[edent]

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz.

Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

[hkmurakami]

>I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

from: "The trick Max Levchin used to hire the best engineers at PayPal"

Levchin realized the best engineers wanted to be challenged both in their jobs and in the interview process. “We cultivated a very public culture of being incredibly hard to get in. Even though it was actually very hard to get good people to even interview, we made a point of broadcasting that it's incredibly hard to even so much as get into the door at PayPal. You have to be IQ of 190 to begin with, and then you have to be an amazing coder, and then five other requirements. The really, really smart people looked at it and said, "That's a challenge. I'm going to go interview there just to prove to these suckers that I'm better." Of course, by end of the conversation, I'm like, "Maybe you want to come get a job here because you're pretty amazing.”

http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-...

[Retric]

Looking for people with high IQ's with the right background is basically a waste of time. There are plenty of ways to define IQ's but 160 is around 1 in 30,000 and there are only something like ~200 graduating highschool each year. If 5 percent of them study programming you looking a say 10 new genius programmers every year. And plenty of them avoid SV for reasons as simple as the limited dating pool.

The simple truth is large companies end up with a few geniuses randomly but there rare enough to not be worth optimizing for. What companies really want are people willing to work ridiculously hard for little reason and that's what 'hard' interviews are optimized for. O your willing to put up with hours of BS on the off chance we will higher you, great let's just see how you like 60h+ weeks.

[astrobiased]

My dad was part of a company in Boston that only had employees with an IQ of 140 and up. I asked him how it went and he laughed and said it naturally fell into ruins. Key point: there's a lot more to employees than just quantifiable numbers like GPA, IQ and such.

[lelandbatey]

I'm pretty sure that was mostly hyperbole, with the intention being "we hire smart, clever people" however you choose to qualify that.

[killermonkeys]

Yes lack of dates has always been a big complaint at the Palo Alto MENSA meet ups.

[reinhardt]

Bazinga!

[fuzzywalrus]

To add: Genius isn't even a predictor of success. Granted, intelligence is a useful tool, its only one of many things that govern success. Sometimes "genius" can be in impediment to success.

Humans are hive minded despite our best attempts to assert otherwise. A modern computer or a modern bridge can't be built from scratch by one person. A genius can certainly help raise the bar, but a cohesive unit capable of achieving the end result is going to be a better optimization strategy.

[nostrademons]

IQ has fat tails: the extreme ends of the distribution are much more common than a bell curve would predict.

[Retric]

IQ by definition fits the bell curve. A given normalized IQ test is only good for a given rang and time period and when incorrectly interpreted outside of that range will produce excesive people with high IQ's. Also a test that's accurate +/- 10 IQ points is going to bump more people from 150 to 160 than drop people from 160 to 150 simply because there are more people at 150 than 160. Not to mention the tendency for people to pick the highest score vs the average.

PS: Often the limit is as low as 135.

[nostrademons]

Alex3917 brought up the same point in the other sub-thread where I raised this, and my response was basically "What's the point then?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5915459

Yes, you can define a concept as a normal distribution centered at 100 with a standard deviation of 15. But if you claim that this concept can be measured with IQ tests, and then the observed distribution of IQ scores doesn't match the predicted curve - it's the curve that's wrong, not the tests.

The studies that the "fat tail" results were from all used the Stanford Binet L-M test, which has a ceiling of around 230.

[Retric]

Sit back and think about this for a second, if you define IQ in some other fashion you can't really have multiple IQ tests just the score on one specific test. As to having problems with a specific test, just because a specific laser rang finder has issues does not mean we need to redefine the inch.

PS: There is no way they had enough data to support an IQ rang up to 230. Do you bave any idea how many people you need to sample to have 50 people with an IQ between 205 and 220.

[HelloMcFly]

Do you have evidence for that? I've worked on cognitive ability testing as it related to workplace performance, and have never seen anything that deviated dramatically from a normal distribution, especially at the high end.

[nostrademons]

Google [iq fat tails] and there're a bunch of articles on it (and one comment I wrote here about 4 years ago). The original data source for most of the articles is Terman's 1921 study of high-IQ people; they've plotted out the observed frequency of Terman's data against a normal distribution and found that it deviated markedly after about 3-4 SD.

