Programming Throwdown - Udacity: Democratizing Education

Episode Date: February 24, 2016

This show covers Online/Continuing education. We ask the experts: How can more people get jobs in programming? ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

programming throwdown episode 51 udacity democratizing education take it away patrick all right we're here with art Gillespie at Udacity HQ in this awesome room of soundproofing. This is like the most professional interview we've ever done for a podcast. Normally we're just like in our pajamas on the couch, like me at my house, Jason at his. I'm hoping he's wearing pajamas. Sometimes.

Depends if we're streaming or on live coding. Okay, anyways, we'll just keep moving forward. No bad pictures in our heads. Anyways, so we're here with Art. And Art, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Art Gillespie. I'm the Director of Engineering here at Udacity. And I keep wanting to make a joke about how I am not wearing pajamas right now.

He's not wearing pajamas, that's true. But I am wearing clothes. So yeah, I've been the Director of Engineering here at Udacity for about a year now. And so I'm the hiring manager for engineers here. And yeah, I'm excited to talk to you guys. Nice. Very cool, very cool. All right, well, I think, Jason, you had some questions kind of prepared here.

Do you want to? Sure. So some of these are kind of questions kind of for everyone, and we can go around the table and have a discussion about it. And so we're going to start off with one of those, which is, so Art, you have a background in engineering? I do. So how did you first learn how to program? Oh, it was a long time ago. So when I was 10, we got an Apple II at the school library.

And I just started, I kind of borrowed the manuals and took them home and read them and I was I was writing like video game ripoffs cool early as I can remember and but I actually didn't realize you could get a job so I went on as I got older I went on to to go to business school and and kind of went that road and then came back to engineering by a long and winding route. So I am not a trained engineer. Okay, very cool, very cool. Yeah, personally, I was very similar.

I got a Commodore 64 from my parents, and it came with a manual that actually taught you BASIC. It's kind of wild. I mean, now you wouldn't even get a manual, I guess. It would just come with a PDF on it or something. But it had this very well-ill illustrated manual teaching basic and yeah I made you know tic-tac-toe and some kind of simple things on that and similarly you know my I remember my parents saying you know look computer programmers are just gonna be like TV repairmen right now I mean exactly doing this like go into

math like your dad and things like that and and uh it's amazing sort of how far we've come and now we realize that that that programming engineering these disciplines are just like incredibly valuable and uh uh and so it's amazing coming thinking all the way back to then and now what a huge difference right but but for me that's it was just um um i just serendipitously had a basic programming book that came with the computer and that's kind of how it started for me yeah my story is completely different um so both my father and my grandfather were computers and programming computers and so from a young age i didn't get we had computers around the house since you know my dad would you would, you know, get them and have them.

And then he had programming books because he was doing programming. And so about the time I ever started getting interested, I could pick up one of his programming books, you know. What is it? Richie's C language book, you know, had that like on the shelf, like pick it up and look at it. So there's like a, it's pretty unique. You're a programming dynasty. Something like that. And so your first programming book was literally knr i won't say that i first understood it but it had to have been one of the first ones i picked up and

looked at right um instead of the dickens he gives you the no it wasn't like that but yeah so i mean from a young age you know we had like i had ides and you know stuff that i could get my that my dad had gotten right and so um you know initially it's hard he didn't really teach me at the beginning like I would just kind of try to learn myself and kind of but then you know once I was ready you know he was able to help me when I would get stuck and stuff so that's kind of how I learned um and then even I took programming classes and starting in high school um very cool and so yeah that's how I started so if you had to start from scratch you know the men in black folks came with the light and just blinded all of us, right? How would you start learning about programming today?

That's a good question. It seems like a great time to be an autodidact. You know, if it were today, there's just so many resources. And if all I wanted to do was learn, it's almost an embarrassment of riches. So I remember as I was getting back into it, MIT OpenCourse Word had just kicked off. And they had SICP and all this great stuff. So I felt like I could go back and get some of that academic.

But honestly, it was great intellectually. It was super stimulating. But it didn't really help me with my day-to-day work. So I guess what I tell high school kids, I go talk at schools and whatnot, honestly, I just tell people to open up their browser, Google Chrome DevTools, and just start hacking. I mean, it's almost like everybody that has a computer has that Commodore 64 now because you have a full runtime right there in your browser, and you can just start writing games or whatever, and it's incredibly powerful.

So that's what I tell young people is just find a know, find a text editor and start writing stuff in JavaScript. And it's a great way to learn. But for people like me that are doing a career change, I don't think there are as many good options. Because especially if you're looking to make the career change and you want some kind of credential or whatnot. And I think that's where, you know, Udacity sort of fits in is that specific market of people that aren't going to take three months off and go to a boot camp or, you know, stop and go back and get their graduate degree in, you know, computer science. So that, you know, obviously, I would recommend for those people, definitely take a look at us or, you know, other, you know,

people in this sort of MOOC space. You guys said MOOC a lot in the debugging episode. We did. Yeah, we're a big fan of MOOCs. Definitely. Cool, cool. I'm very similar. I think the cool thing about JavaScript and the web is it's

very easy to deploy. I think a lot of where people get stuck is where they don't get any feedback. They're learning C and they end up with loops and they have something that looks kind of cool to them, but they don't even know how to give it to somebody else. Maybe they're on a Windows, they're on a Mac or something like that. But you can just make a website with a JavaScript, a game, maybe tic-tac-toe where you click on the boxes. You could have that up and running, zero to 60 in to 60 in a few days and share that with the whole world.

It's just very special. And I agree. I think I would start, just get Chrome, open up the dev tools, just start hacking away at it, totally. What about you? If you had to start over again, Patrick? Maybe I'm different than you guys.

I don't know, the web stuff is cool, but I think today the biggest opportunity that would make me interested is the Arduinos and the hardware stuff, right? You get a Raspberry Pi, to some extent that's still just a computer, but something like an Arduino where it's really meant to hook up to sensors, to your world, right? That's cool to me, the whole just a step below robotics, I guess, but leading into that as an entry point, I think to me would be very enticing because you can write code and it's not just see something move around on the screen

which is you know I could do with my paint tool on the screen as well right but you know actually seeing something move in the real world without a human doing it like to me I think I would find and I still do now even when I find myself with hobby time programming like that's the stuff I tend to program for and then as far as like learning from there so like starting up those things are cheap now I mean our doing is used to be I guess to me as like a student they were kind of expensive now you know you bought nine dollars right I don't know they're that expensive but I was gonna say even like $30 right like

it's really 25 30 yeah 25 30 you know that's fine you can do that but now I mean you can even get stuff that's like five dollars off Amazon in two days or whatever right like you know it's super super easy we won't get into like the authenticity of those or whatever but you? Like, you know, it's super, super easy. We won't get into like the authenticity of those or whatever, but you know, if you really want to do something, right? Like you can get that stuff and start there in the Arduino IDE and, you know, using that and they've made it, you know, to help you.

