1/ What I learned from fucking up my @ycombinator interview.
(I mean, it's obligatory, right?)
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2/ The YC interview is ten minutes. Every guide reiterates: Keep answers short and concise. That's a very easy thing to do if you're rehearsing answers to expected questions. It's much more difficult in the video conferencing moment.
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3/ Anyways, I fucked that up. Two hours sleep; me caffeinating to try and split the difference; and, getting knocked off balance immediately by Zoom enter-on-mute lead to me rambling and answering poorly. (Plus, I think my application is still too speculative at this point.)
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4/ Anyways, the cool thing is the lesson learned about their 10 minute interview filter — it's probably very good. My guess is their false-positive (bad acceptance) is relatively low and the false-negative (what everyone rejected wants to be) is a good price for them to pay.
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5/
@dhh popularized "constraints are liberating!" at least in my mind. 10 minutes of fast questions is a liberating constraint. But, it's generally applicable.1 reply 0 retweets 5 likesShow this thread -
6/ I live in code, math, IDEs, note taking applications, notebooks, editors, and all manner of brain extensions. They're wonderful tools! But I think I'm going to start spending time just sitting with my thoughts, decanting them, no tools allowed.
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7/ Lots of problems are too big for your head. Hell, pretty much all of them are. (
@paulg's essay on this for programming is good.) http://www.paulgraham.com/head.html1 reply 0 retweets 7 likesShow this thread
8/ But spending time with it in your head alone trying to find a compelling answer or explanation or process relies upon a funny constraint and often uncomfortable — your unassisted cognition (and tightly-binding working memory).
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9/ What remains when you're done? Well, it may not be THE ANSWER. But if it's compelling, it's probably a good explanation, at least of your understanding if nothing else.
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