Some additional Googling seems to have found some other independent studies:

http://hiqnews.megafoundation.org/John_Scoville_Paper.htm

http://www.abelard.org/burt/burt-ie.asp

I'm curious what sort of population your work draws from. The results above showed that IQ follows a normal distribution until about 140; other papers I've read indicate that IQ correlates with life outcomes until an IQ of about 140, and then appears completely uncorrelated. If you're studying workplace performance, I wouldn't be surprised if a good fraction of high-IQ people simply aren't in the workplace. (See eg. Christopher Langan.)

[gwern]

> other papers I've read indicate that IQ correlates with life outcomes until an IQ of about 140, and then appears completely uncorrelated.

Cites? The papers I've read, from the Terman study and the SMPY kids, don't show that.

[ArekDymalski]

Just remember that the distribution of the test results depends on the tool itself as well as testing conditions. So I would say that such anomalies are rather the problem with the measurement than characteristic of the population.

[dk8996]

I have to agree with this at some level. I have seen startups trying to pull this type of crap. I haven't figured out why, it could be because they are trying to create "elite culture" that just doesn't fit or they are trying to seem more special so you will put up with BS and 60h+ weeks.

[kybernetyk]

> "That's a challenge. I'm going to go interview there just to prove to these suckers that I'm better."

Well that, or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

[SatvikBeri]

Dunning Kruger does not mean that unskilled people think they do better than skilled people. On average, the more competent people at any skill will rate their abilities higher than the less competent people. See this graph[0] from the original study[1] for a better explanation.

[0]: https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/p480x...

[1]: http://ttsg.org/pdfs/Dunning-Kruger%20Effect.pdf

[kybernetyk]

I meant it the other way round: That some smart people won't have that "I show 'em" attitude and won't even try because they think they are too bad anyways.

[ndefinite]

The chart supports that assumption to some extent. The smartest are under estimating their percentile.

[skwirl]

It would also unfortunately filter out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

[skrebbel]

That does filter out the genius engineers who aren't also arrogant, doesn't it?

(which might not be a problem)

[hkmurakami]

earlier in the interview he talks about preferring avoiding false positives over missing out on false negatives, so this practice does fit into their philosophy.

[skrebbel]

I suspected so. Still, as a super-amazingly competent genius engineer with no self esteem, I hope not many companies follow their lead.

[peterjancelis]

You see yourself as a "super-amazingly competent genius engineer" yet lack self esteem?

What would stop you from applying at a company with a hiring PR strategy as described by Levchin? They aren't looking for confidence in all fields of life, just the technical job related part...

[hkmurakami]

there's probably a bit of sarcasm and hyperbole in his words ;)

[mseebach]

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time? If you don't offer your genius to the team, you might as well not have it.

And no, parceling out work for you to go and excel at on your own is likely not a good use of your skill.

[stephenhuey]

I'm sure loads of amazing projects throughout history have been pulled off with great assistance from amazingly competent people who were hesitant about their abilities. It'd be interesting to find out if more teams are successful with arrogant or humble people. Perhaps you're just more likely to hear about the successes of arrogant people thanks to their loud trumpeting about themselves.

[pekk]

What a pile of bullying bullshit. If someone is skilled, they are skilled completely apart from whether they are constantly advertising themselves and putting other people down as worse than them.

[rhizome]

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time?

Think of it this way: someone who is concerned with not doing the wrong thing is going to be more sure that what they do come up with is the right thing, that they aren't reinventing the wheel badly.

[hkmurakami]

imo such nice people do well by depending on nice friends who can introduce them to competent, well meaning teams (I know a few here and do my best to play matchmaker)

Btw I noticed you like C# (from your profile) so I automatically like you haha :)

[skrebbel]

hah :)

I wonder whether the downvote is because of the C# line.

[da02]

That seems to be a good thing. They get together after lots of rejections and start a sleep little company that goes on to impress the world. Either that or they stay in academia. (eg Niklaus Wirth)

[ArekDymalski]

This story is a great example of what happens if you mix up employer branding with recruitment process. Attracting talent is one thing, while defining what actually "talent" means for your company (in terms of competencies required for the job) and how to measure it - now that's completely different story. In an extreme case you can end up with ultra-smart, over-qualified people who will be disappointed by the boring, uninspiring every-day tasks they're assigned to. The goal of recruitment is not to get "the best people", but to get the people who will consistently deliver business results.

[themstheones]

There are approximately 7 people on earth with an IQ of 190 or higher, so I'm calling bullshit on that requirement.

