It's a pretty bad strategy for hiring great programmers. Given how many cool, interesting, VC-funded startups are hiring, good developers can work literally anywhere they want. A job description that doesn't reveal the company or at least the general domain is likely to just be ignored. When I started my job board, I had a rule that the company name had to be on the posting. When I let one company avoid this rule by posting as a "stealth startup" I got tons of email complaints and the stealth startup got no applicants.
It's only the unlaunched ones that don't. Those have to weigh the benefits of launching vs the costs. Usually they launch soon anyway (we encourage startups to launch quickly) and can then give their names in jobs posts. So a post like this is not the last chance a startup will have to hire people; it's just a chance for them to attract a few adventurous ones a month early.
Empirically, they are in fact able to attract good people, which is why they continue to do it. A posting by an unnamed startup may not work on a job board where anyone can post, but here it has worked well for years.
PG's answer is of course canonical, but as an outside observer, I believe it is incomplete.
The unstated hidden reason comments are disabled is because comment threads often dilute the message of the posting.
Threads can digress and accentuate negative, minor, or emotional/controversial distractions. The postings are a favor to the listing company. If that company prefers just "here's our message, contact us", with no risk of defocusing tangents, then that's the right favor for YC/PG to grant.
It may also be better to decide up front, "we'll give up the comments, good or bad", than to allow comments, and get a few that are so unproductively snarky they create a back-and-forth with critics, or that trigger premature speculation about things strategically left unsaid, or that prompt a later censorship decision (with its accompanying distracting gripetails).
As I've explained before, jobs aren't stories. Though jobs get displayed like stories and get inserted into the frontpage feed along with them, they're a different type of object. The reason I didn't give them comments was that I thought of them as ads, not content.
I would like to see comments on job postings. I don't consider them ads, to me they are interesting content. Even if they were ads, what's intrinsically wrong about enabling comments in ads? There's already a system in place for dealing with inappropriate comments and it works well.
If HN allowed comments on YC job posts, people would use the comments to post job ads for their own companies ("we're doing something similar, &c &c, contact us at &c &c"). This would significantly dilute the value of the YC job ads.
The inevitable discussion about how we could just have an etiquette of not doing that, or a guideline for not doing that, or a new kind of flag button for that, or or or, will just serve to illustrate how much simpler a solution just not allowing comments on those posts is.
These posts aren't hurting you. My bet is most HN people actully think they're a benefit of HN --- early access to YC jobs! This is a fake controversy. Can we think about tolerating the YC job ads in terms of "least we can do for running HN"?
I think they are a benefit to HN, and I think that allowing comments would be even more beneficial as I stated in my comment below. You may be right, but the people wanting comments may also be right but we'll never know unless the experiment is actually run and I thought a large part of HN was experimentation.
This most recent case suggests another problem with adding comments to jobs, at least for startups that hadn't launched yet: a few jerks would make a game of trying to out them. Which would mean such startups couldn't be as specific in job posts, lest they give away something that identified them.
I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that people who endeavor to figure out and post the identities of startups who post jobs are jerks. You make a fair point about why they shouldn't do it, and I think you're right to discourage it. Curiosity, however seems like a more probable motivation than malice.
I don't think whether comments are allowed will make a difference when there is suitable mystery/curiosity. The recent case also illustrates this: other posts in this forum or others will be spawned to try to reason an identity out.
A posting anywhere with enough specific info to prompt applicant interest will prompt other observers to fill in the details. It's true for Google, Apple, Facebook etc. – so it will be true for self-identified YC startups who tout their impressive metrics as well.
I posted the thread on asking what the startup was and I certainly didn't mean to be a jerk towards the new company. I was mostly curious because they got so much traction so fast and was willing to learn on how they achieved it. I apologize pg and YC W11 startup.
Well, you may be getting good programmers but you don't know if you are getting the best candidates of course. Spolsky's argument makes a lot of sense. [edit: PG edited after I posted this]
Actually, if I wasn't busy and on another continent, I would apply based on this ad. I don't think it's a bad strategy at all, given the cachet of YC. Also, it's likely that they are doing other things too to look for great hires, not just this HN posting.
Edit: Not trying to imply that I am a "great programmer"... just providing a data counterpoint that they will probably get people who have other options too applying to this to at least check it out.
Announcing YC funding is a media event that can be leveraged, just like a launch.
They want to make use of that event and release that information at the right time, to make the right kind of splash. Chances are only their closest friends know that they have YC funding, because if it leaked to, say, TechCrunch, they would lose the advantage of being able to announce their YC funding at the most advantageous time for them.
The ideas are obviously not stealth ideas if they have 20m uniques in 6 weeks.
I'm sorry, but this notion that a company can be made by a leveraged media event is stupid. Companies are made by having great products. If you have a great product, it doesn't matter when you show it off because there will always be an opportunity for getting new users.
