Experimenting with a new hiring process/way of working

So we’ll be doing a fair bit of hiring in 2012. I’ve decided to experiment with a new hiring process.

One thing I wanted to try was to do away with interviews. Instead, have candidates fill out a fairly difficult online application form that’s technical. This filters our the semi-serious candidates, and gives us a solid first-look at their quality of work.

Then, we’ll offer the candidates we like an opportunity to work on a small, real project. And from there select the ones we’d like to work with on a longer-term basis.

I thought this was pretty radical (esp. the doing away with the interview part), but this is exactly what they do at this company.

I’m a couple of weeks into the process, and so far it’s very promising. I think being able to give the same job to multiple people and actually compare the work side-by-side is revolutionary. This is like website split-testing.

People ask me if this is an expensive way to go about doing things. I say no, because I think the cost of hiring a mismatch is way higher than the initial high cost of giving the same job to multiple people.

Blood Pressure Snapshot

Blood pressure: 136/89

Heart rate: 58

Minimum Viable DNA?

Reading about basic molecular biology is pretty mind-blowing. As a computer programmer, I would use the phrase “elegant design” to describe how life seems to work. I discovered a lot of things that I didn’t know about and are truly remarkable.

I knew a little bit about the DNA double helix of course. But what I didn’t know was the impact and/or “reason” such a design is elegant. And I knew about base-pairing, but I hadn’t realized it’s all to do with molecule shapes and molecule binding.

In fact, so much molecular biology seems intrinsically linked to shapes and molecule binding. Given a particular shape, a molecule tends to bind to another molecule. And from there, the engines of life run.

And now I have a question. It seems that DNA can be synthesized pretty easily these days, especially if it has less than 5000 kilo-base pairs. I’ve also read that DNA can be injected into an existing cell, and through some process it can take over the existing DNA. So my question is:

Is it possible to synthesize a minimum-viable DNA that can sustain life in controlled situations?

In computer programming, when we want to understand a complex system, we often try to create something small that tests parts of the system. From there, we can be reasonably confident that we understand a larger system. So, could we synthesize a minimum sequence of genes that can allow a single-cell organism to replicate in controlled situations?

Bacteria DNA is reasonably small but even then it has a lot of inter-gene regions which are not needed. It also has introns, which are regions of gene whih are discarded by the cell during messenger RNA creation.  So in our minimum viable DNA (MVD), we definitely want to strip out all that junk.

Bacteria is around today for good reason. It has a LOT of redundancy to survive through the ages. For example, bacteria can get energy from multiple sugars: lactose, glucose, fructose. However, each of those requires multiple genes. In our “controlled environment”, we could easily give the cell a single food source, say glucose which I think is the preferred food source. We can then strip out all the DNA related to the other food sources in keeping with our goal of minimum-viable DNA. Sure our cell may not survive in the wild, but it could survive indefinitely in a petri dish laded with glucose.

So what would the minimum viable DNA need? Well, I guess it would need all the genes that code for replication and for energy absorption. It could work couldn’t it?

Viruses may come to mind. They have very very few genes after all. However, they can’t replicate on their own, and they need many of the genes of the host cell to survive.  Our MVD needs to survive on its own. No parasites please!

Of course, it would be okay for the petri dish to have amino acids lying around. I think life itself needed amino acids in the beginning to get “kick started”.

The beauty of the minimum viable DNA would then be that it would be possible for a student to completely understand every single gene (assuming the number was reasonably small). And we could put the entire workings of the gene in a 3D computer model that could be analyzed and understood. And there you have it: Life. Created.

Live bands

Okay I now realized why I don’t jump at the opportunity to go see a live band when someone suggests it.

Actually I love live bands. I just hate jazz. It does nothing for me. And the majority of times that people invite me out to see a live band, it’s for jazz.

A useful realization.

True Grit: I left the cinema breathless

True Grit, with Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld and Matt Damon, was a great watch at the cinema. I didn’t expect it to have the effect it did. But it was quite a tour de force. Cinematography was beautiful. The 3 main characters were… well, full of character, with each take turns to be at odds with each other only to turn allies later.

Easy A

Watched a made-for-teenagers movie called Easy A with Emma Stone. I needed to give my brain a rest so why not.

Don’t have too many comments on the movie, but I thought the soundtrack was really fun. I’m going to look for it.

Looking for a payment processor? Try Braintree

We’ve been on the hunt to replace our payment gateway and merchant account due to RBS Worldpay unilaterally cancelling our account on the grounds that they were pulling out of our market.

Turns out it’s not that hard to get an Internet merchant account as long as you have a US company, even with foreign sharholders. You might not get the best rates, but it’s certainly possible. You just have to search the internet and apply. Thanks to Azreen for this.

But the payment gateway is another matter. We have two requirements:

1) We do NOT want to store credit card numbers in our system. In fact, we don’t want it going through anywhere near our servers.

2) We need to bill a variable amount automatically every month.

Oh, and we don’t want to spend a lot of money on this, as I’m sure you can appreciate.

Despite the many all-in-one solutions out there, turns out that these two requirements are hard to meet. Paypal, google checkout, amazon.com are all out.

