Jacob Thornton
Jacob co-founded Bumpers, a podcasting app. He worked at Medium and Twitter, where he built Bootstrap, a HTML/CSS/JavaScript web development framework.
In our conversation, he talked about getting attached to his robot vacuum, accidentally building the world's most popular front-end framework, and feeling imposter syndrome, even as a senior engineer.
JACKIE
Okay, so I internet-stalked you, I guess? I read some of your Medium posts and stuff like that, and there was one Medium post that you didn’t write but someone wrote about you while you were working at Medium, and it talked about how you studied or were interested in sociology and critical theory. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that in relation to technology.
JACOB
Yeah. I don’t know if you ever found this, but I have a blog that I used to keep up a long time ago. I haven’t written on it in, like, five years, but it’s byfat.xxx. I wrote on that a number of articles that are more the intersections of more philosophy, sociology, critical theory, and tech and how I approach different ideas and different things I was struggling through at the time. I don’t know—you guide me. Let me know. What kinds of things in particular? It’s a big field.
JACKIE
Yeah, yeah. I don’t know—Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto, the idea that technology is a dehumanizing force and it controls people more than people can control it. Maybe whether you see validity there, where he gets stuff wrong, I don’t know.
JACOB
What are my thoughts on that? Yeah, we can start there, just go deep right away. Let’s see. What are my thoughts on that?
JACKIE
That’s one thing I found interesting—I feel like I haven’t talked to anyone else who was interested in stuff like that.
JACOB
I think that that stuff’s really interesting. So last year I went to TED for the first time, and I thought it was just going to be another lame conference. And I was surprised that there’s really three things that billionaires are absolutely obsessed with. Just people that are so wealthy that they just have time to think about everything. And the three things were recurrent themes throughout the entire TED weekend, which was weird to me.
So the first thing was probably, “Are robots or is artificial intelligence going to get too smart and take over?” So that’s one recurring theme. The second one is, “Are we living in virtual reality already?” So you have Elon Musk—people that are taken very seriously who very intensely believe that we are living in a simulacrum. And the third one is, “We need to colonize Mars, and otherwise we’re going to go extinct.” So those are the three things that people were obsessing about, pretty much. Or at least they were last year.
JACKIE
Like, not just Elon Musk and co.? Other people.
JACOB
“I don’t get super depressed by the alienation of the humanist aspects of technology. I’m like, “Okay, yeah, sure, that might be happening.” But I’m less judgey about it, or I have a tendency to freak out less about it.”
No, no, no, everyone, pretty much, there. So you can think of TED as this really weird intersection of cultural and technological elites that have to spend—just to attend, you have to apply, like you’re going to school or something, and then you get accepted, and you have to give them $10,000, $15,000, just to get a ticket. Which is also absurd. And then it’s just a weird mix-up of scientists, VCs, and crazy people talking about weird shit. But that’s all they care about. Pretty much.
So I guess maybe it’s useful to put forth my philosophical disposition, just to contextualize everything. I’m pretty—not quite nihilist, but pretty close to that. So I’m less—I don’t get super depressed by the alienation of the humanist aspects of technology. I’m like, “Okay, yeah, sure, that might be happening.” But I’m less judgey about it, or I have a tendency to freak out less about it. I do find some of those other arguments kind of compelling, and I do think that it’s vaguely interesting. But I’m less—
JACKIE
Other arguments as in the simulation hypothesis?
JACOB
Yeah. But again, I’m so out of the school world now. That’s why I was saying, maybe my blog, which is older, would be more inspiring or interesting to you than thirty-year-old me. Just because I haven’t thought about this stuff very much. But yeah.
JACKIE
But what are your thoughts on those three things, then, that everyone’s obsessed about?
JACOB
Yeah. I’ll go in reverse order. So the colonizing Mars thing is stressful to me because space is scary, to me, low-key. I don’t even like flying in airplanes, so getting on a massive rocket ship just sounds insane to me. And the crazy thing is, they don’t talk about it like, “In 150 years, we’re going to colonize Mars,” it’s like, “We need to colonize Mars in ten years, or we’re going to go extinct.” Which is—then you’re like, “Oh my god.” Or like, “Oh, I’m cryogenically freezing myself and my wife because the human race is going extinct if we don’t go to Mars and whatever,” and you’re just like, “Ohhh my god. Alright, for sure.”
