There's a further distinction between male-sexed individuals who enjoy crossdressing and those who identify as female and dress accordingly. Only the latter group is trans (and is so independent of what they wear)
Apologies to any nuance of language I've missed here, as I'm sure this could be nitpicked to death.
While both acknowledge that gender is fluid personal interpretation of identity, to drag (female impersonation, but there are women who drag as men), gender identity is a joke to be made fun of and celebrate, but being transgender takes gender identity seriously.
They can be expressed by the same people (see Peppermint who won 2015's RuPaul Drag Race, she is a transgendered woman who competes in drag competitions), but they can just as often be in conflict.
Mostly. In not all cases and for not all people, and I'm probably wrong.
If an org does WBI's then it's a good indication that they are not choosing the best applicants. Instead of either getting good at them or trying to get the industry to change, we should embrace this.
If they do WBI's then they probably do lots of other things which run counter to best practices. Isn't it so much better to expose to the outside world a culture of cargo culting inability to evaluate techniques for the efficacy.
There are so many orgs who do run themselves well. The real tricky party is how to determine that quickly. With WBI's we can get a short cut.
>If an org does WBI's then it's a good indication that they are not choosing the best applicants
I don't think the data supports this. Say what you will about Google, but they do WBIs and the average quality of their engineers is very very high. Same with FB.
I'd like to agree with you but my current gig involved a WBI and the company itself actually has stellar software development processes and tools. It might just have been that the hiring manager wasn't too comfy doing it any other way, but in any case it did not correlate strongly to the culture inside the company.
Perhaps use it as a warning sign, but you might want to talk to your potential co-workers as well and see what they're actually doing and how.
I don't get the hatred towards white boarding during interviews. That's exactly what I do when brainstorming design, general architecture, state machines, explaining data structures used etc. The use of white board in an interview also covers the same topics, when I'm interviewing candidates.
Now if you say whiteboard programming, and that the candidate has to pay attention to curly braces and semicolons and typos, then I agree its not a great process.
So for me, whiteboard interviewing is perfectly fine, whiteboard programming is not.
> If they do WBI's then they probably do lots of other things which run counter to best practices.
And what are the best practices for interviewing? Whiteboard interviews are employed by plenty of successful software companies (Google, Facebook etc), "best practices" implies there is something clearly accepted as more effective that they should be using instead. What is it?
Conversation, half technical and half to figure out what the person would be like to work with. For example, tell me about the most interesting/difficult/satisfying problem was that you've worked on. Or, tell me what happens when you point your browser at a web site, in as much detail as you can muster. What are your go-to tools to solve problems
Mostly pair-programming coding session on site or homework that is later discussed and "developed" on site. Candidate picks which option works best for her.
I know a lot of the early history, I worked there when we hired both Jack and Biz. I can tell you that it's a really good thing that Biz is back on board. Biz was able to articulate what twitter was as the human voice of the company in both directions. From day one the question was always, what does Biz do.
Biz bounced around but when he was there things were better. Kind of like the basketball player that Nate Silver likes to love, who doesn't have any stat which makes them star, but everybody else around them plays better when they're there. Biz isn't a business guy, nor product, nor code, nor support, nor really marketing. But when he's in the room, working with people, everybody's better at all of those things.
He can play a kind of court jester role, which is disarming, but he's super damned sharp. He uses stories and humor to bring people forward.
Having him there, working on twitter means there are now two people in senior roles who aren't afraid of breaking twitter, because they created it in the first place.
In recent years, talking to twitter employees you get this amnesia over the company's culture and history. People don't know where things came from, they don't know the story of how the came to be. The myth's are complicated and messy. And eventually go so messy the company stopped telling the story of how twitter came to be where it is now all together.
With Biz back, he can take on that internal story telling, creating a hero's journey that the company can believe in. Because he's there, as an equal to Jack in understanding the origin, he can tear things down without fear of destroying somebody else's house of cards.
I just realised you are the same rabble in "Hatching Twitter"[1] and you were there even during the Odeo days!
Since you were too humble to mention it yourself, I thought I point that out to those folks that don't know who you are so that people know your opinion definitely has some weight in the matter. :)
Anyway, interesting that your basic point of Biz was that he was an everyman but I posit that while it may be a good role to have in a startup (with all the internal dramas and such), it may not work in a "corporate" environment given that Twitter has thousands of employees[2]? I have been working for more than a decade and have met my fair share of "everymans" but it is my personal anecdotal experience that these guys usually get shredded in the politics of the corporate world. More so considering that apparently Biz use to get on the nerves of Jack[3]?
A jester can be loved by the king in his court but the minute the King finds him annoying, not long will it degenerate into an off-with-his-head scenario.
Given your intimate knowledge of their relationship, I am curious what are your thoughts from this perspective.
> "In recent years, talking to twitter employees you get this amnesia over the company's culture and history. People don't know where things came from, they don't know the story of how the came to be. The myth's are complicated and messy. And eventually go so messy the company stopped telling the story of how twitter came to be where it is now all together."
That always happens, the raison d'être gets lost after the initial cohort moves on.
Twitter is just another big corporation now, like any big corp employees will pay lip service to vague corporate values (with a few true believers).
Rolling out a heavily decorated old timer in 1870 will not inspire the troops to fight anew for the glory of the French empire.
Rabble was the first Eng hire at Odeo, the podcasting startup founded by Noah Glass and Evan Williams. When Odeo didn't gain enough traction and they were figuring out what to do next, a small Odeo team (which included Jack) prototyped Twttr. And the rest is history.
Yeah, huge amounts of work from prototype to world changing platform happened after i left. Nobody created twitter, rather it was the collective work of many.
Twitter started out as Odeo, we started with Ev's investment in Noah Glass's idea for a podcasting platform in 2004. After a few months in early 2005 Ev joined full time. Biz and Jack joined in the fall of 2005 almost a year in to the company. Twitter itself was created as a prototype in Feb 2006, and the current version was launched as a side project in March 2006.
Companies name co-founders based on what's useful going forward and of the dozen or so folks who were at Odeo when twitter was created it made most sense to name Ev, Jack, and Biz as cofounders. Goldman probably turned down the offer to be named as a cofounder, and the rest of us weren't given an option. Later Hatching Twitter came out and Noah was added to the list of founders.
Starting companies is hard, running them is hard, the drama of who said and did what is interesting but it doesn't teach us much about why the platform ended up like it did or provide insights in to creating new companies.
So i think it's partially values and markets. Enough US companies know the transformational effect tech can have on a business where that's not really understood elsewhere. Just having part of the market get it means it drives up all prices. In the US you are quoted a price before taxes, many countries quote offers post taxes (including after income tax is taken out). That can make US salaries look MUCH higher. Because the employer doesn't think about taxes, if you're outside the US as a contractor or freelancing, you can get a much better deal.
I've got a place in rural northern california and we don't get cell phone coverage, no where within a 20 miles, and of course there is no broadband. The forest service doesn't help put in towers, the rural telephony program only supports landlines, which don't reach out here. Easy process of putting up both cell phone towers and microwave repeaters would be huge. What's now is that the government makes it very hard to do, but it should subsidize it instead.
I love Project FI, but nobody who tries to call me ever gets through. Not nobody, but really like %75 of the calls don't go through. The data and international roaming are wonderful.
Does gigster have anything real at all? There are no gigs at all listed on their site... just a few full time jobs in SF, plus things for working on gigster itself. Seems like it might be a lean startup trick of painting the sky blue to try and build both sides of a marketplace.