[nostrademons]

I've seen this misconception twice on the thread now, so I'm calling it out: IQ is not normally distributed. It has fat tails: the extreme ends of the distribution are much more common than a normal distribution would suggest. Some quick Googling indicated that Terman's data on high-IQ people (1921) showed IQs at 4 SDs (160ish) are about 15x more common than a Gaussian would predict, while at 5+ SDs (175-200ish) they can be up to 1000x more common than a Gaussian.

[Alex3917]

> IQ is not normally distributed.

IQ is actually normally distributed by definition. Actual intelligence, if such a thing exists, may not be. The reason for Terman's finding is that there aren't any IQ tests that are valid for people with extremely high IQ.

[nostrademons]

Then you get into "What's the definition of IQ?" You could argue that IQ is a theoretical construct that's defined to average 100 with a standard deviation of 15 - but then, if you can't measure it with any tests, and when you do try to measure it the tests come up with different numbers, what's the point?

In my physics courses, my professors were always very careful to stress that "If the theory says one thing and the data says another, it's the theory that needs to change." (Well, unless it's a student lab report that measures the speed of light as different from the commonly accepted value. ;-))

[Alex3917]

I agree with what you're saying, my point is just that all of the current IQ tests (including the ones Terman used) were not designed to be measures. That is, someone with an IQ of 200 isn't twice as smart as someone with an IQ of 100, which is what the term 'measurement' implies. (C.f. the book Measurement In Psychology, which was recommended by tokenadult a while ago.) Rather, they are designed to compare people relative to one another. In other words, regardless of whether or not there is some underlying thing called IQ, no one (to the best of my knowledge) has ever tried to measure it.

[rollo_tommasi]

That's clearly hyperbole to illustrate the perception they wanted to create, not an actual checkbox on the hiring form.

[rdouble]

Is Google's HR data set really "Big Data" or just "data?"

Seems like it would fit into a normal database. Or maybe even an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet.

[hkmurakami]

I quote my friend who works in "Big Data":

"sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"

[daemonk]

Big data is a misnomer. Complex data is a better description. Having a terabyte of simple data with 2 columns is really not that difficult to analyze and won't give you much information. Whereas having a few hundred mbs data with complex relationships and many dimensions can yield tons of information and is far more difficult to analyze.

Difficulty in "big data" should be about its horizontal breadth (covering many aspects of a system) rather than its vertical depth (covering one aspect of a system in great resolution).

[dasil003]

Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?

[willismichael]

The devil is in the details. Big Data is really a massive cluster of VMs running maxed out Excel spreadsheets, and instrumented to restart automatically and restore from redundant backup, a la RAID, when the Excel process crashes one of the Windows VMs.

[objclxt]

If you're being pedantic, it's 1,048,576 rows from Excel 2007, 65,536 rows before that.

[hkmurakami]

2^20 rows! :)

[dagw]

Current limit is 1,000,000 pr worksheet. However there is a tool called PowerPivot which lets you get around that limit and do analysis on larger data sets.

[chinpokomon]

I didn't see this response when I replied to the parent. Power Pivot is pretty great when you can use it.

[jjcr]

Not since 2007 where it got bumped to over 1 million. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifica...

[hkmurakami]

He's saying his file has way more rows than that, so maybe they upped the limit in the more recent versions of excel? (I think he also wrote a bunch of VBA and hooked into some external systems too)

[chinpokomon]

Not when you use it with Power Pivot.

[Joeri]

16 384 columns and 1 048 576 rows actually

[n00b101]

2^14 columns * 2^20 rows * 8 bytes per cell = 128GB. Bang on.

[Kurtz79]

It's just me or this kind of comment is one of the most common in HN lately, when any story about data analysis comes up ?

We get it, big data it's not really "big" unless you talk giga(tera?)bytes.

Do not take upon yourself to educate any single person that misuses the term. It's not worth it. :)

[ionforce]

I guess it's a natural reaction to people wanting to jump on that "big data" bandwagon. Kind of like size envy I guess? So sad...

[Kurtz79]

True, the point is that many people writing these stories cannot really tell (or care) about the difference. "Big data" is a sexy definition, so they go with it regardless of wheter it's actually relevant.

Most of the people here do, so these comments are really preaching in the wrong place...

[MortenK]

Just data. Working with "big data" is just boring old business intelligence in 99.9% of the cases.