I think that we mythologize Mars in this weird way. I’m obviously no scientist, but I do think we’re killing Earth in an insane way. But I’m not super stressed about going to Mars. Basically I feel like I’m going down with the Earth, so if the Earth bursts into flames, I, too, will probably be of a similar fate.
And then… the “we’re living in a simulation” thing is super interesting to me. And I think it’s Elon Musk and his whole crew—they talk about it all the time. This is one of my favorite stories. I used to work at Medium with Ev Williams and stuff, and he was a billionaire tech nerd, so he’s very much in the scene, and he was at dinner with Barack Obama, Elon Musk, a handful of people who are very important. And Elon Musk was explaining this theory to the table, like, “Yeah, we’re living in a simulation, blah blah blah.” And he was freaking out about it. And Barack Obama is just drinking water the whole time, Ev said, and at the end, he’s like, “All I know is, if I hug a girl, I feel something, and it’s real.”
For sure. It’s been a long time, but I remember when was really nerding out on stuff, I’d read Baudrillard and things like that, and I definitely really had to be careful, especially when I was younger. Like, thinking back now, this is my sage advice as an old person—I romanticized a lot of philosophers like that because their writing is so sexy to me.
JACKIE
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Baudrillard sometimes doesn’t even really make sense, I feel like.
JACOB
No, not at all!
JACKIE
It sounds really good, I’m on board with it, but I don’t know what it means.
JACOB
Yeah. I’m just like, “I want to believe,” because it sounds so dope. But I definitely catch what he’s saying on things, and then again maybe this is the nihilist aspect of me—if we are hypothetically living in a simulation or everything has become this weird copy of a copy that’s so perverted that we are no longer interacting with the real things—that’s fine. I’m fine with that.
JACKIE
Yeah, that makes it easy. And I guess same with AI?
JACOB
Yeah. Well, AI. I guess the third one would be, “Are robots going to take over?” or whatever. That one’s interesting to me. So I have this thing called a Eufy—do you know what that is? It’s like a little Roomba-type thing. And I have Alexa and a bunch of these things, which I can only assume are the absolute dumbest versions of the actual technology that's out there because they're consumer products, so the cheapest, dumbest versions, but—even then, it's kind of insane how easy it is to project some sort of personality onto robots already.
“The eventual evolution of the technology and integration of that technology at some level is going to put that hierarchy of human-robot into question in a really profound way.”
Like, this little Roomba thing—it'll get stuck on my rug all the time, and I'll be like, "Aw, Eufy, get off of my rug! I'll save you, Eufy." And just even that interaction makes me think that the eventual evolution of the technology and integration of that technology at some level is going to put that hierarchy of human-robot into question, I think, in a really profound way. I don't know if I'll see it in my lifetime, but I definitely feel like I would come down on the side of robot sympathizers. I feel the struggle of being the robot, so—
JACKIE
Just let them take over.
JACOB
Yeah. Also, I feel like everyone's designed them so cute that you can't help but have this real love for them. I don't know. I also think it's interesting that a handful of my friends have Alexa, Amazon Alexa, and you can call it Amazon or you can say, "I want to use Alexa," as the key name. Every single person I know uses Alexa. I've never heard anyone say, "Amazon, what's the weather today?"
JACKIE
Yeah, that's true.
JACOB
And I think it's because people want to humanize robots in that way. The thing that I'm less certain of is the apocalyptic "robots will become so smart they attack and eliminate the human race." Although that's possible—I just don't see the angle, per se. So I don't know. I'm hyped for that. So, for example, I have allergies. But if I could have a robot cat, I'm down. I'm ready to have that. So I wouldn't be super excited if my robot cat tried to attack me, but I'd hopefully foster some good relationships, I don't know.
So what sort of other things are you reading? You said that you were reading the Unabomber thing. What Heidegger are you reading?
JACKIE
The Question Concerning Technology. I don't know how I feel about that. About Heidegger in general, actually.
