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Silicon Valley Interview Pet Peeves

After spending several years constantly hiring people in the Valley, here are small pet peeves that I encounter frequently - and bother me most. Last week one candidate did the hat trick and did all 3 which made me want to write it down and make it “public” for the record –

1. Don’t show up late, and then not apologize.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like candidates that show up on time. But stuff happens. Traffic happens. Trains don’t run on time like they do in Germany. But is it really that much to ask to apologize when you’re late to an interview? Or at least call ahead to warn that you’d be late?

“Punctuality is the courtesy of kings” - quote I remember from the wonderful BOOK not the movie ”Thank You for Smoking” but supposedly its from a Louis XVIII. Its not that 2 minutes here, 5 minutes makes a world of difference in terms of time - its a matter of respect for the other person - and this is important no matter what the role (except maybe - brilliant engineer).

2. Don’t admit you had a long weekend in Vegas, so you didn’t really have time to prep for the interview.
Again, this is more about respect for the other person. In what world is this an appropriate response to your lack of preparation? At the very least, you should try to appear prepared - because yes, at some point in your career, you will have a long weekend in Vegas and won’t be prepared for the important presentation. But the ability to get through those situations passably - is what separates the boys/girls from the men/women.

3. Don’t be negative about the interviewer’s T-shirt.

Negativity is fine for soul-searching blogs and Yelp reviews. And sure, you can joke about people’s dress after you’ve landed your job. But being negative about the company, about industry events, about the T-shirt that the interviewer is wearing - all things which should follow the maxim “If you can’t say something nice, better not say anything at all.” You can think all these things - but do you really have to say them out loud?

All of these things come down to “RESPECT”. If you have a modicum of respect for someone who is spending the time to consider hiring you and giving you money & a sense of belonging, I think its all common sense….

Otherwise - its much more respectful to cancel an interview, than to go thru with it. In the Web world, you may not want/or care about the job now, but in 2 years this same person may be interviewing you for the dream job, and negative impressions will last a lifetime….

I have a new job!

I have a new job! Recently I became the VP of Product for FixYa, the world’s largest community Q&A site for technical support on everything you own. FixYa maybe the largest site in the world that no one knows about. We get over 9 million visitors a month, which is equivalent or more than much-better known Yelp. Thousands of difficult product support issues get answered every day, and its absolutely free. Its like my old gig - Yahoo! Answers, except that the quality of Q&A is focused on product issues, and so there is much less chitchat, and because of its focus, its much easier to monetize.

FixYa is headquarted in the Peninsula of the Bay Area - in San Mateo. We are hiring at every position - product manager, business development, designer, and marketing. So forward this on to anyone that might be looking.

Social…

During the 80s and 90s, the only common uses of the word “social” as an adjective in front of a noun was for “social studies” that you took in elementary school, and maybe “social security”. Then in the middle of this decade we started to see it applied to Web 2.0 concepts (e.g. social bookmarking, social networking, social software, social graph) but now it is proliferating out of control - (e.g. social gaming, social commerce, social broadcasting, social media). The only letter in the alphabet that does not generate a Google suggester in the G-Toolbar is the letter X (social X-box is not yet a common term).

Profile Pic Management

Since there is practically a site related to every aspect of Social Networking - why isn’t there one for profile pic management (or maybe Flickr should do a feature). I don’t particularly go out of my way to join social media sites, but even so I have more than 10 profile pics that I have had to upload separately. Now, you really expect me to go to each & every site and upload new pics, every time I have a makeover (or trying to play down my crazy Tequilla past?) No - there should be some kid at Stanford who starts a profile pic mgmt site or Flickr should allow me to do this. Maybe I should write Kakul…

What is up with eBay employees?

Every time I post on Craigslist for a part-time position for Web work (coding, design, etc.) I get a ton of replies from CURRENT eBay employees who all say they can work up to 20 hours a week on moonlighting freelance. One person we hired for a facebook application was absolutely horrendous - but I still am amazed at how he often came to our office in the middle of the work-day (long lunch???) to do milestone meetings. Is life at eBay that slow & boring that you have to look for outside work? Or do they not pay enough? Inquiring minds want to know….