[ChuckMcM]

Probably not, but the year that I joined they had processed a million resumes. So they probably have some level of data (ranging from phone screen only to on-site interview) on anywhere from 8 to 12 million engineering candidates. For the folks who have come on site there might be a 5 - 8k words of text in their file for phone screens probably less than 1K depending on if they include a code sample or not. Most of the folks they processed at the time didn't get to on-site interviews so it probably skews to the lower end.

Its "not" big data in the sense that it needs a cluster to process but it is a pretty large sample set of the current population of engineers who might want to work there.

[robbiep]

But then you have a tech company that isnt sprucing a buzz word

[jedc]

They've reported receiving 1million applications per year. If even a fraction of those get interviewed (with 1-5 interviews per candidate) that's a good chunk of data. Correlate that with regular performance reviews of 30k employees... I'd say that's a small Big Data problem.

[raverbashing]

30k? Data. Not Big Data

And "Small Big Data" is probably data as well.

[ownagefool]

He's not talking about 30k rows, he's talking about 30k people. It could easily be big data if you monitor & document their every working moment, but they probably aren't doing that so you're probably right.

[raverbashing]

Yes, 30k people, so it's what? Some interview reports, some performance reviews, HR report/history of the employee?

It really doesn't look like something big.

[jedc]

1 million applications received. Say 10% of those go into some sort of evaluation process = 100k assessments/year. Say 10% of those go through an interview panel of (on average 3 interviews) = 30k assessments/year For 30k employees with (say on average) 2 assessments per year = 60k assessments/year.

So 1 million CVs per year on which to do some sort of evaluations, and 200k individual assessments per year. Over the past five years that roughly 6 million data points.

Since there's no hard-and-fast rule on this, that's why I called it small Big Data.

[drewvolpe]

Definitely not. And it's a good example of how useful POD ("plain old data") can be. They ask 6 team members 18 questions about what they think of their boss and give those 108 datapoints to her and it's tremendously valuable.

[dk8996]

Its "deep learning" data hahaha.

[eliben]

I find the use of the term "Big Data" there bullshit. Even for the largest company like Walmart with 2 million employees - having some data about every one is hardly "big". Collect a whole deluge of data about each and you hardly fill a USB drive.

I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.

[ap22213]

I don't know, I'm starting to change my opinion of this. I used to think 'big data' meant anything that didn't fit easily into a RDBMS. At least petabytes.

But, more recently, in conversations with non-programmers, I see that 'big data' to them, means 'broad data' - it means trying to track everything possible and make sense of it. The average business user is really excited to be able to cross-relate disparate types of data - in an effort to make things better. 'Big data' enables the breaking down silos and enabling of cross references. It's about making empirical decisions based on data rather than opinion or intuition. That's really good, in my opinion.

So, 'big data' in that way is more amorphous than just the size of the data. With services and networks, the question becomes where does the data begin and end? Big data is potentially everything.

[eliben]

If you're right then it's a sad situation. I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.

[plorkyeran]

In this case at least the meaning it's drifting towards still actually means something rather than just a meaningless buzzword.

[Helianthus]

Just wait until Big Data is referred to similarly to Big Oil...

[Thrymr]

> I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.

That's how language has always worked. There are people who are still uptight by the current "misuse" of words like "awesome" and "hopeful", but those of us who grew up with different meanings in common usage mostly just shrug.

For technical terms, usually I can live with words having domain-specific meaning that differs from common usage, but "theory" is one I still can't get over. It causes too much miscommunication.

[chaz]

Walmart's DW was 2.5 petabytes in 2008; undoubtedly larger now. Rumor had it that they were storing every line item from every POS receipt since the early 90s, but they probably don't have all that data online. I would think it needs to contain POS data, SKU inventory and sales at every store and distribution center, tracking of vendors, orders, shipments, truck logistics, etc. Even weather reports (remember how they predicted Poptarts would sell more when hurricanes were forecast?).

eBay has a 9 petabyte DW that cuts across all of the types of data on their whole site: listings, bids, feedback, categories, clicks, etc.

Sometimes big data is actually big data, both in terms of raw size as well as complexity.

http://gigaom.com/2013/03/27/why-apple-ebay-and-walmart-have...

[killermonkeys]

I asked these questions until a year ago. Brain teasers were never ok. They are defined as things that require a single insight and/or domain knowledge and could be communicated in a few seconds.

"Monopoly" is a perfect example of a brain teaser and anyone using that would be treated pretty harshly by the committee that reviews interview feedback. Estimate questions are not: there's no expectation of a "right answer" and the important fact is the working.