And then I think the learning goes from how do I learn what programming is? And I think everything we described is kind of talking about how do we learn what programming is, except for maybe Udacity, which maybe you can fill this in a little. And that is a first step and you need to do that to find out is this interesting to me but i think one of the things that is for someone who's learning on their own is how do you transition from learning what programming is what a programming

language is what does it mean how do i write stuff in it how do i make software right and and making a game in part teaches you that but how how do I structure things? So getting into things like what is OO? Architecture. Object oriented. What is, you know, what is this functional programming language? Like as people in that industry, we talk about those things and we have a feeling for what they mean. But I imagine as a newcomer, right, how do I go from essentially the scripting modality? Like I'm scripting things to happen.

Maybe I add some input, but I'm doing that very simple flow. So how do I say I'm going to build a piece of infrastructure? I'm going to, you know, why would someone go work at X or Y Silicon Valley company just making pipes? Like why is that interesting to them? They're just taking data from one place and sticking in some other, you know. I'd rather make games or I'd rather make robots, right? But there are obviously intelligent people doing those things and like i think one of the missing things for self-teaching is how do you make that yeah that progression and that's something that you know i was forced to learn at university

because you take a class and the teacher gets up and tells you like hey when you get to industry like they're going to be making you do these kinds of things here's an established code base like go in and make edit and i guess it's part of their curriculum there. Yeah. So that gets into our next question, is actually exactly this. So by far the most question, I'm sure everyone listening is dying to hear the answer from Art, is I got a degree in not CS, but I love programming. How can I get a job at programming?

And that includes being able to do architecture and the basics and things like that. Yeah, and I think there are a lot of paths, really. As a hiring manager, I'll walk back. I'll start with the end of this answer and walk back. I think as a hiring manager, when people show up and they just show a big path. I mean, I don't really pay attention to CS degrees anymore as a hiring. It's been a few years since I really cared because I just didn't see any correlation. And I was getting a lot of people that had taught themselves or had made the change. And this is

sort of like part of my journey to Udacity is, you know, career wise is realizing this is a powerful thing that's happening where people aren't CS majors, but they're totally capable of doing industry work. And so I don't really pay attention to that. I look for a passion for the work. And I usually get a great signal. What we do here is we just do a ton of research on people's beforehand GitHub. Do they have a blog? What have they shipped on their own?

Because there's almost no excuse for not shipping something on your own. As you said, it's super easy to deploy just about anything. You can ship an app to the App Store. The cost is virtually nil. And so I always recommend to people that they build up a portfolio of projects. And this is sort of the tack that Udacity took at it as well, is that it's project-based curriculum.

And so you go through, you fix real projects, you build real projects from scratch. And, you know, we have an army of code reviewers that go through it. And, you know, you either meet expectations, don't meet expectations. And that's why we feel comfortable credentialing people at the end. Because they've gone through this sort of rigorous code review process on these five or six projects. But, you know, whether you do it at Udacity, whether you do it on your own, that's the key, I think,

is having this demonstrated passion for the work that manifests itself in projects. So do you have a differentiation between people who do the shotgun approach? Like here I have a bunch of, and I don't mean this slanderously, but a bunch of toy apps, right? Like here I wrote another to-do app in JavaScript,

and then I wrote an iPhone game, but it's you know i move sprite it's a match three game that i found mostly the template on the internet right like so thinking about how i would look at hiring someone right and bringing them in is like to me that approach says something very different than this person kind of sat down and did something new or something different something where they had to get past the point of following in other footsteps and like kind of doing that learning where there isn't a clear guide right like they've been given the fundamentals but they have to go out and kind of do it from I don't know from scratch isn't the right word but kind of like build that thing which there wasn't an existence proof

for well I would argue that the the signal I like best is actually that they went to a real project and just started contributing to it in a small fashion and not doing something from scratch and being hyper creative because I hardly ever hire people that I need to create something from scratch I need them to work on a code base and build features but it's a fair point if it is just sort of look I completed this tutorial obviously not that interesting but there are people that have taken tutorials and just gone insane and that's super impressive but yeah I mean a lot of times I'm actually looking are people that have taken tutorials and just gone insane. Right. And that's super impressive. But yeah, I mean, a lot of times I'm actually looking for people that have

contributed meaningfully to open source projects, even on smallish features. So what would you say, and obviously, specific examples, but like as a general case, what would be a significant contribution to an open source project? Oh, that's a good question. So like, obviously, a bug fix, right? Like, could be a scale from like, I went and changed one line of code. But that's still hard.

You've got to figure out what line of code to change, right, to, like, adding a feature. Is it along that spectrum? How do you kind of, or what have you come across in the past? Well, I think, yeah, exactly. So if you're looking at an entry-level candidate, you know, somebody that's gone in and taken the initiative to, you know, find a bug or five or six and go through and fix them. And you can go through and you can see their comments on the bug group. This is an incredible signal that you don't normally get because somebody just has a four-year CS degree, right? So it's not so much, I mean, there

is an issue of scope there, right? If they just went in and fixed the readme and said, I contributed the Python, which people have definitely done. No, someone exaggerated on their resume? No. I know. It seems extra silly in this day and age

since all you have to do is go check the commitment list, right? But, yeah, no, it's not so much scope. It's more the nature of the work. And then, of course,

you're looking for all the sort of maybe softest skills, but like how do they communicate the issues that they run into? How do they participate in the community?

Because these are the things that are going to make and break them on your team, right? You know, so, yeah, it's not. And I've run into things where people showed up to, I don't want to get too specific, call people out.

It's too easy to identify people. Sure, but. But where somebody went to an open source language project and basically had completely rewrote their support for AIFF files. And this was just because it was, and they improved the load. I don't remember. So AIFF files have the chunk of the header that has all the metadata,

and it improved parsing of that. It was like, I don't know, 80% or something. But, you know, I mean, to me that just shows a tremendous amount of initiative. And also they participated really well. And this is something that had like no prior experience, you know, they built some projects and whatnot. But that one thing was enough for me, you know, in the interview and whatnot, you know, they were capable. Yeah, that was enough for me. So I mean, when people are looking to make the change, I think there's a lot more fear of that process. You know, this town is kind of legendary for having crazy academic requirements

and insane interviews. But when in fact, we're just looking for great people. That's true. And I think too, it depends on, you know, the, the, the company. I think there are some very large companies that have, um, um, that, that get millions of resumes and, um, they don't, they're not going to be able to know who's passionate for the company and who's not. And so it might be difficult without a CS degree to get through all the autonomy so someone can find the diamond in the rough. Not impossible, but more difficult.

But if you find a place like U udacity and uh you have sort of good synergy then there's there's there's no reason why uh you know you with you know the right github and these these kind of like experiences why your resume wouldn't get looked at i think that's a common fear is i'm going to give my resume, it's going to say GitHub superstar invented Lua, did all these things, but it's not going to have computer science degree from insert top five university here, and some filter is going to remove it. I think that happens.