JACOB
Yeah, he's kind of a weird dude.
JACKIE
Anyway, another thing I was wondering about—you say a lot that you hate coding and computers, but, I don't know, not to state the obvious, but you do that.
JACOB
Yeah.
JACKIE
How does that connect?
JACOB
Yeah, good question. I think there's a couple ways to answer that. One way is I like the end product of computers often. And it just so happens that you have to code and slave away on this stupid computer to get to the end result. I like communicating with people, and I like writing things and creating art and doing other things. And I think that the computer and internet, etc., can make a lot of those things a lot better.
This is going to be a real Kanye, pompous, godlike comparison, but if you think of some Greek sculpture person or something, was he super into carving away at stone? Was that his favorite [thing to do]? That sounds also pretty fucking terrible. Just chipping away at stone all day. Like, it's dusty and messy and hard. He probably fucked his fingers up. It sounds like basically the shittiest thing ever. But then at the end, you're like, "Holy shit, this looks tight, I'm glad I suffered through this whole thing." So there's that aspect of it.
And then there's also the aspect where I feel like there's a handful of things I really love that I constantly hold against technology and virtual things. So I really like zine culture, for example. And a lot of that is just—even if it's just the shittiest little photocopied thing, just that tangibility and the limited physical nature of it, I think, is really cool and valuable, and it takes on its own kind of form of coolness. Just because it's like, "Oh, wow, ten of these little booklets were made, and some person put this stuff together, or maybe they drew something specific into it, and it's the only one like this." And I feel like a lot of technology is spent trying to reproduce that and ultimately failing. Almost everything on the internet that I've worked on has been directly trying to attack an analog version of the same thing.
JACKIE
Sure.
JACOB
And after a while, maybe it's better, but I feel like in trying to copy the thing that it's replacing, it's always doing a disservice to the original thing. Like, there'll never be a Medium article that's as engaging and as beautifully laid out as a magazine article—a good magazine article. So I don't know, so that can kind of bum me out. Feeling like you're a part of the device which is systematically taking out the things you really like.
So that's the one side, which is real. And then the other side is—the thing that attracted me to computers when I was ten, when computers were not cool, not sexy—there were no apps. At all. It was just lame as shit, and I was on my Compaq Presario, just like, "Ding ding ding ding"—was how lame they were.
JACKIE
Wait, the thing that attracted you?
JACOB
Yeah. It was just how dorky they were. I loved how there was the mythos of the computer having nerdy people use it, and it's this tool that's ugly and weird, but it was at the same time really fun. Every once in a while, I stumble into a little microcommunity—the latest one, for example, is mechanical keyboards, which I feel like still capture this. It's a really small community that's obsessed with mechanical keyboards, which are pretty much obsolete, more or less, and just the dorkiest, clacky [objects]—and people obsess, they build them from scratch, they solder their motherboard things or computer boards together, they get custom-braided cables. It cannot be a dorkier pasttime. But I am so here for it? I'm so into it.
And I feel like computers, being into computers, at one point, was that, kind of. It was another kind of cool, weird thing that you could be into that you could identify with, and at some point, computers became so absolutely mainstream and a part of everyday life to such a point that people forgot the culture of them being weird and dorky and random, which are the things when I was younger that got me so stoked on them. So part of me hating computers and saying that I hate computers and constantly being like, "This shit is for losers," is me trying to—
JACKIE
Make it true?
JACOB
Remind people that that's what computers are for. They're for nerds. So don't get it twisted. This is not—y'all tried to take this from the nerds, but it's still a nerdy-ass device. There's still Terminal on your Mac. There's still all these little pockets of Unix stuff hidden away. And it's just really easy to forget it when it's like, "Oh, yeah, I go on Twitter, or I go on my computer to check Instagram and use Word," or something, I don't know.
JACKIE
Yeah. I don't know if you've read Jaron Lanier's—he wrote this book called You Are Not a Gadget, and he talks about the death of Web 1.0 culture, I guess. Like, weird websites that are kind of ugly and use ugly bright colors and things like that—and how it moved to the more mass-produced Facebook profiles, Twitter profiles, whatever, look.
