I applied to Sparkfun about 8 or 9 years ago - they had some kind of Github easter egg in their application process or something. It was an IT role. I applied and recall being pretty glib; my application was about "me" and how I would benefit, how good I was, etc.
The receiver of the resume was beyond unimpressed, and took the time to write a 2-3 paragraph response to how unappealing my tone and application was.
I remember it being a sobering and humbling moment, and truly appreciated the time someone took to set a conceited young applicant straight.
Sure would have been nice to move to Boulder, though.
That is a hard pill to swallow, and good on you for taking that feedback and learning from it.
Quite possibly the best two best pieces of advice I have ever received were on how to receive, and how to give, feedback.
For the former, always take critical feedback at face value, and take the time to thank them for it. Assume that their feedback is true, and ask yourself what you could or should change to address it.
Even if the answer ends up being "nothing", it is a very useful mental exercise, and chance to learn and grow.
It sounds like you learned that lesson well. :)
The second is that all feedback you give should be actionable, specific, and kind.
It is shocking how much those two small pieces of wisdom have improved my life over the years.
If you don't deliver a critique with kindness then the ego gets engaged, the shield goes up, and the target becomes unreceptive. You become the attacker/enemy.
Because criticism is the process of sitting square in the middle of the "sourest spot" of our failings and faults, and staying there for a few moments. It's never fun.
So if someone who needs to shove something we're doing incorrectly in our faces so we can re-prioritize, and they don't do it kindly, that's kind of abusive, and very imbalanced. In that moment there needs to be acknowledgement and recognition of universal imperfection and vulnerability, and not "you're the worst person in the world right now."
Comparing ourselves with others is incredibly toxic. It makes the condemner think they've truly "made it" (which in itself is a gigantic lie) and get complacent, and it makes the condemned think there's no point in going forward. So it slows both parties down!
--
NB. Written because I compared what I was going to say with the two comments that were written, and I decided what I was going to say was more interesting and insightful and would attract more comments. Karma is an incredibly unhelpful digital sugarcube, I don't take it well (ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634577, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16384194).
If the person delivering feedback doesn't "care" about the person receiving it, you'll never get the tone right, and will never create the emotional connection that is so necessary for the feedback to be internalized. The receiving end will hear the words, but much harder to act on it.
Kim Scott wrote extensively about this in her book "Radical Candor" [1]. Do yourself a favor and skip the video snippets and TED talks, and go straight to the book (so you don't get caught up on the click-baity "radical candor quadrant"). This is particularly true if you manage teams - or ever aspire to.
The author is a former Googler and used to report to Sheryl Sandberg during the early days, before going to Apple and working with Jobs and Tim Cook, and more recently with Dick Costolo on Twitter.
This is one of those books I wish I had read when I started my career. It would have saved me from so much pain and mistakes learned the hard way.
Many people, especially those not used to receiving and handling feedback, can misinterpret feedback as petty criticism or even as a personal attack. Being kind may help reassure the recipient of the feedback that we're actually trying to help them rather than hurt them.
Few things are truly obvious, so this is a good question.
There are a lot of good answers here, but I feel compelled to add one more.
Kindness... opens doors. By being kind, your feedback is much more likely to actually benefit the person on the receiving end of it, which is the point of giving feedback in the first place.
Kindness also reminds us to look at not just the things that we don't like, but also at the good, and to give credit wherever and whenever it is due.
Here, for example, I could just have replied with an answer or a link to an article. That wouldn't have been unkind, per se. But you did ask a good question! Other people that read my reply may have wondered the same thing, and so by raising this, you helped all of those other people.
Moreover, in looking back on things, I struggle to think of a time in my life when being unkind was a net benefit to me.
Doing things that don't help me... doesn't sound like a solid strategy for winning. :)
So, in general, I make it a point to Always Be Kind, and encourage others to do the same.
I spent high school in boulder. Don't get me wrong, the place is "great" and all. But I'm not even a little sad to be gone.
A job at Sparkfun might make me reconsider tho, that company is the bees knees.
Also, I really wish your experience was the norm. It's far to common to spend hour working on a solution to a technical assignment for a job application, and hear nothing in response.
I actually really liked my high school(s)... I just don't like the cities vibe. Not to over generalize, but the whole place felt really ironic to me. A hippy town from the 70s turned rich kid playground. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty well off myself, it's just not my scene.
I've used them for tons of projects. I've read people that throw shade their way for their prices for components compared to some of the offshore websites like digikey or alibaba. However, I don't like their websites, and anything they might be "overcharging" for is easily made up with what I receive from the rest of their website. I'm constantly in a state of 2-3 projects that are in various stages of incomplete. If the parts&pieces for these projects didn't come from SparkFun, they probably came from Adafruit. Love both of these sites.
