital skill, so I've been able to maintain my reading chops possibly better than some pro's.
I'm a non-musician trying to learn some musical stuff now and think language acquisition is a great analogy. I can learn this stuff, but my pace is just so slow compared with what any child can do. I feel this both for music and for foreign language skills. I will just never be as fluid as a native speaker and I have to be ok with that.
The analogy here doesn't make sense. It'd be more like the actor mentioning that he doesn't have any experience doing commercial work, but he has acted in a theatrical production before (suggesting that he's adaptable and willing to do more than just one kind of acting job).
HFT firms aren't trying to predict "the market" as a whole - just small eddies of it. A typical example of this is arbing names at the bottom of index fund rebalances. Speed is important mostly to make sure someone else doesn't hit the arb first.
No notable company names on my resume so I suspect that's why I'm still having a hard time.