> This is not really the attitude a company should have when they manage benefits

Why exactly? They are talking at the individual employee level, not company wide. The statement above is: "[As an individual developer] it is ok to make mistakes, just own up to them and take responsibility."

They didn't touch on test coverage, integration Vs. unit testing, code reviews, UI automated testing, code quality inspections (both automated and manual), regression testing, external audits, or a whole bunch of other things a company can do to improve the quality of their software over the medium to long term. These exist to help mitigate an individual's errors.

If we take what you said above at face value, you're essentially saying: "It is unacceptable for an individual employee at a company who manages benefits to make mistakes ever period." Which when re-phased like that is patently absurd.

Your anecdotes above may be legitimate reasons to gripe about the quality of Zenefits' software. But these are issues with organisational quality, not individual quality. Individuals can and will make mistakes at any endeavour no matter how mission or life critical, the way organisations detect and resolve these mistakes is what is key to quality, not pretending that people should be mistake free, that's a pipe dream.

This Buzzfeed article corroborates your findings: http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-hr-rocket-ship...

Glad my benefits aren't handled by Zenefits.

When working for a devshop a while back, one of our programmers discovered a SQL injection by using some non-alphabet characters in their health insurance password...

We informed them. Never checked to see if it was fixed :)

Anybody with actual experience and skills doesn't give a rats ass about your company's mission. And are you seriously asking devs about where they want to be in 5 years? I hope you're not any older than 30.

I think the takeaway is that it's a competitive jungle out there and some companies may appreciate your effort to standout from the rest.

"How I aced a front-end engineering phone screen at Zenefits.com" more like it

I imagine you'd:

A. Include it with your resume before hand

B. Bring it up when asked about previous experience tangential to it

C. Bring it up when asked about your outside work activities or what sort of continuing professional development you've been doing lately

D. Mention it when asked about the "coolest/most fun" thing you've hacked on lately

E. Whip it out when asked the usual "what do you think we do here and what can you bring to the table"

Or, when you start asking your questions about the company/culture/ect. (DEFINITELY ask those types of questions), weave it in with a question about what kind of side-project or 20% type program they offer/support.

You could also throw it up on a design site or your blog and drop it in whichever social media channel they may have.

Cultivating a curious attitude (or sincerely making an effort to fake it) will help calm your nerves a bit as well.

I viewed his little creation as "extra credit". It shows he knows Sass/CSS and makes him standout from other "boring" interviewees that may have possessed similar skillsets.

Why not make it about their brand? It shows his desire that he wants to work there, and it's also clear he just made this. It isn't some cool thing he did awhile ago and is showing many different companies in interviews. He wants to work there, and that initiative shown will go a long way (and was successful, in this case).

Worst-case scenario is that he doesn't get the job but spent the night learning more about pseudo elements and how the interact with other elements. That's a win-win.

I don't think making cats bark would be very relevant to an Internet technology company, but it would probably be a good sign in a relevant industry (say, a company that trains animals).

That's the point. This person did a neat little project that uses skills which are directly relevant to the job being applied for. The project probably isn't actually useful on its own, but it shows interest and ability.

I also thought about this as well. At first I even thought it was an SVG image. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty damn awesome that he was able to use CSS transforms to create that but...why? I guess it shows how to think critically and maybe he did it in CSS because it's backwards compatible. I don't know. I don't know the backwards compatibility of CSS transforms vs. SVG.

Obviously, this isn't something to do for every place you apply to. However, for those at the top of your list, as is mentioned in the piece, riffing their design or code when you're practicing or wanting to expand your skillset anyway is a great idea. Two birds, one stone and all that.

If you read the complaint, the potential employee essentially worries that zenefits won't be technically challenging and it won't be a name brand place that opens doors by having it on your resume. And if we're honest, the 2nd bit is definitely important for your career.