I do think that it happens, but it's not as prevalent as people think. DAN GALPIN- Sure. Also, I was at Google for a while. If you're shooting for Google, this is probably a tougher road to go. But even,

didn't they just, and I think you guys mentioned it too, they had their how to become an engineer page. Oh, the Laszlo posted this, right? There was this list and like Udacity's on it

and you know, how to become a software engineer. Nowhere on the list did it say go get a CS degree. Right. And so,

I don't know, maybe things are changing there as well. Yeah. But the, so that's really exciting to me that it's not, and because just if you think about, you mentioned the industrial revolution earlier, that if we think about the number of jobs that are going to require these skills and the number of people that have them,

we probably have to find a different model. Yep. And just to recap, so we talked about this on the 50th episode, but in case you're skipping, there's this idea of sort of this pyramid where you just, at different levels of the pyramid, you have different roles and they're needed at different quantities. And the Industrial Revolution shifted that whole pyramid up where you need way more mechanists, not as many farmers, and just everyone kind of, all the other levels above farmer grew dramatically.

And so what we're seeing now in the information age is the potential for the pyramid to shift up again. And so that's where something like Udacity becomes very important. So just one thing to clarify and then a comment. So we're talking about Udacity both as a place to learn and a place to work. So that might be slightly confusing to some people. So it may be good to talk about Udacity as a place to work. You guys aren't just a shell website that hosts people's videos.

So maybe we can get into that a little later or whatever. But you're talking about it one way, that way, but also as a place to go and get learning. That's true. And so just people might have gotten a little totally a little mixed up there but yeah i mean i think what you guys are talking about is is interesting is that as we have as companies have trouble hiring people because the you know universities are only capable of churning out so many people and they're mostly focused on weeding out unsuccessful computer science people as opposed to in some ways making them successful that's

that's my personal opinion and so you know they're mostly focused on that that it may be the companies that have the pick of whoever they want it may be a difficult road may continue to be for years to come because as long as if universities are still producing enough very talented people who both had time opportunity and timing to go to university did that. They may take them preferentially, seeing it as less risk. Now, whether or not it is, you know, to be debated. But then, you know, there's always going to be those other companies that are looking,

and they don't have the name recognition, maybe. It doesn't make them a bad company. It just means they're the next Google or Apple or Facebook, right? Those up and coming, when Google and Facebook were initially there, right, and now they're a big company. So there's other companies looking to become that. And so they aren't able to get the, you know, top 1% of graduates or whatever.

And so then they have to look at other things and they're still looking for quality people and quality signals. And I think that's where we're talking about. Now it may change for the other companies as well. They may begin to accept things that they don't today. Also, you have to look at your entire career. Now it may change for the other companies as well. They may begin to accept things that they don't today. Right. Also, you have to look at your entire career. Once you're established in software engineering discipline for 10, 15 years, then the field

is completely equal. I mean, if someone has 15 years experience at Google, I don't know. Do you think it even takes 15? I don't know that it takes 15. Yeah, I was being extremely conservative. But if someone has five years of experience at, let's say, Google, then you're probably not looking at where they went to high school, right, or something like that. And so a lot of it is about you're getting the right experience, and then at that point you've leveled the playing field.

Yeah, I think it can happen in as little as, you know, definitely five years, because if you're really go to a good company, and you're doing good work, when you go to interviews, or when I conduct interviews for people, and you ask them, like, hey, you have, like we talked about, people exaggerate their resume. So, oh, I wrote Python. Wait, I happen, no, I don't think so. But, you know, hey, I did something awesome on Python, you ask them about it, and it falls through, it makes you kind of like, now I feel bad because you've kind of not been truthful. But if you say, hey, I built a, you know, bandwidth shaping algorithm for delivery of video content or, you know, something. Right.

And then you're like, whoa, tell me about that. And you can actually because you did it. You can actually talk about it. You spend years doing it. People go, oh, I can relate to this person. This person knows how to speak the language. Like they obviously know and are passionate about what they're talking about. You spend years doing it. People go, oh, I can relate to this person. This person knows how to speak the language. They obviously know and are passionate about what they're talking about.

And then now you can get on to the other kinds of questions or interview. But you need to get to that point, right? And I think open source helps, but then I think working at a company, as you said, for some number of years and being able to say, look, I worked on this. You don't have to own it as a manager, but these were the things specifically I did. Not my team did, not the mailing list I was on did but the like here's the things I did so another kind of question along these lines is what sort of the certification process for Udacity and other sort of MOOCs and and how does this how is this

different than a university accreditation process? As someone who doesn't know anything about either. I think there was two different things there. Well, yeah, I mean, basically, like, how do either of those two things work? Issuing a certificate to a person or accreditation to an education platform? To an education platform. Okay. Yeah.

So how are universities... Because I'm actually interested in both. Right. How are universities accredited? How is Udacity accredited? And sort of how are these accredited how is udacity accredited and sort of how are these things similar and different right so i don't know how universities are okay apparently nobody it's i the only little bit i know is that um there's some consortium and i think they do a bunch of audits and things i have no idea i figured you i thought you were going somewhere with that no i said okay it turns out none of us know. So we all buy into the system, but none of us know how it works.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so on the Udacity side, we offer a credential. So the idea is we build these nanodegrees with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and we're basically curating the entire sort of all the pedagogy, all the material, all the projects are geared towards what they're looking for in this particular discipline. So if we're doing the data analyst degree with Facebook, you know, we do that with data analysts from Facebook, and they're basically trying to curtail, or I'm sorry, craft a sort of pipeline of entry-level

data analysts. So this is super effective, right? Because this is literally what hiring managers are looking for. And then as people come through, we find it's easy to place these people because, again, they know the curriculum was designed by us with Facebook. So we sort of take that approach to, you know, we would like to help people change their careers or get that first job. And so our idea of credentialing is go to the source. That makes sense. I mean, one sort of common complaint that can seem kind of orthogonal, but I feel now after talking to you it's kind of connected. We always kind of jest about interviews and how – so Max Howell, who invented Homebrew, which is a very popular OS X software,

he posted on Twitter you know you the post was a quoted post it said he was quoting as if he was I can't remember which company he applied to but it said you know you you invented homebrew but you can't invert a binary tree so get lost you know and his whole thing was you know I interviewed at this company I've all years of experience but this some academic thing from 15 years ago didn't apply, hasn't applied to me, and I didn't get it right. So I think maybe that kind of starts to build the pictures. I think a lot of academic accreditation comes from, it's just much more, has a much longer tail. In other words, the people are looking at the next 50 years or 100 years and saying, what should computer science people know 50 years from now? And the answer is yes,

you should always know how to do sorting. And that's just a universal, right? But that puts people who get a degree in a very weird position because the industry doesn't really need that. I've never since leaving university have had to code my own sort algorithm. I would just download it. And I mean, I'm sure you're in the same boat. So there's this kind of disconnect, right? And I think by going directly to the companies and saying, what do you want, and how can we get people there? You're putting people on a direct path to something that's of value to the industry. Wait, so that's a good question, though. So if you go take data analysis, what is the actual, what were you? We have a data analyst nanodegree.