JACOB
I haven't read that—it sounds interesting. It's definitely true. I was very much a part of the Web 2.0 wave, which is horrible, which was a horrible wave of gradients, and—
JACKIE
And Bootstrap, I guess, is—I mean, I used Bootstrap, so obviously there's lots of good things about it. But there's also definitely that kind of uniformity of style?
JACOB
Oh, yeah, it's like the complete and total homogenization of the web, yeah. It cannot be seen as more destructive. But it's weird—if you think about Bootstrap, for example. I'm someone who really wants there to be radical, unique, different destinations and experiences, especially on the internet. And it's like, "Oh, Bootstrap is the opposite of that." But if you think of Bootstrap—Bootstrap was just crazy. It's really like if you were—I'm trying to think of a good example.
It would be kind of like if you were going to make a sandwich for yourself, and you're like, "This sandwich is pretty good, but I'm going to make a sauce to put on my sandwich." And then you did that. And then someone across the room saw that sauce, and they were like, "That looks kind of good." And you were like, "Okay, like, you know, y'all can use my sauce, too, that's cool." And then, on the other side of the whole restaurant, some mass-producer person was like, "We should take this sauce and bottle it and sell it. People are going to fucking love this sauce." And then you're like, "Okay. For sure. People might find it useful, maybe. Maybe someone will come by and need some extra sauce."
And then all of a sudden, 10% of sandwiches in the world have your sauce on it, and you're like, "Oh my god. I just tried to make, like, a simple sandwich for myself. I can't believe 10% of all sandwiches have my sauce on it." And then you're like, "Oh my god, did I just, like, make the web—or did I just make all sandwiches taste like my sandwich?"
“All of a sudden, 10% of sandwiches in the world have your sauce on it, and you’re like, “Oh my god. I just tried to make, like, a simple sandwich for myself. I can’t believe 10% of all sandwiches have my sauce on it.” And then you’re like, “Oh my god, did I just, like, make the web—or did I just make all sandwiches taste like my sandwich?””
I think that sounds horrible. I want some variety, some spice in my life. But that's kind of the sandwich version of what happened. Which is to say, it kind of just accidentally happened. And I think we tried to live in denial, a little bit, in two ways. In one way, we were like, "This will be good because we'll raise the lowest common denominator bar, which is already kind of generic." And two, "We'll try to build in some sort of customizability." And also learning—so a lot of people learn how to code by using Bootstrap. And I think that that was true to some extent, but I don't know. It's a hard one. It definitely took on a life of its own, that's for sure.
JACKIE
Like, do you feel like the kind of homogenization or whatever—there's sort of no going back from that, or...?
JACOB
Well, I think that the curious thing about the web is—I would even argue the web has pretty much always been a matter—like most design, actually, graphic design—it's a very commercialized process. We just have more people in the field trying to flex in it now. But even if you look—I could show you three websites, and I'm pretty sure you'd be able to say what era they're from. Like, if you go to spacejam.com, you know that that website was built in the 90s and has not been changed. Like, it has flashing animated GIFs and a tile space background. It looks fucking terrible. But also it was very much of its time, and that's just how people were building websites. And it's just because that's, one, the maximum the browsers would really allow you to lay anything out, and, two, I think it was just people—like Instagram and Facebook are doing now—they see stuff that they like and they're like, "How [can I do that?]"
You either purposefully copy something or you accidentally copy something by trying to, you know, bring in some added flavor or whatever. So I don't know. I think that Bootstrap definitely had its moment, and there was a period of Bootstrap-ization of the web, for sure, but I would say now that the web looks largely the same, too. There might be more subcategories, like, "This is what a social media website looks like," and "This is what a news website looks like," and "This is what whatever looks like," but there's still very much design metaphors that are just used every single time.
And they pretty much teach you now, in the design industry—if you're building something that isn't integral to your app, don't innovate on it. So, for example, if you're building—I work on this thing Bumpers, which is a podcasting app. If I build a commenting section, I shouldn't be innovating on comments. I should just look at Instagram and copy exactly—or look at Facebook and copy exactly how comments are done... because it's working, and it's fine. It's fucking comments. No one cares. I think maybe there's some ideal world where Bootstrap provided those design metaphors and allowed for more innovation by eliminating the time you needed to spend reinventing certain wheels, but I don't know whether or not that's true.