Digi-key has been based in Minnesota since they were founded 40+ years ago. Sure a lot of their parts are manufactured in other countries (just like Sparkfun), but their main distribution center is in the US, and they have thousands of employees working there.
Their only distribution center, at that! They ship everything out of the Thief River Falls warehouse. They also run a great tour, if you're ever in the area.
Fun fact, they can take just about any combination of the 1million+ SKUs they stock from order reception to in a box waiting for a truck in under 15 minutes.
They have (had?) a local warehouse I think off 101 in the Bay Area, don't remember exactly where. You could walk in with a list of parts and they would grab them for you right there.
Yep thanks I just remembered that's what it was ("it had a J in it"). Woops. Not sure why I've had them confused for Digi-Key the last few years. Maybe the Digi-Key branding is just more memorable.
watch me eat this big bowl of crow. honestly, had no idea, and made a huge assumption. will actually have to rethink order from there. still don't like their website though ;-)
Digi-Key has what has to be a top contender for fastest order processing & shipment of any company that does e-commerce ever. No exaggeration, it's almost inconceivable how quickly they will pack up and ship out your order. Especially when considering most orders likely contain many different, intricately small parts each of varying quantities. For example, I've seen YouTube videos from AvE who lives in Canada, where he ordered a few ICs late-ish the previous night and UPS dropped them off at his door the next afternoon. And this isn't a one-off occasion, it's consistent.
McMaster-Carr might be comparable, though. At Georgia Tech, a MC order at like 9AM could realistically be received at like 1PM with the cheapest shipping option. Usually the slow link was GT Post Office.
But that's because MC has a warehouse really close to Atlanta.
Funnily enough, when I first stumbled on them (about 15 years ago) I too assumed they were a China-based company for some reason. It wasn't until the first shipment arrived and I finally noticed the sender address that I realised they were States-based. I still use them for most of my parts, they're amazingly quick to process and ship, and the free shipping for $50+ orders is awesome.
I live in MN now, but when I lived on the East Coast, I remember talking to a Digi-Key order taker on the phone (pre-web days!) about the weather. It was winter and all the roads were closed, but many of the employees came to work on snowmobiles.
I have to add that in the (holy cow!) 30 years that I've been buying parts from Digi-Key either for personal use, my own businesses, or employers, I remember them making exactly three mistakes! Two of which I didn't care about, the third, since the order was for the company I worked for, they corrected immediately.
BTW: you can order a lot of Sparkfun (and Adafruit) stuff from DigiKey. I do this a lot since Digi-Key ships faster and I already live in MN so it gets here next day.
I've come to the conclusion that better documented, quality controlled parts are worth it as my free time for hardware projects dwindles. In the end the parts for RPi and Arduino projects are generally quite cheap in comparison to my time.
I don't really think that's being fair. The association the parent made was between Digikey and Alibaba. Digikey has pretty much exactly the same startup story as Sparkfun. Read all about it (https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/about-digikey):
It was Dr. Ronald A. Stordahl's interest in ham radio that provided the springboard for what has become Digi-Key today.
While in college he assembled and began selling a digital electronic keyer kit for sending radiotelegraph code for ham radio operators. It was called the Digi-Key.
After obtaining his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Stordahl returned to his hometown of Thief River Falls, Minnesota. The keyer kit was discontinued and he began selling electronic components in 1972. The Digi-Key "keyer" is long gone, but Digi-Key has become one of the fastest growing electronic component distributors in the world. We continue to operate on the premise of providing our customers – you – with superior service, focusing on the key areas of product selection, product availability, on-time delivery, and responsiveness.
Few things are as exciting for a programmer as dabbling with electronics is. Especially if you have no experience with it. I knew some maths and physics and I knew basics of electronics, but never dabbled with a soldering iron, let alone other stuff.
AND THEN, I had a need for a simple motor-driven CNC-like machine that would drive my film camera around the set, like a small-ish, motion repeatable, crane. Motion Control system, basically, but DIY-I-have-no-idea-if-electricity-will-kill-me stuff. My dudes, let me tell you, the whole process was extremely laborious and extremely fun. Reminiscent of ye olde days of poking around Commodore 64 memory addresses to see what will happen. With microcontroler abundance today and a whole gallery of crap for them, like sensors and drivers and whatnots, you owe yourself to try it out.
Just a friendly reminder, it's a bug that once you catch will fill your house with random electronics junk, oscilloscopes, PSUs and other stuff. Like photography, buying equipment never stops.
Bravo Sparkfun! They are the group that I hold most responsible for reigniting my interest in programming, which eventually led me into a happy career in software development. Their projects, products, and educational materials helped me see the real world effects of code, and I am really grateful that I found them and learned from them.