Some programming questions border on brain teasers to non programmers but that doesn't matter because you are asking programmers and again, it's the working that matters.

Finally different roles get different types of interviews. I worked in PM and there were analytical (these questions), product (design a better x) and technical (basic engineering interviews). The behavioral type was not one I encountered in PM or eng but maybe used elsewhere.

[SilasX]

Are we thinking of the same "Monopoly" question? The one where you ask them to sketch out how they would program the game Monopoly? Because that's a lot more like an estimation question than a single-insight brain-teaser.

[killermonkeys]

No sorry the "man pushes his car to a hotel and loses his fortune" question from another comment.

[goblin89]

Their findings wrt. formal education are interesting, too. The first time I see a big company's representative saying “test scores are worthless.”

[stephencanon]

Not really surprising at all. A huge amount of selection has already taken place by the time you get to the interview, and most of that selections is based either on grades or on other metrics that measure similar traits. The “low-GPA” individuals who get an interview are therefore very different from the general population of “low-GPA” individuals, and one expects there to be little or no correlation between GPA and success (if anything, I would expect negative correlation, as low-GPA individuals who get interviews will have something else going on that got them there).

This is almost exactly the same effect as the fact that SATs do not predict college GPA. SAT scores are used as one of the major factors for admission to colleges; having separated the students into cohorts based (partially) on SAT, it is completely expected that SAT scores have minimal correlation with grades assigned within each cohort.

[rlanday]

The sorting continues in college; SAT scores are most predictive for the first year, before less-capable students switch out of the hard majors. My guess is that nearly all of the engineers Google hires score very highly, and in that sense the SAT is indeed predictive of success there (since you can take it in middle/high school), but they might have determined that discriminating on the high end between differences of <1 SD (about the validity between retakes) might not tell them much.

[ig1]

Actually they say they're giving less weight to them (historically Google has weighted them very heavily) which is significantly different from "test scores are worthless".

[objclxt]

You've skipped over the original NYT article, which the qz.com article being linked to here quotes from. He does say they're worthless. Here's the complete quote:

One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation

This chimes with my understanding and experience that Google only really use test scores and GPA's right now as a filter to manage the vast number of internship/entry-level applicants they get.

[ig1]

Makes sense, most companies only care about university grades for first jobs (because there's very little else to distinguish candidates at the stage).

[pavanred]

I quit my job after 5 years as a programmer for my Masters. I must say, just working on one small class project with any candidate can help you find a world of a difference. I think its the experience and my personal interest that drives me towards worrying more about actually learning stuff instead of scoring grades. Getting a grade is more about identifying what a Professor expects and giving it to them. There are many students who slack off their effort in team projects. And, the worst part, the slackers spend a lot of time applying and preparing specifically for interviews, so as I see the ones who get the "best" jobs are generally the ones that I would never hire them if I was looking for candidates for my company.

[TheAceOfHearts]

I think it's a lot more useful to show em your GitHub than it is to show them GPA. That's how I got my first internship :D.

[hkmurakami]

I have awesome test scores but am happy to see this development!! :)

[silverlake]

On the bright side, this article will boost the self-esteem of the 100s of thousands of devs like me who didn't get a job offer. "I'm not stupid, their process was stupid!"

[Alex3917]

Actually here is the real original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?e...

Which there have already been a few HN discussions about:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&ei=ZfzCUYa...

[donohoe]

We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?

[engtech]

1. when I go to this link: http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...

It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.

2. In general, people would rather read the real article instead of a summary of the article. When someone submits a summary of an article to a site like HN or reddit, it is usually flagged as blog-spam because we'd rather read/support the original content than a summary with questionable value.

3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page to get rid of all the sidebars, comments, ads. Look at the print preview page: it is not possible to get less distraction free than that. Any other format has more distractions.

Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best information architecture in the business. These are the guys who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:

4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.

4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.

4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.

4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen that convey no useful information to me.

You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to have your business model and be as distraction free as possible. The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.

[donohoe]

  1. ... It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.

It shows one article initially. It will load the next one as you scroll down and approach the end. This is not counted as a Page View unless you actually continue down into it - you'll notice the URL change at that point)

  2. In general, people would rather read the real article
  instead of a summary of the article.

I would argue that this is a "real article". The NYT piece were 8 questions and answers. This article is based on just one of those questions - and expands on it. I'm not an editor/write so I'll avoid going deeper but thats my take-away.

  3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page...