JACKIE
Okay, so, maybe related—I read your blog post about rewriting Bumpers in React. And—this is less related to that and more related to React in general—what about the convergence of how people build things? Because I feel like, at this point—and this is also more of a JavaScript thing—there are "right" frameworks and other frameworks that are inferior and you should never use them?
JACOB
Yeah, that's weird. I think that the thing that happened is—especially today, more so than ever—it's interesting. So I listen to a lot of hip-hop, and for a long time everyone wanted to be taken seriously as a rapper and the best lyricist. And then everyone wanted to be taken seriously as the best artist—they no longer wanted to be seen as just a rapper. And now you see—Lil Yachty and stuff like that—where they don't want to be artists, they don't want to be rappers, they want to be brands. They want to be like Jay Z, where you just say their name and there's all these connotations you have of them. Which is, one, insane, but two, but also maybe smart and useful.
But I think that we live in this crazy time where everything is so extremely branded. Like, Bootstrap's Twitter thing probably has a hundred thousand followers or something. And it's very much a brand that's completely separate from what the code is or what it tries to do that people just conjure up when you say, "Oh, this is Bootstrap," or "I built this on Bootstrap." It's like, "Oh, are you a noob?" or "Do you not know stuff very well?"
Or, "Oh, I built this on React," "Oh, wow, that's the new hot thing, blah blah blah. Oh, Facebook engineers built that? Wow! Ooh!" Or, "Oh, I built this on PHP," "Oh, are you a scrub? PHP is outdated... why would you use PHP?" When in reality, it's like—Facebook's written on PHP, and behind the scenes, there's all this crazy overlap of everything, and then people fetishize brands so much.
I think it's in some ways because people demand—well, I don't know if it's the immediacy of moving forward and moving at this breakneck pace all the time, but most people don't spend the time—rightfully because there's so many choices—saying, "Okay, I'm going to start an app from scratch. Which language should I use? Should I use Go, should I use Rust?" Those are some hot new ones. "Should I use Rails or Python?" Which have more been around. "Or Java? Should I use PHP? Or Node?" Something that's easier and you can move faster with.
And there's all these other things that start popping up, like hiring people—what are people going to want to work on, and why are they going to want to work on that? It's insane. And that's just with back-end technology. And then there's front-end technology and libraries and a bunch of stuff compounded onto that. It's really bizarre.
And so I think it's a lot to do with brands. You could argue to some extent, once a brand gets big enough, the community comes into play. I think Rails was actually the first one to really nail community. Maybe PHP was and I just missed that wave, but Rails was the first community for me. Well, it was the first community that, at the time, Ruby just felt really hot. It was a really hot language. So some dude in Japan wrote it, and everyone was like, "Wow, that's sick," and, "Oh, it's really pretty, and you can do all these crazy little shortcuts for things." At the time. Everyone was just like, "Oh my god, Ruby's the best language."
And so you saw Twitter written in Ruby and a bunch of new startups at the time were originally written in Ruby. And the community grew so strong that after a while, you could just be like, "I need to build authentication flows," and just do `gem install authentication`. And, "Oh, I need to build an image uploader"—`gem install image-uploader`. Stuff like that.
I think React is pretty much at the same place now. Bootstrap was like that at one point, where you can find Bootstrap plugins for most UI things at this point. And React definitely—the plugins are usually terrible, but you can use them in a pinch or at least get inspiration from them. So yeah. I don't know. React is an interesting one, though, because it's so terrible for building 99% of projects. But it really reaffirms in the most hilarious way to me the power of branding. That so much is built on it when it's the absolute worst decision you could possibly make 90% of the time. That's kind of wild.
“[React] really reaffirms in the most hilarious way to me the power of branding. That so much is built on it when it’s the absolute worst decision you could possibly make 90% of the time.”
JACKIE
React also has a sharp learning curve, and I don't know—I was thinking, what are your thoughts on the idea that everyone should be code-literate or whatever?