Okay, if I go take data analyst nanodegree, obviously probably to start I need some sort of background in programming before I start, or can I take it just, I want to do a little example walkthrough maybe. So I don't know anything. Can I just start on a degree? If you're a chemical engineer, you want to be a nano engineer. Yeah, I'm a chemical engineer, so I know math. Right. So yeah, I'd say if you're a chemical engineer, you can jump in. So we have sort of suggested prerequisites. We have a ton of free courses that can help people fill that.

Okay. Fill those in. But it's really a question of comfort level. So you walk into DAND, and the first course is pretty basic statistics. But if you're completely uncomfortable with math, then there'd probably be some things that you'd want to do first. OK, but you've not programmed a lot.

It would be OK. I would say we have a few senior courses that are clearly nanodegrees that are designated, like Android and senior web dev where it's definitely implicit in the title that you've already done some programming. But, and then we have, actually one of our most popular nanodegrees is intro to computer science, I'm sorry, intro to programming nanodegree and that's literally, so if you find yourself

in another nanodegree having trouble with the sort of assumption of programming experience and just go to intro to programming and that's literally regardless of where you really want to go ios or java android whatever um this gets you up to speed on sort of the basics of programming um but again it's not a strong computer science focus necessarily so the idea is to get you to be productive and so if you came from okay i'm a chemical engineer. I went through the nanodegree. You know, it's good. Facebook presumably came to you or you went to them and said, like, hey, let's create this together.

So they have some, like, we like what's in here. We looked at the syllabus. We've maybe taken the classes, whatever, you know, sign off on it. But then, you know, taking that and making it a job at Facebook, you at Facebook is probably a helpful thing, right? But is that sufficient? Because I would imagine Facebook wants to know, hey, if we want to switch you from, I don't know, maybe they have a specific data analyst position that isn't also expected to do programming that does other stuff.

But hey, we want that background. Would it be, look, we want a nanodegree in that and something else? Or do you think a nanodegree in that and, hey hey you can start becoming a data analyst and learn the rest on the job do you see where i'm kind of well i mean i i i think with entry-level positions there's always that component of you you know as a hiring manager you hardly ever get everything i keep switching hats here and like from hiring uh talking about audacity but you know as a hiring manager i hardly ever get everything I want in any

hire and there's always an on the job component and often times they bring things

that you didn't expect which are awesome but no absolutely people that come out of

the data analyst degree get data analyst jobs I guess if they want to move into

another role at that company then maybe they come back and take another data analyst degree which Okay. You know, whether, I guess if they want to move into another role at that company, then maybe they come back and take another nanonavigate. Sure, sure. Which would be awesome. Cool. That makes sense.

So, tell us a little bit, you know, more specific about Udacity. Kind of tell us sort of where did the idea come from? What was sort of day one at Udacity like from, you know, talking to people and things like that who, you know who were there at conception? What's sort of the history like, the sort of ramp up, and where is sort of Udacity now? Yeah, so in 2011, Sebastian Thrun, our founder, he was a professor in AI at Stanford.

And I'm not really sure what predicated this, but he decided to make it available, the course, that semester, available to everyone in the world. And this was real time. And they were doing the full experience just for anybody that wanted to attend. And I don't remember the exact numbers. I want to say it was like 60,000 students. Wow.

That's a lot. I'm being told it was over 100,000 students oh wow signed up uh and um and it was taking that one class yeah exactly and so and they're they're grading everything and it's it's insane doesn't scale um right but what he was shocked by and what you know the sort of um nucleus of udacity was that he had to, when they got done and they ranked everybody, the first Stanford student was like 47. And so the first 46 people in the class were remote. And he's like, we, and so the idea was, how do we scale this? And so that is the sort of inception of Udacity.

And since then, you know, and it was one of the first companies, well, that was probably the first MOOC that was real-time. And then, you know, sort of experimenting with those massive, massive open online course models at the beginning. And over time, iterating to this, you know, Sebastian likes to say, and I agree with it, I think it's true, is that the fundamental, and I know a lot of people would disagree, but the fundamental value proposition of an education is a job. And so we, over time, evolved to that. And those are some of the most rewarding things for us individually and as a company, as a business, is seeing the people who we help

reach these goals. You know, they're in one job, they're dreaming of, you know, getting over it, and then it happens through this process. And, you know, to your point about earlier we were talking about they finish the data analyst nanodegree and then they get a job at Facebook. But actually, we have a whole careers group that helps people that does resume reviews, GitHub reviews, LinkedIn reviews. Engineers on my team do mock interviews, so we give them like the full Silicon Valley interview experience. But actually the really cool thing about that is

what you don't normally get to do when you interview somebody. Tell them how they did? Exactly. So you do a 45-minute interview, and then you talk to them for 45 minutes and kind of, you know, give them feedback. Let them know what talk to them for 45 minutes and kind of you know give them feedback let them know what they could do better but also kind of pump them up I have a friend who stopped interviewing because wait doing interviews or going on interviews no he stopped conducting

because so many times people felt like they were doing good and they weren't or vice versa and he couldn't give the feedback back to them and it's sort of like leaves this hole so we should clarify that for because not everybody may know how that works because it was kind of interesting to me because when I got my first job it was a non-technical interview so they just ask you like tell us about a time where you didn't like

someone and had to work with them and yeah so anyway so that's a little bit different but for technical interviews it when you go to job training at a job or when you go on an interview you know what you should expect is that the interview person giving the interview will not tell you anything so you'll they'll say hey you know I have a problem I want you to solve this problem you know go to the whiteboard write it down or over the phone type it into some online sharing thing and then they will sit there quietly and maybe ask a question or two, tell you the next step. But they won't tell you, oh, that's right. Or, wow, that's good. Or, ooh, yeah, you know.

There's nothing. Nothing. You just stare. So sometimes I've been in ones where people just stare at their laptop the whole time. There's no feedback. And that's actually by training. They tell you do not give feedback. say for you know potential lawsuit reasons or whatever you know and that may be but even even lawsuit notwithstanding you don't want i mean what you don't want is the person goes through five interviews all five people tell them they're great and they don't get the job yeah exactly yeah just and also you don't want to become violent like yeah i'm sure there's lots and lots and lots of reasons he gets hard interviews apparently i don't want to take your interview. No, no, no, no.

