Laurel Fan's profile answers

Check out my list on www.43things.com/people/laurel

My best interview experience was when I interviewed at Jobster, because it wasn't really an interview. Everyone on the dev team had worked with me before, so they didn't bother with the coding questions, and pretty much started off by getting the CEO in to convince me to join.

A friend recommended me for a position at a startup company doing stuff with mobile technology. After sending the recruiter my resume, I never heard back. My friend later told me that this was because I 'refused' to send my resume as a Word document, and instead sent a link to download it in text, html, or pdf....

The path I took to my current career was not terribly exotic. I went to Carnegie Mellon and got a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I was doing all of my interviewing in the fall and winter of my last year, which was 2000/2001, right before the bubble burst, so everyone was still interviewing for college hires like crazy. I got a few offers from the big computer companies to do stuff actually relevant to my specialization (microarchitecture CAD), but I went with Avogadro, a little startup doing something with mobile phones and instant messaging because it was cool and in downtown Seattle instead of some suburb like Shrewsbury, MA, Poughkeepsie, NY, or Beaverton, OR. It got acquired by Openwave right before I started, then moved to Bellevue, started laying people off, and cancelled our project. I landed at Amazon, (referred by an Avogadro co-worker,
http://www.jobster.com/at/person/experience_ans...
http://www.jobster.com/at/person/show/8886 of course) and was there for a couple years. I was just getting a little disgruntled about the large company thing when I got a note from Ray http://www.jobster.com/at/person/experience_ans... (who I knew from Avogadro), who was now working at Jobster with a bunch more Avogadro people. So here I am......

The 4 Hour Work Week

One of the projects I worked on before we left was a rewrite of the core recommendation engine to fit in with sweeping company wide architecture changes. I didn't realize it at the time, but the direction we chose for it meant we ended up reimplementing the wheel a few times (things like inversion of control, dependency injection). I think the Not Invented Here thing is one problem with a lot of groups at Amazon, and something I've tried to be more aware of. It's helped that open source frameworks and tools like Spring and Rails have gotten a lot better and more well known since then....

The week after I got there, I worked with Eric Vadon on the prototype for search similarities (the feature where it suggests terms that are similar to the search terms that you typed in). His team took it to the product stage, and last I heard it was one of the best performing features on the search page....

This one. Jobster.com as it is now started about April of this year. At that point, Jobster was more focused on recruiters, and the only real "consumer" (meaning non-recruiter) application was meta job search. Ray, Ryan, and I, three developers, kind of took over the project, and had a couple months to come up with a beta-able prototype. The first prototype just contained our core idea that people answer questions about their experiences at companies in order to provide insights about their companies, themselves, and their careers. A few months and lots of work from many other people later, here it is.

We also used the opportunity to experiment with ruby on rails (honestly, I don't think we could have done it without it), and now pretty much every page on the site is at least partially served up by a rails app....

I ate the same thing for lunch almost every day for the last 3 years -- Indian food that some guy sold out of the back of his van for $3.

A few nearby restaurant/bars had half price food specials for students around midnight. Most of the time we'd eat our cheap food and go back to some assignment due at 8 AM the next day -- deadly combination of heavy workload and heavy procrastination.