JACOB
It's an interesting idea. I'm Team Not Everyone Should Be, but I do think more people should be than are, if that makes sense? So I hate math, for example. I suck at math. I got to the math portion of the SAT and I was just like, pencil down. I was like, "I'm going to fail this shit." I'm so bad at math. And I'm just not interested. They're like, "Oh, do this math problem," and I'm like, "Not trying to figure out the square... I don't got time for that. Tell me to do anything else." Yeah. Coding, I feel like, is the same way.
I think that at times, society gets too behind certain industries and tries to force that industry into people. So if you think about schools, a lot of critical school theory, education theory, is that everything is set up in such a way to pump out factory workers. And then that industry is all of a sudden not that big in the US, but we're still using the same antiquated system to call and develop to make people work really good in factories. And so I get nervous when people are like, "Oh, yeah, we should be teaching kids to code because that's the future, there'll be all these jobs, blah blah blah." I'm like, "Eh." I don't really know what we should do, but I think that putting all your eggs in one basket like that is a little questionable. And I don't know. I still hope that coding becomes obsolete.
JACKIE
Sure, yeah.
JACOB
In some way? Coding, oftentimes, is like sudoku or whatever shit that was. Or like a crossword. It's, like, cool, once in a while, and you're like, "Oh, that's a fun problem." But it's definitely not like, "Oh, it's Friday night! I'm trying to get turned up and code some shit!" It's not fun, for most people. Sometimes, some rare people find it tight, and I think that's awesome. But for most people—or at least, for me—it's a means. So I don't know. I would be bummed if, in elementary school, I was forced. One, it would make it a lot less fun, and, two, some people just aren't meant to—I think genetically, your brain works better on some types of problems. I just think coding isn't that way.
That said, I do think that there's certain—there's a big debate, which is "Should designers code?," for example, or "Should product managers code?," or other people that are closer into the industry. I also don't think that they should code, or I don't think they should be forced to code, but if you are a product manager or you're a designer, your life is a hundred times easier if you code. And the result of everything you do is better. I just don't like forcing people to do shit, basically. That's my short answer.
JACKIE
Fair enough.
JACOB
I just get stressed out by it.
JACKIE
The last thing I wanted to ask you about was imposter syndrome, I guess? I don't feel like you call it that, but you know, you talked about how you were hired for a job that you were not qualified for, and then in the React writeup, you were talking about going between crippling self-doubt and Kanye god complex. Why do you think that's so prevalent—I feel like it's prevalent particularly in engineering and tech?
JACOB
“I think interviewing is impossible. I just don’t believe it’s possible. I almost think that it should be closer to a raffle system, where literally anyone can apply, and you just get a number, and we randomly draw one.”
It's funny because it's such a common conversation to have with pretty much everyone. There's a certain Friday, you'll be stuck in the office with someone, you'll be having a few beers, you'll be working on something you hate, or you'll have interviewed some candidate that day. Well, I think there's a couple things. One, I think interviewing is impossible. I just don't believe it's possible. I almost think that it should be closer to a raffle system, where literally anyone can apply, and you just get a number, and we randomly draw one. It might actually be more effective than trying to talk to someone for an hour and figure out if they're super intelligent and will make your company grow or something. It's fucking impossible. It's really both a waste of time because it's impossible and it reminds me—yeah, this is what it is.
I've never made this correlation before, but there's this other thing I fucking hate, when you're at a restaurant and you're having a nice dinner with someone, and you're like, "I think we should get some wine," and the waiter comes over, and they pour this much wine, and they're like, "Sip this," and you're like, "Okay!" You try to smell it, you taste it—every single time, everyone's like, "Yeah, I think it's fine... Pour me that glass."
Because it's just this weird, awkward performance that people have just been doing for so long, but at some point it stopped meaning really anything other than, like, it's just this expectation that they're going to do it, and there's this expectation that you're going to be like, "It's great. I love it." You have to be so incredibly adept and skilled at interviewing to be able to suss out if someone is good in an hour conversation.