But, yeah, so people's just opinion of themselves are way higher than to your point, right? People think they're doing great. But, so, yeah, that's great, right? That, you know, having someone tell you at the end, hey, you did this at this point or you did that at that point or you forgot to do this is, like, really helpful. Because it's very nerve-wracking to essentially be talking to a wall that you feel is judging you so it's not even they may think wow this is the best person i've ever seen but they'll probably get that poker face and not tell you anything what's what's the connection between the nano degree and the sort of job training job preparation is there a job preparation nano degree or is that come along with all the other

degrees so the career services come along with the nanodegree guys there is an additional thing called career advisor and we've launched something recently that we're super excited about which is a job guarantee so I saw the email on this yeah so it's it's it's an additional hundred dollars a month while you're enrolled but then we guarantee to find you a job in six months or we just pay back your entire tuition so but yeah on the the career services thing is really interesting like all the engineers love doing this um because you do do the poker face thing for the first 45 minutes because i think all of us remember our

first maybe maybe not first maybe first 10 15 you know interviews throughout over your the course of your career and they're stressful i mean they're incredibly stressful they're stressful for both people to be fair you may not know that but if you get if you're getting someone who's giving their first interview they're probably to be and it sounds silly how could this be but i tell you the first time you give an interview to someone and you're like oh i think this person's like twice as qualified as i am it's very intimidating it is right and you keep your poker face so you have an upper hand but you know you feel very nervous or like you're you're Or like the question that's supposed to take 20 minutes of the interview, and they're just like... In two minutes.

You're like, oh, no! What was that second question? Exactly. But yeah. Yeah, totally. So yeah, so when you're doing a nano degree, the Udacity is trying to provide more than just, hey, take this course, take this, take this course. They're trying to help you grow, right? They're trying to create you a career path

if that's what you're looking for. Presumably some people may not be looking for that. They're just learning. Actually, that's a good question. So if someone is just a pure academic, maybe they have no interest in a software engineering job. Maybe they're perfectly happy being a lawyer, but they just want to learn just in a very sort of like high level academic setting,

computer science or anything, economics or something. Are there those courses? Is there a sort of, I mean, because that's a little different than a nano degree in terms of sort of the goals, right? So how do you sort of balance that? So we have, you know, historically we have some psychology courses. I think there's some econ courses. With nano degrees, it's just been totally let's get people jobs in tech. So nano degrees are almost exclusively focused on that. We have a tech entrepreneur nano degree, which is more focused on sort of starting a business, running a business.

But for the academic the more academic subjects I guess we have these free courses but it's not really our main business. It's not what we you know we don't aspire to get people jobs as economists. You're not going to go over that. So now you're focused on, it sounds like

mostly technology or even computer science as a big focus. But then, do you see that transitioning to other areas? If all of a sudden the math factories start popping up and you need people to make widgets of math, then you could pivot, right? I mean, we've gotten pretty, so the machine learning nanodegree and the deep learning course that we did with Google,

I mean, that's getting more and more practical. I feel like I need to know it, you know, for my job. And so, but that's fair. We push the boundaries there. We've been doing, also, historically, our first course was AI. We kind of stick to that. Makes sense. But no, really for us, it's all about,

we're passionate about this mission of getting people jobs. Cool. So I think there was still something there. So for people who are just looking to audit, so like famously the judge ruling over Sun versus Google over Java APIs is like, well, hey, this is super subtle. Like I should go learn programming. And he admitted from the bench that he had gone and, you know,

read about programming and read a book. Remember what he said? Basically, he taught himself programming. Now, to what degree, I'm not sure. You know, he's a judge. He's probably really busy. But, you know, if he wanted to come take, right, like is there an option there to kind of like, hey,

I'm just auditing a couple courses. Is it at that level? Is it easy for him to identify here's some things to take versus not take because of what I'm looking for? Right, this is an important part of our model. So it's a freemium, you know, model. All of our course material is available for free. So if all you want to do is, you know, watch the videos and look at the material, anybody can do that. You just sign up, do it. The NetAgre is more about the services around it. So the project

code reviews, the one-on-one mentoring. So I guess it depends on whether you learn about it. You know, if you would get value out of a one-on-one mentor, even if you didn't need a job, then the Nanodegree probably is still for you. If you could benefit out of that code review process, that would still be great. But, so.

And I think that's actually a great distinction. I would never ask you to talk bad about other people in this space, but I mean, I think I've been on other places like, oh, here is a course about blah. And it really is. They want to just charge you for the videos. Like that's the thing they're selling. And I think that's interesting what you said, that you guys aren't trying to sell videos. You're not trying to sell learning.

People can learn. You want the knowledge. You want to help people. But I mean, it costs money to have someone give down the phone for 40 hour and a half doing 45 minutes of an interview and 45 minutes feedback. It costs money to have code review and peer review. Those people have to be, by necessity, they could be in the field, right, or else it's kind of meaningless and so therefore it's gonna cost, right? And so it's interesting that that's the thing you're trying, I think that's a very, like that's something I didn't really understand, I guess, prior to you saying this. Yeah, we basically charge for the services, essentially.

Yeah, I'd also thought up until now that the money was just sort of for the certificate. I hadn't really understood that there were different services for the premium versus the free tier. And so that actually makes a ton of sense. And I mean, it's the services that lead to the credential. Right, but you get both. But you're not paying for a piece of sense. And I mean, it's the services that lead to the credential. Right, but you get both. Yeah. Well, you're not paying for a piece of paper. Right, right.

And I guess to some extent, people say that at university, you're paying for a piece of paper. But that's not really true. I mean, university, well, you may criticize in some classes they do, but they don't typically just sit you down and show you a video for the entire time. Like there's TAs who grade your paper. There's professors who you can go to their office hours and they interactively give the lecture theoretically. The interactivity part may depend on your university. But in theory, you're paying for that, right? You're paying for it. In addition to getting a piece of paper, but they have to have people there.

It's not like they can just make that autonomous. It can't scale in the same way. That's right. I feel like there's actually two so this is one thing that makes education so difficult is that there's so many goals from one service right i mean so one is it's a key to academia so if you want to write research papers you have to go to college and so there's there's that part of it where like some if you want a certain door a very specific door to open there's only one way to open that door but there's all if you want to write a very specific kind of academic paper, like peer-reviewed, journal-published academic paper. Okay, just to be fair, I mean, you could just publish an equal quality paper without that tag. Oh, that's right.

Okay. Right. But, well... I distracted you a little. Well, not to go on too much of a tangent, but a lot of academic papers are peer-reviewed. And so even though it's a double-blind peer review, it becomes sort of a clique. You have to be part of the clique to get the paper published. Okay.

Anyway, but that's one goal. But then that's the minority of people, not many people. Like there's this inverse exponential thing that goes on. Basically, every year you're in college, half the people drop out. And this goes from first year, freshman year, all the way to last year of PhD.