Hardware Always Beats Software in the End

Reading about Mowser’s demise (I sat in on a few mobile search meetings with Russell Beattie at Yahoo! a couple years ago), it reminded me that everytime smart people try to invent ways to deal with hardware limitations with software (like Mowser tried to do by smartly converting regular web pages into mobile web pages), they are burned in the end by hardware making the Moore’s Law jumps in capacity/capability that make the software solution moot. One example is all those data archiving software solutions in the 90’s which are totally useless now that you can store tetrabytes of data for $50/month. Another may be the way scaling “search” used to be trying to come up with ever-sophisticated algos for that one Sun server - while Google was just scaling with thousands and thousands of ever-more cheap Linux boxes.

Is Yahoo! going to buy Twitter?

Given that Y! will probably soon be part of Microsoft, it may not be such a good tip any more, but I noticed that in the last 30 days, I have been getting an inordinate amount of people from my former company (Yahoo!) signing up for Twitter and telling me that they are “following me”.

This happened 3 times before in the last 2 years - where I saw a big surge in people from my Yahoo! network asking me to join their “network” - and especially people you would not have expected to be interested in social networks - once for Flickr, then for del.icio.us and finally for Facebook. First 2 were bought by Yahoo!, and a billion dollar offer was made for the last one.

Is this the last gasp of Yahoo!’s bid to stay independent? Twitter????? (next may be justin.tv.

Facebook vs. MySpace

There’s a lot of buzz about Facebook these days, and the stats point to a still dominant MySpace. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/11/myspace-still-the-king/

One factor in their differences that I think is critical to their product direction is that Facebook avoided getting swallowed up by Yahoo! whereas MySpace became part of the Fox-NewsCorp empire. And I think in small but strategic ways, you see that in the product updates and directions of these two companies.

Whereas Facebook still operates like a startup and makes major strategic bets like opening membership up to the public and this whole apps platform direction, MySpace has certainly stagnated in the product strategy and features department. Having been at Yahoo! I can just imagine the “product leaders” at MySpace having to go thru endless committee meetings, research, and bureacracy to change anything in their product, and certainly any major risky bets getting quashed since the main business is such a cash-cow.

You can also see in MySpace’s international sites (I read Japanese & Chinese) that their “globalization” efforts are purely functional - as they just machine translated the UI and launched it without any real consideration for cultural/social dynamics in those countries. I am willing to bet lots of yen that some ”not in the target demographic” exec at NewsCorp gave some strategic decision to enter those large Asian markets, without any consideration for the product aspects of entering those markets.

Anyhoo - hats off to Facebook & the Zuck machine for “just doing it” and a very wise decision not to get bought by Yahoo!

Price = Marginal Cost

As I was buying a digital “gift” (aka icons) on Facebook for Caterina who just had her baby, I saw that the one I wanted to buy was a limited edition (100,000 only! Buy now!) and it cost $1. I don’t know how many of these Facebook sells each month, but it is easily a side business with the highest margins since all you need is to hire a cheap graphic designer in China, and then some social network where giving this stuff is easy. Then I remembered my Econ 101 days when I taught the undergrads the golden principle of modern economics P=MC (price = marginal cost). Obviously this is in a perfect market, but its still interesting to think about the marginal cost of digital goods, since you’d think its close to 0. Once you’ve uploaded that icon, it pretty much just requires that the servers continue to run so that 2 people can buy - send - receive. So at $1 an icon - that’s a pretty nice profit margin, as long as you got that social network - of course.

South by Southwest 2007 Interactive

I came to South by Southwest 2007/Interactive, not knowing what to expect. The only information I had was that there were good parties at night. So I was pleasantly surprised when I can honestly say that I learned a thing or two about web design, as well as the story behind Lonelygirl15 from its creators, Miles Beckett, Greg Goodfried, and Mesh Flinders (med-school drop out, lawyer, and film director wannabe) and how Genghis Khan obliterated the Russian knights in the 13th century (”The Ten Ways to Run a Startup like Genghis Khan“) from an Asian American dude named “Kevin Hale“.

All in all, the people were normal folks (as normal as Web designers from the Bay Area can be considered normal), not snooty NYC design types, and mostly very friendly. I heard the attendance numbers were 5000+ (up 60% from last year) so that may have something to do with the normalization of the attendees. Maybe not as edgy as it once was, and certainly not as entertaining as its Film and Music cousins, but it was certainly a worthwhile professional conference.

Good times…