Tru dat.

  Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best 
  information architecture in the business. These are the guys 
  who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.

I used to work there :)

  4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:
  4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.

The Featured Image (between Headlines and Text) is meant to be full-width to a max. Inline images should have left/right whitespace

  4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.

Can you email me a screenshot (email in profile)? There are a few Firefox specific bugs we're working on this week. This may be one of them.

  4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen 
  all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.

True. Intentional. It can be expanded which reveals the large site map. There are big pros and cons to hiding it. Its an on-going conversation.

However we used to have it disappear altogether and people complained about that too....

  4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen 
  that convey no useful information to me.
 

Its a list of Headlines - thats all that is meant to be conveyed.

  You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, 
  but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to 
  have your business model and be as distraction free as possible.
  The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.

I'm confused. That doesn't make much sense to me. Yes, I am saying that we intend to be "distraction free as possible" - I'm not sure that I have to add a big asterisk * that covers "within the confines of an ad based business model" any more than I should also add "within the confines of a browser running a web site thats not a book" - I'm not trying to be snarky, just hard know what to make of what you said exactly..

Also - take a look at the ads... do we have them all over the place? Nope - we have them at the end of an Article - not in-between, not embedded, not inline. Thats important.

We are not perfect, but we aspire to continuously improve. Focus is on the user and the reading experience but with recognition that we have to pay the bills for 20 or so editors and journalists across five (maybe more?) countries. (I'm not counting devs, sales, hr etc in that)

[chinpokomon]

The pages also won't show in my favorite Android HN client: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof.... I always have to open in a browser.

[tomp]

Add to that the inability to quickly scroll to the bottom of the article. At least you fixed the top scrolling.

[afandian]

I couldn't help biting.

1 - Viewing it in Android Chrome just doesn't work. See this comment and its responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907648

2 - On some pages (with full-screen window), some or all of the thumb of the scroll bar is hidden on my browser under the black bar.

3 - As I drag the scrollbar down the size of the page jumps so my mouse pointer is no longer on the thumb.

4 - Sometimes I use the space bar to scroll because my hands are on the keyboard, not on the mouse. It doesn't work unless I click first.

5 - I often tile windows on my machine. This window is exactly width of the left-hand half of my screen (2011 MBP). Because of the responsive design I get a ToC when I visit the home page, which is annoying. It feels like the developers said "all users will have maximised windows".

Other frustrations I've had in the past but can't remember now, perhaps it was changed since last time I tried to use it on the desktop. I just get the feeling that (and Quartz isn't alone in this) the developers tried to re-implement functionality and didn't do it well enough to be worth it.

[glesica]

The fixed header is a complete waste of space. Why is it necessary? It's frames all over again, it's like a web design straight out of 1998. Also, is the right-hand sidebar supposed to contain ads? I can't think of another purpose for it, but I don't feel like turning adblock off for long enough to find out...

[donohoe]

Its a case of damned if you do and damned if you dont.

Regarding AdBlock - our site looks the same with it on as it does with it off.

[glesica]

So then what's the point of the right-hand sidebar? Is it just there to annoyingly push the scroll bar into a weird position?

[donohoe]

There is no side-bar to the right. The site expands to 1400px. After that there isn't anything meaningful to place on the right side (other than for the sake of doing so - but thats just clutter)

[bornhuetter]

Well for starters, there is a huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar. If you are trying to read the page in a windows that is not maximised, then you really lose a lot of real estate.

[caf]

I don't know about cruft, but Quartz just doesn't work at all for me. The spinner just spins on, forever.

[Ma8ee]

I don't know about cruft, but I just don't like it.

I'm going to try to be a little bit more helpful. At first I didn't really know why I felt a bit uncomfortable on the page, but I think it comes from a feeling a bit lost. My attempts to try to understand why:

1. The pictures don't have any borders, so at first I think a part of the picture is hidden outside the window. I widen the window to see the whole picture, but instead of revealing any missing part the picture just gets bigger.

2. If I continue increase the size of the window until the picture stops scaling, I eventually see the grey area to the right, which give me the feeling of locking behind the coulisses at a theater. I shouldn't be there and see that. Contributing to that might be the lack of shadow on the right side, which makes that border flat compared to the left side.

3. I scroll down to gauge the length of the article before I start reading, and it just continue to scroll and I realize after a while that I'm in some other article and I have scrolled through a whole bunch of them. The boundaries between the articles are very weak compared with the pictures and in particular the thick black fields with the captions.