And so there's really nobody left at the end. So for everybody else, you're really wanting to change your distribution. So in other words, if I was to pick a person out of a hat who has a CS degree. A sorting hat? Like, yeah, like Harry Potter, yeah. If I was to just randomly pick a person who has a CS degree and randomly pick a person who doesn't,

then the first distribution hopefully skews more towards someone who's going to do better in the job. And so I think that by providing sort of these services, you can provide, not only is it helping the candidates, but you're providing guarantees to the companies. Let's say, if I'm going to draw a Udacity nano graduate, then I'm going to draw someone who I know will fit the role with some amount of confidence. I think it works both ways. I mean, that's gone to an extreme with us. We just recently did a deal with Flipkart in India, the Amazon of India, and they actually did a deal with us

to hire nanodegree grads in India, sight unseen, no interview. Wow, wow. So it's kind of like the manifestation of our ultimate goal to just be able to... Except that pushes a big responsibility on you guys. It does. Now you've got to, you know, protect against things like fraud, right? So if someone's copying someone else.

That's true. I don't mean to talk about it, right? But I mean, if you're going to have that as like, hey, these people are going to hire you. There's a trust there. If you abuse that, you'll lose it and get slammed and get bad press. I was actually thinking something different. I was thinking more just like culture fit and things like that. It's hard to sort of, like you want to be given the chance to say,

yes, this person has all the skills, but they don't fit the flip part. Yeah, but I mean the person could ultimately get the job and not like it and transition to something else after a period of time. That's true. Or they don't have to accept presumably the offer, right? Right, that's true. So sure, there's other things and maybe they still conduct yeah anyways whatever but slight unseen hiring right like then you guys have to protect against like how do and this goes another question i have in general which

is you know how do you make sure the people are the people they say they are and doing the things they say they're doing but then also providing the interaction with other people so like you know in college you do group projects and i think college it's also a problem like sure it is so I kind of those two things that's true how do there's no in-person part right so like I how do you make sure the person is who they say they are and then how do you provide that person-to-person interaction among peers so we use an identity certification service when you graduate and as far as you know fraud or cheating is the same as it would be in any institution.

You get ahead of it, find something new. Sure, don't say anything specific. And the algorithm, no. What we do, making that scale is a fun technical challenge. But yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And it's something that we're vigilant about because if those things happen, not just with Flipkart, but in general, the credential is not worth anything. And, you know, it is worth something, and we're going to make sure it's worth something. So we work really hard on that.

And then, again, because people aren't in a place, you know, the interaction will necessarily be different. But how do you kind of handle that? They weren't really that related. No, so on that, I think of that more is a that helps people learn that's uh not not so much as a validation or fraud yeah yeah yeah no no but yeah the the this is something that we work on a lot from a product perspective where we just want to make it as much like being in a classroom as possible so we cohort people as they join So they see those same people throughout their... Oh, that's cool.

You have the same deadlines as those folks. And we've experimented with a lot of sort of real-time chat, sort of study group-type things, and those have shown tremendous promise, and we'll keep looking at that. We also, as often as we can, we host sort of in-person in different cities where we have the most students. We'll host these sort of in-person hackathons or just

meetups. And we found that, I mean, the engagement with those folks is just huge. I mean, we have good engagement as it is, but the folks that actually feel like they're part of a group, and it's, you know, it's the college thing, right? They just, they do much better in terms of retention, in terms of, you know, getting projects done on the original timeline. I mean, I should point out that you can work at your own pace. These deadlines are sort of just to help motivate people. But then, you know, nobody ever fails out because they, you know, missed a deadline or something like that.

But I think what Jason says is true. I mean, you guys must suffer attrition, right? People who start something and don't finish. And then, like, having a group to kind of, do you find that people are reporting that the groups help them to stay motivated to like, you know, if you have no schedule, if I'm just like, I've taken a couple of moves and I don't think I finished any because I'm a terrible person. That's true. I'm halfway through, you know, four different.

Yeah. So that's partly because like I'm not seeking to get a job. I'm just picking up some extra learning. I'm not trying to look for a certification because at this point in my life, I'm not seeking it. Um, not that I won't ever, but, um, so as we move on, right, like I drop out, whatever, and when you find, do people report that in these groups, they get, you know, motivation to keep the course and like stay on a, you know, deadline, even if it's, you know, self-imposed.

Well, so we've done a bunch of stuff to help with that um so i mean yeah we have attrition like any people are a little more invested because they're paying um we also if you if you finish your nanodegree in the first and within 12 months we give you half your tuition back um i didn't know that okay um and is that hard to do i mean i just like no you know i don't know like how many hours like how many hours a week would it take a person to finish a nanodegree in a year? I mean, that's all the specific question, but. It's a good one, but it varies a lot because people are doing this, you know, people do nanodegrees while they're at their current job or while they're going to school. They have different backgrounds.

Right. And so, I mean, the average is about six months across all nanodegrees. Oh, okay. And, but we've seen extremes on both ends. You know, we've seen people finish them in three months. But if you're reasonably, you know, there's no promise, but if you're reasonably motivated and you're really trying to drive at it, getting through in a year isn't an impossible task. Oh, no, not at all. So, you know, I recently hired one of our graduates that finished three of our nanodegrees in the course of about seven months. Wow.

Is that some kind of bootstrap? I trained this guy, and then he came and worked for me. It's funny. When I interviewed here, I was like, so do you guys dog food? Do you hire your graduates in the engineering team? And I was really pleased that the answer was yes. But, yeah, he's been great. So, I mean, these hyper-motivated folks

can get it done really quickly. But I think Alan said that he was spending like three hours a day on it. So, I mean, extremes on both ends. Well, I mean, which isn't unreasonable. I mean, I'm sure there are people playing League of Legends or... Why do you have to call me out on this? I thought you were a Dota guy.

Yeah, that's true. Okay, well, okay. So, just out yourself then. But, you know, League of Legends or, you know, Counter-Strike or, you know, Halo. I'm going to date myself. I don't know, whatever. But anyways, you know, people playing that two, three hours a day, easy, right? I mean, to be fair, I'm not saying they're wasting their time because you do what you want with your time.

You can absolutely finish it in a year. Yeah, I mean, two to3 hours studying is probably harder than playing League of Legends for 3 hours. It's not ridiculous. Yeah, absolutely. Dota is so good. People who play that are so skilled. It's hard for me to play Dota

because I used to be very good and then we both had kids and so now we don't play that much anymore. And when I do play, it still thinks I'm at the same level. So now I play, and people basically call me slurs and tell me to leave. But I didn't really answer your question earlier. So what we tell people on the website is it's 10 hours a week for six months. But again, that's...

It's very dependent. Yeah, this is a guideline. Like you said, I mean, if you have someone who's a chemical engineer, it's going to be different than someone who got three quarters of a way and for life circumstances dropped out of a computer science degree, right? Like those two people are going to have very different experiences. So do you have any public stats? I mean, I know that the guarantee thing is relatively new. And this Flipkart thing sounds like it's even newer but historically are there any stats on um you know students sort of like what the funnel looks like right like students who come in um sort of what percentage of them like finish what percentage like do you

have any like cool success stories kind of things like that um yes all. Good. I guess that's it for this episode. So, yeah, we have over 2,000 graduates. And so the inter-degree is launched in October of 2014. So it's about 16 months. And so we have over 2,000 graduates. And the jobs thing is a little harder. People that we've helped put in jobs, people that we know about, is over 300. But we expect that they're more of a just, it's a self-reporting thing.