Braintree is by far the best solution I found. They “look” web 2.0, they offer a dead-simple API, and customer support is off the charts.

Their technological innovation is so simple, I was almost shocked that it wasn’t the norm. But hey, they thought of it first so props to them.

Their first innovation is transparent redirect. I mean, it’s really basic. You create your own credit card collection form using HTML or jsp or whatever. But you submit it directly to their website, and when try respond, it redirects to your own page, where you have to make a confirmation API call to finalize the transaction.

What this means is the credit card info never passes through your system. The current drawback is that you can’t use Ajax (because of cross-domain security restrictions), and this means you have to submit the form and the user loses the data she entered.

Their second innovation is just a really good java client library which is really a joy to program against. They have libraries in other languages as well like ruby and asp.net. Their javadoc could be a little better documented though.

Finally, they have a Vault where the credit card info is securely stored. You can continue to make charges against the credit card, by referencing it’s “token” which is just it’s ID. This is how we’re able to make monthly variable billings. Obviously the trigger comes from our system, which is fine.

I just want to add one more thing. From the time i discovered them to the time the system was fully activated only took a week!

We go live by the end of the week. Hoping it all goes smoothly.

Time is flying past!

Time has really been flying past. I’ve been in Malaysia for the past 4 weeks, and it’s about time for me to go back to Belmont, CA.

The last time I had less than 2 months to work on things. Now, if I’m lucky, I’ll get 6 months to really dig my heels in and produce.

Looking forward to it.

500 days of summer

Things have been pretty tough lately and I needed a break. And what better way than to watch some DVDs. “The Hurt Locker” was pretty powerful, and I thought Kathryn Bigelow did a great job for what was apparently an independent movie. I found out something surprising: No woman director has yet won the directing Oscar, and The Hurt Locker is only the 4th woman nominated for the directing Oscar. Lost in Translation was another, directed by Sofia Copolla. That, by the way, was one of my favorite movies.

Today I watched something much lighter: 500 Days of Summer. I actually enjoyed it a lot. I can’t say with absolute certainty that Zooey Deschanel didn’t have something to do with that. But there were a lot of things I liked about the movie:

• The use of narrative humor, recited in a deep and serious male voice which reminds me of french movies like Amelie.
• The random insertion of incongruous images/video clips that emphasize a funny point, which also reminds me of french movies.
• The split-screen scene when Tom goes to a party. The scene on the left is titled “Expectation”, and the scene on the right is titled “Reality.” Brilliant! And I for one can identify with this expectation-reality split
• The movie had a great soundtrack. And heck, it referenced Belle & Sebastian. I was reminded me of my own Belle & Sebastian moment.

In reading up on the movie I learned a new phrase: Manic pixie dream girl. Interesting.

HSBC is starting to disappoint me

When I started transitioning over to HSBC from Maybank a few years, I was very impressed with their level of customer service. I was happy despite the fact that they charged far higher fees than Maybank. For example, whenever I called their hotline, I got good service. And things usually worked well.

But in the last month and so, I’ve been noticing a stark deterioration in service quality.

1) I suddenly couldn’t log onto my Personal Account at hsbc.com.my. Try as I may, putting in my username, password and the randomly-generated security device number, it just wouldn’t work. I called the hotline, and at least the person answering the question was professional, and QUICK. She resolved my problem very rapidly.

2) Guess what. It happened AGAIN in less than 30 days. I couldn’t log in, and I had to call customer support again. This time, for the first time, I noticed I was rerouted to an agent who was not based in Malaysia. And the service quality was atrocious. She kept repeating over and over again, “Uhm, let me just double check it here sir”. She was terribly slow at asking the security question. “Uhm, sir, okay, if you could answer this security question. Uhm, let me just double check it here.” And she would repeat herself 2-3 times, struggling with her computer system, before finally asking the question. And after I answered, she’d have to struggle some more to see if my answer matched her system.

Oh, wait. You’ll like this security question:

She: “Sir, what is the name of your spouse?”
Me: “I’m single. I don’t have an answer to that security question.”
She: “Oh, yes, I understand that sir.” (I could almost HEAR the sneer in your words – I understand that you’re a loser sir, and couldn’t find someone to get married to sir, and that sucks sir, but I understand sir.)

(and apparently, I failed a few of the security questions, she told me later. I have a wife I don’t know about perhaps?)

So after we got past the security questions (the entire phone call lasted 23 minutes, 47 seconds by the way), she finally asked me: “So what seems to be the problem sir?”

I explained that my security device appeared to go wonky, and she asked me to read the serial number out. I read it out multiple times. Guess what her response was?

“Sir, that’s not the device we have on file.”

Wow. Through an act of the cleverest sabotage you could imagine, someone FLEW all the way from Malaysia to Palo Alto, FOUND me in a Comfort Inn hotel, BROKE into my hotel room, DISCOVERED where I kept my HSBC security device, had a SPARE copy, SWAPPED mine with the copy, and left, without leaving a trace, just so they could annoy the heck out of me.

I had no idea I was important enough to deserve such sabotage. I’m kinda flattered.

(p.s. I could finally log in again after the call.)