[benjamincburns]

My personal pet peeve... A huuuuuuuuge banner image pushes the article text below the fold on my 13" rMBP on default display settings in a maximized (by height and width, grr OSX) Chrome window.

Screenshot: http://imgur.com/fFqt2ud

Maybe I'm a bit irrational about this, I know scrolling isn't hard, but I came to read your text, dammit.

Edit:

Also, seriously... HUGE thanks for asking!

Edit 2:

Scrolling down I'm noticing that your image height is actually bigger than the height of the viewport (minus the height of your top bar). Even if you disagree with the idea that the image shouldn't push the text below the fold, I hope you agree that the image should at least fit my viewport.

[donohoe]

Thats a tough one. We want to be visual as well as just text. Text is king, but nice to have best of both worlds (if possible)

Editors choose "Featured Images" and we really want to allow for the big expressive photos.

Its hard to constrain them and maintain a sane aspect ratio. I'm not disagreeing with you - I don't have a good answer.

These definitely work really well on larger monitors - however laptops, older computers its not the ideal.

Will need to think about this more.

[benjamincburns]

If you want to make it the editor's choice, build a feature that at least gives them visibility into what they're doing. Worst case, just load an article preview in a bunch of fixed-size iframes which match the viewport size of common browsers. Better but more expensive, cobble together a browser farm (getting cheaper now thanks to modern.ie images). Either way, make it a prominent part of the editorial process.

Edit: I think the reason it bugs me is that text is the primary value your site provides. The image is ambiance. Ambiance that blocks me from the value I seek goes from tasteful to gaudy real fast. I get the desire to let editors be expressive, but if you're in a situation where you're forced to prioritize, always prioritize the thing that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Otherwise you might not have need for the editor at all.

[tjohns]

Just to balance out the negative comments, I actually really like Quartz.

- Scrolling down into the next article and having the article list as a sidebar is a neat way to encourage exploration. It makes the site a bit more "sticky".

- I like that ads are unobtrusive and placed at the end of the articles. And unlike nytimes.com, there's no paywall.

- I find the site's overall design crisp and relatively uncluttered compared to most news sites.

[edent]

Hi,

I say cruft because I'm reading on mobile. I've got a Galaxy Note 2, and I'm using Chrome. It's hardly a slouch of a machine.

First, after clicking the link, I have to watch your spinner for a ~5 seconds. I'm on 65Mbps ADSL - just how much content are you sending me?

Second, the sheer weight of the JavaScript slows everything down. My browser is perfectly capable of scrolling through a page - yet because you've overloaded that, the scrolling is slow, jumpy, and the text renders poorly.

Thirdly, the Note has a huge screen, so I don't mind your static header. If I had a small screen it would piss me off.

Finally, when I switch from Portrait to Landscape, your page jumps all over the place.

Now, compare that to the Mobile NYT page. Yours looks more beautiful, but the NYT is quicker, easier to read, and doesn't get in my way.

You have great content - and an interesting product - but it needs to go on a diet and be user tested on a wider range of devices. I dread to think how it performs on low end phones.

T

[zellyn]

On my iPhone, Chrome hides the browser location and other buttons when you start scrolling down. Scrolling up brings them back into view.

On that article, I was completely unable to bring the location/page-controls back into view -- I was stuck on that page, trying to figure out how to escape -- until I clicked a link - then the controls showed up while it was loading the new content.

[donohoe]

I can't reply directly, but in reference to:

  huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar.

I see what you mean - but I don't think I"d call that "cruft" but thats my opinion. Thats the Navigation Bar at the top, and the sidebar is a Queue of the Articles in the feed. These are basic page elements.

We get feedback specifically calling this out as good and relatively distraction-free (hence your comment struck me as odd)

Also - the width of the page dedicated to text/images is the same as the NYT mobile site (600px aprox)

[potatolicious]

But the navigation bar doesn't serve any purpose to me, at least not floating. It has your logo, which I care about, but not once I'm deeper into the article.

It has a search field I will never use. It has social media buttons I will never use (because if I wanted to share this I would just copy/paste the URL). It has a "more" button that I will never use also.

The nav bar is fine at the very top of your page, making it float and scroll with me is just a waste of space.

Floating UI elements should be reserved for critical functionality that's core to the site. Facebook gets a pass because the things on the floating nav bar are actually important. If you really must float it, consider floating to the side - most of us on modern laptops have an abundance of horizontal space but not a great deal of vertical space.