I give them credit for the other side of the coin. After programming for a while, I credit SparkFun for getting me interested and back into hardware. With all of the very affordable micro-controllers and various shields/kits, it's so much fun designing the circuits, building it, and then writing the code to make it function. However, I'm still at the stage of when it's all assembled and code being written and it doesn't work, I have to decide if it's just bad programming, bad hardware/circuit assembly, or just flat out bad circuitry design. Way more debugging than just figuring out what line I forgot to use a semi-colon or where I reassigned a variable's value etc.
With all of that experience, I have even more respect for people like Woz. I have online forums to ask questions. The "grey beards" just had to figure it out ;-)
I've been using their stuff since right after they started, any my career was just starting. I've used their products to prototype new products and ideas for many projects. Blood pumps, artificial hearts, LVADS, medical devices and indoor agriculture products. Their mix of education, support, accessability, real technical chops and providing the latest stuff is only matched closely by Adafruit. I'm thankful for both. They are an invaluable resource for both engineers and hobbyists.
I used a sparkfun kit to create a sales demo for some sensors and I learned so much more about circuitry than I did in a couple years of theory based coursework.
The author's early point is right, getting hands on is the best way to learn EE and I have no idea why even good schools don't have you build stuff early and often.
It took me years to break my "Dings and Dents" module addiction. Some weeks I'd even send in multiple orders while telling myself this will be the last time. It was too entertaining trying to figure out why each board didn't pass QA and how they could be fixed using parts from pervious orders.
> It was too entertaining trying to figure out why each board didn't pass QA
Do they have a reputation for poor quality? I bought a RedBoard Arduino clone from them last year and it was DOA, as was the replacement (different batches).
I very rarely have an issue with a sparkfun product. The "Dents and Dings" boards are boards that failed QA that they sell cheap as-is without warranty. After examining a couple hundred "Dents and Dings" boards I'd say they are very strict when it comes to QA.
Pretty much. Source: I'm one of the guys in the picture.
The stairs are actually wider than the picture makes it look (wide enough to have people on both side of the oven while carrying it). The tricky part was the corner: the oven was long enough that it had to hang out in the air over the corner as we brought it around. I recall that meant lifting it to shoulder height to clear the railing.
As Ray Kroc is supposed to have said: "The two most important things for success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it."
I sold my business (Geek Ammo) to Nate/SparkFun and spent a few months working with the team. Flying back and forth between Sydney, Australia and Boulder/Niwot every few weeks.
SparkFun is a great company with a really distinct culture that sits at the intersection of hacking and education.
Congratulations to Nate and the team for going 15 years strong!
I was offered a dev job at SparkFun. I really liked the work they offered but the pay was a little low and I got a much better offer from a well-funded project. That well-funded project went bankrupt and SparkFun continued to grow. Sometimes I think maybe I made the wrong decision. There may have been more money to be earned in the short term, but SparkFun is one of those really snazzy companies and I feel like I may have missed out on a great experience.
I grew up in Colorado and having them as a local resource for components was truly a gift. My dad was an EE and in his eyes Sparkfun was a great alternative to the Radioshack of his early days.
When I was in college in Fort Collins I made a quite a few trips for last minute parts to finish my projects and I had a ton of fun when I got one of the 5.00 dumpster dive boxes.
When I was in college at CU Boulder I remember frequently taking the bus to their old location to pick up parts. We all felt lucky when assembling our final projects that we had such a great resource so close for local pickup, and many of us owe no small part of our degrees to being able to pick up replacement parts the day before we needed to demo!
Part of my life involves building $100k+ interactive/experiential advertising installations.
Sparkfun has been pretty vital for a lot of our builds. The ability to know what we're getting, and to have it shipped overnight is a Big Deal.
For a while it was looking like Amazon might replace them on shipping, but shipping has become hit and miss enough that it isn't worth the risk anymore.
We built, for instance, a 10' tall animatronic set piece to promote a major comic book property at comic con. Attendees stood at a control console and moved essentially a giant robot around.
Any time you see a brand doing some sort of non standard advertising installation; stuff attendees would walk up to and interact with, that's the type of stuff I'm talking about.
Congrats to Nate and Sparkfun! I studied ECE at CU a few years behind Nate, and fondly remember the departmental pride in the local and growing (despite the GFC!) electronics company he started.
The receiver of the resume was beyond unimpressed, and took the time to write a 2-3 paragraph response to how unappealing my tone and application was.
I remember it being a sobering and humbling moment, and truly appreciated the time someone took to set a conceited young applicant straight.
Sure would have been nice to move to Boulder, though.