And there are people that we know have gotten promotions, too, as a result of this. There was a woman at Google that went from being an analyst to being an SWE. Okay. Which requires a technical interview. Yeah, SWE is software engineer. you will not know. Yeah. I just said sweet and made it really. So yeah, the, what was the other, there was one other number you asked for. So success stories and also just, yeah, like anyone in particular who said something that kind of really Like, I was away because I had to go to Afghanistan or something. I came back.

I couldn't go to college. Any cool stories like that? So, yeah, my favorite is actually Alan, the guy I was telling you about earlier. So he was the special forces guy. And it's funny that you said that because he was in Afghanistan. He actually did. He went to MIT for mechanical engineering. And then he joined in Afghanistan. He actually did. He went to MIT for mechanical engineering, and then he joined the Army,

did several deploys in Afghanistan, and came back and decided that he wanted to be a software engineer and just started doing nanodegrees, like I said, very rapidly, and then decided instead of getting a job, he was going to start his own company. And he started this really cool...

The idea was crowdsourced insurance. Okay. So basically going back to the, you know, the idea behind insurance is distributed risk. Right. But like now you pick the people that you distribute risk with. Oh, okay, okay. So it's a totally fascinating model. So I'm imagining a Kickstarter page where it's like,

hi, I'm an athletic 30-year-old looking for other people. God smoker. Yeah. So the idea is like all of you get together and you say, okay, if I break my arm, we'll all split it, you know, in ways. Well, is it, well, okay. Let him finish the story. Then we can have some. Sorry, sorry.

That is an amazing business. Yeah. And novel, too. I was really surprised. So the, but anyway, he wound up interviewing here after he'd been doing that for about six months. And we were all just blown away in the interview process. Of course, we have a soft spot for our students, our graduates, obviously. But yeah, I hired him on the team, and he's just been incredible.

And it's kind of, you know, people get jobs other places than Udacity, but that one's so close. And it's really amazing to see this guy every day was he able to hit the ground running or was it just okay I really need someone to boot camp me on Udacity or something no he didn't need a lot cool he's a it's definitely you know as an individual he's the sort of person that just runs really hard. And then I was talking about mock interviews earlier. It was sort of my introduction to the Udacity culture. I'd been here about a month, and I volunteered to do one of these mock interviews. And as we were talking about earlier, it was really satisfying to do it and then give her feedback.

And this was a woman who was completely changing careers. She was like a court reporter. Okay. And this was a woman who was completely changing careers. She was like a court reporter and then was going to interview. She was interviewing around the valley for engineering test positions or software reliability engineer type things. And I didn't mention earlier, but I used to be at Nest. It's relevant to this story. So about five weeks later, she didn't tell me where she was interviewing. About five weeks later, I just get this gushing email thanking me for my help.

And she just got a job on the integration engineering team at Nest. Cool. And there was something so appealing about seeing this person. For me as an individual, we do this at scale. But seeing the sort of impact on one person's life and um what was amazing but yeah we have lots of people we had somebody that was a pro golfer and decided they want to be a programmer and went to udacity and got a job as a programmer cool cool yeah there's where i used to work there were lots of programmers who did golfing but around here i don't know many people

that's true it usually goes the other way around You want to become a pro golfer after you do programming. So before we go to some of the listener questions I think you have here. I don't know if we, I think we covered almost everything. Okay, I was going to say, so we talked a lot about Udacity, but I mean other things too, just being, you know, you said you were director of engineering. Is that your title? Did I get that right?

You know, what are the kinds of things, you know, just want people to know or whatever regarding Udacity, regarding, hey, when you're interviewing, don't brush your teeth before you go. Right. We always do. Or just good tips. You do obviously a lot of hiring, I imagine. I do.

Or at least a lot of interviewing. And so, yeah. So if you want to talk a little bit about that, people are always asking us for tips, right? We have people who are already kind of training or trained to be computer science now they're trying to do interviews so like that stuff is also um would be interesting for people to hear and then i i read a blog post in preparation for this where you were right talking about being a dad in the as a programmer i think okay you're looking at a little blank it's like uh-oh no no

um and so we're both that so you know if we want to talk about that or diversity in the work for like these are things we care about as well So if you just kind of have any other things that you want to talk about or give tips or... Yeah, we've been kind of blasting you with questions now as you're talking to... To blast you guys with questions? No, I think on the interviewing, it's obvious, but so many people get it wrong,

is ask questions. You know, the big thing, the mistake that I see people make, and this is experienced people as well, is that they come, the mistake that I see people make, and this is like experienced people as well, is that they come to the interview and you set up a problem

for them and they just go, okay, right. And they don't ask you whether you care more about time or space or, you know, just, and that's always

a red flag. I don't know about you guys, but for me, that's always this red flag of like, no clarifying questions at all. And,

that's the advice I want to give to almost, well, not almost, but to lots of candidates. If I had the chance, just ask me questions before you start answering the question. Yeah, I mean, imagine if you're on the job and someone says, I want you, we're building the next Facebook.

You always hear this. I get asked this on Quora every week. How do I build the next Facebook? So if someone comes to you on the job and says, hey, you'll build the next Facebook, your answer would be why? I mean, like, what's really the point here? Or if not why, at least, like, how? Like, what sort of assumptions are we making that's going to make things different, right?

And it's the same in an interview. If someone says, you know, do a deep copy of this graph, you should say, well, is it a tree or does it have cycles in the graph? Like these kind of things, right? You should ask questions back to them and start to understand. And then also just ask about the company and is it sort of the right place to be. I totally agree. That would be one of my top things is people just want to know. There's plenty of people who can do the deep copy of the graph. There's not that many people who are

genuinely interested in the company that you're representing. I'll give a dissenting opinion because I really had this argument yesterday at work. And so there is a fine balance here between uh people who stall by asking questions sure and then when you're doing an interview trying to make it clear that you're not so like i know this and i'm ready to go and so sometimes people ask questions which are simple enough that they don't i won't say don't require because as you said you may could ask something but they're trying to look let's put up a solution and then like i want to show I can get a solution up, and then let's talk about it. Because often as engineers, I mean, that's kind of, you first say, how would I solve this as a first order thing, and then talk about, now that I have a, you know, something down, especially if I know it's going to be short

enough that I can bang it out fast, like, let's talk about what would be different, right? And I'm not saying you guys are wrong, I'm just saying, like, I've had candidates who I ask a simple first question and I want to expound upon they go ahead and give me an answer I don't actually knock them down for that because then I say okay now that was great and if they're going fast enough they're going slow enough I'll kind of stop them away hang on a second like you know whatever they're banging out fast great get to the end and say ah that's great now what happens if we change it this way or change it right and now I begin to introduce that

or maybe sometimes they even ask like once they get that first thing up oh you mean something that's solvable by this and give me five lines of code and it's like well yeah that would be a solution and then like okay well what happened do you like are you planning to change this are you planning to change that and they asked me at that point because i would say i'm very careful to say that when someone doesn't do this thing i it's a red flag because... That's a good point. I understand what you're saying. It's a valid point in general. There are hardly any absolutes in interviewing. It's very improvisational.