A ceo who isn't a prick might have said we understand your concerns: here's [blah blah blah] reasons that our work is more technically challenging than it may appear from the outside or from your limited time interviewing here, and it's a personal and/or company goal to be recognized for the quality of our technical achievements as a peer of google.

I happen to think that zenefits is not particularly technically challenging and is mostly wiring together integrations with 3rd party systems, but I'm open to being wrong. Nonetheless, this might have won them the employee without being a dick.

Well in fairness he actually is an amateur and is learning on the job. I think he's done something pretty incredible myself. Zenefits really is one of those incredible outliers that is going to the stratosphere. Even an experienced CEO might have some things go wrong in such an extreme example.

He made a public spectacle out of something small and he paid the price in bad publicity. But I've seen worse, by so-called pros. Sometimes people let their ego get the best of them. But that doesn't mean that every decision they've made is invalid.

I'm going to be unusually blunt here: I don't buy that name recognition isn't part of your equation (even if only a small or subconscious part). I could be totally ass-backwards wrong. You could have a mental discipline to make these sort of decisions in a far more principled fashion than myself or any engineer I've ever met; but that statement makes me set my Bayesian prior where I set it. At the end of the day, we all know that name recognition _is_ a component to how future opportunities may play out, like it or not, and as engineers trained (hopefully) in the art of considering the possible outcomes and impact of our actions, it would be going against our nature to pretend that having "Google" or "Microsoft" on your resume will not open doors.

College is a prime example of this. Why are certain schools (Ivys, primarily) so highly recognized? Do they universally have better programs? Sometimes, sure, but so much of their cache comes exclusively from the institution itself being a signaling mechanism of exclusivity, and as was put, "buzzwordyness".

In my view, it would be irresponsible to NOT consider any potential added value of positions when comparing them. You are not doing a disservice to either company or your own integrity as an engineer as long as the work you do is sound, and to suggest that you should put your own best interests aside because a given metric isn't "tasteful" seems shortsighted. (I do not mean to suggest that hopping companies to ride trends is something to be looked up to, but that when you make a decision, the more data that helps you obtain a positive outcome the better.)

I think I have a bit more respect for such behavior. Mercenary behavior and making work decisions based on the potential resume-building impact is a completely natural response to the ways in which the job markets have changed since the 90s.

Everyone can, and should, consider how a job will help them advance their own careers. This is exactly why I quit COMPANY_X. At the time, their codebase was entirely based on not one, but two obsolete technology stacks. If I didn't leave quickly, I would have been locked into that narrow ecosystem for the rest of my life, at a "flattened" company with almost zero opportunity for career advancement. It would have been almost like someone deciding to move into COBOL programming starting in 2016.

And I have been frequently laid off as a result of startup failure, acquisition redundancy, or just the company's loss of contract work. There is no longer any loyalty from the typical employer to the typical employee. If you can manage to work your entire career at a single company, you are an extreme outlier, because at many, if an accountant predicts you will be unprofitable next week, you will get laid off on Friday afternoon, with no severance package.

So asking yourself "would this look good on my resume?" is something you should do very frequently, even if you are currently content where you are. We wouldn't need to chase after buzzword-related experience if HR didn't look at those buzzwords when hiring people!

And anecdotally, the name of a previous employer has helped me to get hired at another company. After COMPANY_X, my future co-workers told me at the interview, "COMPANY_X is great! We know they hire only high-quality people, and we also know that the best all want to leave after about two years. PERSON_1 and PERSON_2 used to work there!"

But buzzwords matter. MIT, Stanford, FB, Google all things that make a resume look better. Would you want Java on your resume or JS and React right now? The candidate was absolutely right in the analysis even though it should not have been shared in public.

it's a kid fresh out of college, though -- how is he supposed to know any better? working for a name brand makes the decision a safer decision; i'd put the onus on those advising him to point out why that's not the best metric for making this decision.

Yep, I wouldn't work at a company that was unhappy I didn't drink the koolaid before I even began working there.