Some more feedback:

- The organization of content is confusing. Just scrolling casually I cannot immediately tell where one post ends and the next begins. The large images aren't a good indicator, since some of them appear to be ads. I shouldn't have to read the tail sentence of something just to determine if I'm looking at the end of a post or not.

- There is a mismatch of expectations. When I go to a link that clearly refers to a single piece of content, I do not expect to keep scrolling and go right into a completely different piece of content.

- I find the photos oversized for their purpose. In this particular piece you have generic-stock-photo-of-Google-employees, which is only superficially related to the topic at hand. It doesn't have business being this huge. It's distracting and keeps me from the actual content I'm here for. Note in the original NYT link the image is also only tangentially related, but it does not overwhelm the text.

[hexagonc]

It has a search field I will never use. It has social media buttons I will never use (because if I wanted to share this I would just copy/paste the URL). It has a "more" button that I will never use also.

Social buttons are doubly unnecessary in the floating toolbar since you already find social buttons at the end of the article.

[dbecker]

Are the users who liked the navigation bar and the sidebar using quartz in a different way from us? For example, are they using quartz primarily to browse rather than following a link to a specific story?

I found these page elements very annoying, and I suspect those who liked it have a different use pattern.

[barrkel]

Mobile view can't be disabled, on Android stock browser at least. That means I can't zoom out and read the text at the much smaller size and higher info density I prefer.

[lancewiggs]

On my iPad I had a similar problem - unable to zoom in or out. The site takes control away from the reader.

Medium.com seem to be doing everything right.

[genwin]

I like Quartz in general but usually get tripped up by the scroll bar within a frame. My mouse is normally near the right edge of the monitor, outside the frame.

[donohoe]

We have that in Jira - we'll get to it - promise.

[eieio]

I can't stand the huge fixed header and I'm sad that I'm seeing more and more of them on websites. If I plan on spending any amount of time on a website that has one, I immediately edit the css to add display: none because otherwise it'll drive me crazy.

It's a waste of space and it makes it much much harder for me to read on my laptop. Vertical space is way too valuable to throw away like that.

[mtgx]

Mobile NYT must be one of the very few sites that don't look absolutely horrible when used on a PC browser. I usually hate it when people post the mobile version of a page.

[Tyrannosaurs]

I doubt the interviews will be less tough, they'll just be differently tough.

After all, they're just changing the mechanism, not lowering the standard.

[joeldidit]

I always wonder how Google manages to have so many vanilla Engineers given how high their standards are. I don't think their standards are high in the "needs to be smart" sense, but in regards to all the other BS. Or they must only ask basic data structure (and puzzle) questions that any studious person can memorize the answers to. I don't think knowing the answer to these interview questions correlates with knowing how to do your job well. It only correlates with knowing the answer to these questions.

Then again, they also have some of the best Engineers. But I don't think that's a testament to a great hiring process, as that could be the result of great marketing. The "we allow you the freedom to actually do stuff and to work with the best" type marketing. From what I read/saw, the great Engineers didn't seem that happy, so maybe those marketing claims aren't really true, but perhaps things have changed since then.

[matwood]

It's basically like SAT prep. With a little prep work a person can greatly raise their chances at getting a great score. Google's hiring practices are well known so a little prep can get vanilla engineers over the hump.

Then again, are there vanilla engineers who would prep in this manner? Just the simple fact that someone preps at all puts them above the 'can't complete fizzbuzz person' ~100% of the time.

[6d0debc071]

There are two kinds of hard though - there's the hard that's hard just because it's boring repetitive work and there's the hard that's hard because it's complex and beautiful and requires an investment in thought and background that not everyone has.

And if you're eliminating the former kind of hard without increasing the latter, then your interviews should get easier. Heck, for people in the latter group it will get easier even if you decrease the former and increase the latter, to a point.

Just because you're not lowering standards doesn't mean your interviews aren't getting easier.

Which is also a thing with exams now I think about it - just because your exam's hard doesn't mean it's worthwhile.

[hkmurakami]

and so applicants will have to figure out the new dance, which is likely to be not so useful yet again.

[quux]

The "structured behavioral interview" he mentions is what I've settled on over the years too. You get a much better idea of what the applicant has really done and is passionate about than seeing if they're good at pop quizzes.

[nkorth]

Thanks, Quartz is literally unusable on my phone.