And no one is good at interviewing because literally what happens is that you get hired at Facebook and next week they're like, "You have three interviews this week, they're scheduled here, here, and here," and you're like, "Okay." And then you show up, and the only thing you can rely on is the different biases you have and you could be having [a bad day]—you could have been dumped the night before, you could have had all this bad shit happen, your PR (your pull request thing to get your code merged) could have been rejected. A bunch of bad day shit can be happening. And you just show up and be an asshole.
I've admittedly been like that, where you just can't help it, you're just in a bad mood. Or you show up and you're in the best mood ever. Like, you just had a hot date, or you had the best breakfast ever. You get oatmeal, and you're like, "I fucking love oatmeal." And you have an interview right after, and you're just like, "I don't even care what you say! You're getting a pass because I'm in the best mood ever. Can I help you through this?" And I feel like because of the impossibility of interviews, the absolute unknownness of it, and how the more interviewing you do, the more abundantly clear that interviewing is just this weird performance that means nothing and is impossible to get any value out of—you become more and more confused how you got in. The imposter system grows with each interview, where you see the interview panel of what other peers are asking and how they're judging people, and you're like, "How did I ever get through? I can't answer any of these questions."
I was mentoring this kid J, and he's doing Code2040, which is this really cool program, and he got an interview at Dropbox, and he's like, "Hey, I'm going to come over and work on this interview. I have an hour to do this coding problem." It was me, my friend Dave, who's another engineer, and we were hanging out playing video games or something. And I was like, "Yeah, dude, come over if you get stuck, ask a question, it's cool, whatever." It's just the take-home test, not anything serious.
He got here, and he read through the question, and he's like, "Fuck, I don't understand this at all." I was like, "What are you talking about, man?" He's at SF State. He's a fine engineer—young, but fine. And so I read it, and I was like, "What the fuck?" Literally the three of us huddled around this computer—and I've been coding for, like, ten years, no big deal. I consider myself also to be on the pretty senior side, and we stressed through this fucking code exam.
It was not even to get an internship. It was to get a phone screen to get considered to get interviewed to get an internship at Dropbox. Which is bullshit. Also, Dropbox sends me recruitment emails all the time, like, "Please consider working at Dropbox, we'd love to have you, Jacob, blah blah blah." So the three of us huddled around, tried to write something, finally get something that's pretty much working, and it has an hour—a sixty-minute cutoff and then the page just goes white, like, "Thank you for working on this problem."
Anyway, so we got rejected. And it was like—we completely cheated, and we were all competent engineers who had worked at Twitter—my friend Dave literally worked at Dropbox as a contractor for a while, but he worked at Medium and other places. Anyway, we all got shot down. As a crew. And I was just like, "What the fuck?" I don't Twitter rant very much because I feel like Twitter gets pretty rant-y, but I was just so shook. And it just completely reaffirmed that absurdity of—like, at this same company where I can't get an internship, I, tomorrow, could become an engineering manager. Which is this weird paradox.
“It just completely reaffirmed that absurdity of—like, at this same company where I can’t get an internship, I, tomorrow, could become an engineering manager. Which is this weird paradox.”
And because of that, I feel like—if you don't have imposter syndrome and you work at a company, I don't trust you. Like, if you think you deserve to be here, you don't get it. You haven't figured out that it's just luck. It's just weird luck and bias and it's crazy. It's weird. So yeah. That's how I feel about it, anyway. And I think that's how a lot of people that are pretty in touch with what's going on and reflected on it at all [feel]. Like, really great engineers feel that way. "Oh, I just so happened to catch it on the right day when I just so happened to study some algorithm that they happened to ask, and thank god because otherwise..." And it's always these absurd questions or absurd reasons—like, "Oh, yeah, I'd love to get a beer with that guy." And you're just like, "Alright." So yeah.
JACKIE
Yeah, it's funny that you say that because the startup where I worked last year—we would have onsite interviews with five questions, whatever, and at some point our CTO was like, "You know, I don't think I would pass our interview."
JACOB
It's impossible. And every time—this is another thing—as you add people that can pass the bar, they raise the bar every single time, higher and higher, until you're just like, "No one—we can hire no one now. It's just impossible." And you just lose touch with your culture. I don't know, it's weird. I don't like hiring. That's why I like small teams of three people, no more. Too problematic.
