[gtani]

Unfortunately, part of the game is accomodating HR and non-technical managers in most companies that have gone beyond the 30 person startup stage, unless you have widely recognized expertise in some relatively rare skill.

There's three hurdles to being hired (and HN has hashed this over before), so the technical chops are there, it sounds like, but then they ask

- is he/she willing to sacrifice for our success?

- "fit/culture", is s/he somebody we want to travel with/hang out, spend lots of time with, most of it involuntary

[MichaelCrawford]

I don't have a problem with non-technical HR and managerial people, nor sales, marketing, production staff and so on.

I remain dumbfounded that their HR didn't understand that work I did on other platforms, contributes a great deal to my ability to code for Mac OS X.

Consider that OS X drivers are all written in C++. I've done quite a lot of C++ work on Windows and embedded platforms, and a little on Linux. Yet their HR wanted me to delete all that from my resume.

I didn't just turn down the jobs. Each time I explained to the recruiters - who generally are non-technical too - that all that other experience contributes to my ability to write OS X drivers. Yet the recruiters were unwilling to pass on the message to the HR.

I've only known this to happen at just one company.

Actually I am quite good at explaining difficult concepts to the uninitiated, as a direct result of my experiences with many of my teachers.

I have a BA in Physics, with some graduate school. I had some courses that I regarded as quite easy, some were quite difficult. Quite often this was not the result of the material I studied, but the ability of the instructor to explain it.

Consider that physics is commonly taught by working out mathematical derivations. That leads people who either don't know math, or don't like it, to regard physics as completely unapproachable.

But physics can be taught in a purely conceptual way, with no math at all. For example, I once explained elementary particle physics to a Burgerville cashier by comparing it to the game of pool. "Suppose you cover the break" - the initial positions of the balls, in a triangle - "with a sheet of plywood. Your job now is to shoot the cue ball underneath the wood, then determine the shape of the break from the tracks of the balls after they scatter out from underneath the sheet of wood."

She was quite pleased as she grasped it instantly.

[gtani]

I wasn't clear, that was supposed to be a purely mechanical calculation of amortizing the time costs of preparing for screens and onsites over how much you want the gig, which for me always includes tailoring a resume for each company and other stuff which is basically a waste of time.

You reminded me of the 4th, newest hurdle to getting hired at a lot of places, a decent grounding in linear algebra, prob/statistics, calculus, with the odd category theory curveball question.

I was taught physics the other way, BTW, my Dad decided around 8th grade was the right time to start developing intuitions for ODE's and linear algebra, with illustrations from real life. Made absolutely no sense to me.

[MichaelCrawford]

All I Ever Really Needed To Know About Designing Nuclear Weapons, I Learned In Linear Algebra When I Was Seventeen.

Seriously, a whole lot of Physics really does ultimately distill down to linear algebra.

Just yesterday I learned through an HN link that Statistics is among the top-ten most valued skills among employers. That's implied by listing my physics degree on my resume, but those who don't have a clue about physics won't know that. I'll make it more clear in my next revision.