It's just the thing that I've been running into the last couple years is just people just jumping into problems and missing a key. But sometimes it's really blatant if you've set the problem up, which maybe it's not a good question. We could get to that.

It's a separate discussion, but some people start something with something missing. Yeah. Right. And so you will get some far, you can get started, but you'll get to some point and be stuck and now you'll be hosed because you made assumptions and then you still couldn't get it done. And that's, do you have in that case? Yeah.

Do you have sort of like a, so we've shared in the past the past our interview horror stories so this is on both sides of the fence you know an interview that was that was horrifying and interviewing someone else where horrifying things happened did you have an interview horror story on either side i'm so glad you asked oh no yes so while i was at a company in the valley um and i was interviewing as a hiring manager so I would typically do behavioral questions and just you know looking at you know will this person work well with other people but I would always throw a technical question and this is a sanity check and for a while there the one and these are just kind of fizzbuzz type question okay yeah and it was just filled on a fizzbuzz is like the most popular interview question but it's really I've never seen anyone ask it

before I haven't either but it's the most example it's the most example question but I don't even know it is something with a for loop or something if a version of it is I want you to print fizz you know go through a counter and print out to number one two three and everything every seventh safe is every third say or every third say buzz, every seventh say fizz. And then that's the question. And you're supposed to determine that on ones that

are common multiples of seven and three, you need to say fizz, buzz. OK, got it. That's the gist. So you asked a fizz, buzz question. Or similar to the fizz, buzz question. The question was actually count the number of set bits in a 32-bit integer. And this guy, he was French, so I'm going to try to do an impression here.

This guy kind of leans back in his chair, which doesn't work on video. It's just total attitude. Body language is awful. He's just leaning back in the chair. He's got this contemptuous look at the whiteboard. And he's like, you can tell it's a leaning back in the chair. He has this contemptuous look at the whiteboard and he's like, you can tell it is a hardware company with the bits.

And I'm like, no, no, this is a problem solving thing. First principle is no problem. We just walk through it and he's just getting angry. And right when I'm about to call it, and I'm just like, okay, forget about it. We won't do this question. He yells, the bits! I have not used the bits in years

and then he picks up his backpack and storms oh oh my so is it instant hire yeah sounds great get that guy around man that's amazing oh man so the answer is look up table that's painful right like that so so well, one of the things there is... I'm going to do the problem now. I'll say like... On air. Fascinating. The hardest thing, the most frightening thing for me as an interviewee,

somebody asked me, how would I design a database for this website? And it was a website company. And I only knew embedded systems i know anything about web anything at the time and uh and i basically kind of said various things they said oh it's not going to work i was like yeah i guess you're right you know and and uh the important thing there is uh it is always try and talk your way through it and have an important dialogue i mean as you said i mean this is maybe this guy knew the answer, but because he didn't want to have the dialogue,

you're never gonna get the job that way. The other useful tip in your horror story is, even if you're going for a tentacle interview, be ready, don't fall over when someone says, tell me about a problem you solved, or tell me about yourself in a few sentences, or two words to describe you. It says, oh, those are questions that are easy, if you've not like spent a few minutes thinking about it you'll be caught

flat-footed and it gets awkward and you can uh improve all of these skills by doing the nano degree i know but i was i was actually just i can show wow wow jason what can i say is the pins were set up i just had to knock them down. Sponsored by you, Dan. No, but I was going to say that we do these sort of question and answer, what are they called? Hangouts on air. Oh, okay. Yeah. Where we'll just field interview questions.

And, I mean, the most common answer to every question is, you know, prep. You know, what you were alluding to is,, don't, don't get stumped by, you know, behavioral questions. You can expect those, right. And just practice and, you know, practice with the Udacity engineer during a month. But I thought you were going with that is that you allow people to ask you interview questions and then like someone solves that was like, that is gutsy. That is gutsy. Wow. Cause every time I... We don't do that, but now we will. That's a really good idea. I kind of want to listen to this now. Can I call in with some questions?

I guess I don't know how to solve. I have this bug. Can I just send you this source code? It becomes some source, and this is really unfortunate. I try to fuss at people I catch doing it, but, like, abuse the interviewee. Like, you know, ask them some question that's ridiculous. And, like, you don't expect them to do well, but like you ask them a really hard question

just to like show like it. That's worth saying. So you hear about this. And actually, I think this is true in the finance sector. I have a friend who interviewed at, well, a certain finance company. And they have an interview where they just try and get under your skin

and see how you react. So in general, I mean, I've interviewed and been an interviewer at a lot of companies. I've never seen this. Oh, I have. Really? You've seen an interview where the point was to... Yeah, someone, well, I don't know that they were... Someone told me 15 minutes into an interview,

I think you have no technical skills whatsoever. When I was solving a technical problem, like on the whiteboard. But my point is they weren't know to tell you that really that they were just a terrible I mean they're having a bad day I think they're having a bad day probably that's an HR moment most places yeah so no I don't know that for sure it was a test it's impossible to know but it is true that some people are told ask the candidate, and I do know this

ask them a really hard question and then you have a calibration internally that they're only expected to get the easy answer or halfway through and they want to make sure that at least one question isn't completely solvable so you know where the upper limit is that's true in programming competitions as well, right?

Like there's some you're really not supposed to be able to answer in the timeframe. That's why the Eastern European ACM set is harder than the World Finals set. Because there's so many teams from the Eastern European division that don't qualify. Because only the top three teams from each division qualify. And they found that when they made those two sets the same everyone got a not everyone but a lot of people got all of them right and so they ended up having to make that set harder and so you're right I mean interviews are the same way where they keep they need to make sure that you can't get everything right so that because they want to know

where you're what happens when you write squirm right and not to an abusive point you can avoid HR moments and you have to be really trusting of the person doing the interview as a hiring manager to tell them to do this. Just because you're doing poorly on a problem A, doesn't mean you're actually doing poorly and B, may mean it's designed for you not to finish.

Anyways, I think I derailed us. You were saying about this person in the finance. No, I think there's some interviews that were some companies where they uh there's there's like people think that that company they try to give you a hard time but it's not true they're really just trying to find the best people and uh um and you're all you're both kind of have aligned interests when you're interviewing that's one important thing to take away but uh cool thank you art oh thank you for your time uh this is awesome well uh i'm really looking forward to uh to uh to um getting the feedback and so we might get some questions for

you from from the listeners so we can send them your way and things like that and sounds good cool i guess that's it thank you guys for listening and uh the intro music is axo by biner pilot programming throwdown is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 2.0 license. You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work. But you must provide attribution to Patrick and I and sharealike in kind.