This goes for hiring new employees too. Even if your beta version sucks and you aren't ready to show it off, yet its a product that works and fixes problems, job candidates will find a way to apply.
"If you have a great product, it doesn't matter when you show it off..."
I can refute your comment with one word: Apple.
Do you think their "leveraged media events" aren't effective? I used the believe (as you do) in the "Product Uber Alles" philosophy- no longer. Product is indeed the most important thing with the highest leverage. But it's not the only thing, and ignoring skillsets and tactics that can give you an advantage is silly.
Think of non-product bits as multipliers. If I have great PR, bizdev, marketing, pricing, etc., I can often beat a better product in the market.
There are zillions of markets where crappy/mediocre products are at or near the top of the heap.
My comment refers to startups. When you're building a company from the ground-up having a great product will sell itself. You don't get bizdev deals, advertising deals, or users talking about your product if it sucks. I work for a startup that hardly gets any press and you know what, it's cool, because we still manage to grow by 20% a month because our product is great.
There's more to planning your press and media attention than your product, though. Here are couple of benefits from a good PR strategy:
- Investors can hear about you
- Showing relevant press from a reputable source is a great way to overcome objections to your product
- It attracts excellent talent that is more risk averse than, say, someone who is willing to join early stage/pre money or when the startup is in stealth mode
- You get to set the tone of your brand in the public eye
- You can get a critical amount of press momentum with a lot of planning and a little bit of luck. The idea being that if you can get a few big -- or relevant -- publications to write about you at the same time, it will get the attention of secondary publications and down onto humble bloggers.
PR might not always be a good strategy for product awareness. But planning and guiding how the public sees you is a great strategy for any company.
It matters a great deal when and where you show things off. I don't even understand why this is a controversial statement. If you show off something really cool when people are watching you, you get great PR. If you show something off to an empty room, no matter how cool the product is, the net effect is that you convert some oxygen into carbon dioxide.
Wow, did the Ask HN on "what is the YC W11 social network startup that's hiring called" get deleted? There were at least a dozen comments on it last night, it was high up the front page, and now I can't find it.
If this is what you're talking about http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020416 it's still on the front page. It never had any comments though. The one thing I really think should be changed on HN is this job posting with no comments nonsense.
I just looked at that site. It looks clever (but it could use some prettying up).
Why didn't they mention their name in the job posting, then? I would totally work for them, were it not for the fact that I already have a job and a skillset completely orthogonal to anything they might want.
They pretty clearly are in some form of stealth mode. My guess, from looking at their site is that they have some competitors. Go through the schools enabled and there are some pretty glaring omissions. Quite a few very large state schools that are not listed while very small schools surrounding them are included (look at California, Missouri, Florida and Georgia).
This is just speculation, but it would be my guess that they are either dealing with a few smaller competitors or one big one.
If they have competitors, their competitors are 100% certain to be aware of them. And the fact that they're hiring might be interesting to a competitor, but not really actionable in any way. So why stealth?
Perhaps, but it's awfully hard to keep your existence secret from your competitors when you apparently have nonzero traction in other universities in the area.
That's the point. You build up traction in the surrounding area to break into the campuses where there is competition.
(again this is just speculation)
They're already in plenty of big and small campuses, though still missing a few big ones.
For instance in California they've got Berkeley, Davis, UCSD and Stanford, although they're missing UCLA, UCSB and all the other (smaller, I think) UCs. I haven't looked at other states. There doesn't seem to be any particular rhyme or reason to which universities they're not in, so I guess it's just that nobody at UCLA has bothered to click the "I want it here" button yet.
The question you're asking is, "why does it make sense for YC companies to be in stealth mode?" Sometimes it makes sense to be stealthy, and occasionally you need to hire folks when you're in that state. It's certainly a handicap (as spolsky says elsewhere in this thread, what kind of hotshot would want to interview without knowing ANYTHING about a company?).
I'm glad someone else feels the same way. My angle is: these ads expect people to give up all their personal details, without revealing any of their own. I'm sure they miss out as a result. (One posting sounded almost spammy - "we're the next big social network" etc etc. No-one's gonna respond to that unless they know who you are, can check a website etc).
Edit: or maybe that's the point - if you don't know who the poster is, you're not worthy of applying.
Find it interesting, too. 'We need a dedicated person with lots of experience to work full time with uncertain perspectives on a problem that unknown "we" who probably have done nothing before believe has lots of potential. We will probably have money some time in the future too'.
Maybe I never learned the secret handshake* or something, because I was a homemaker for eons, but I find all job postings pretty opaque. So I don't see what the big deal is (that some specific piece of info is being left out).
* From what I have read, I am not so sure it's "just me". For example, I've read plenty of anecdotes where someone went in to some field with grand visions only to discover that their visions don't remotely match the day-to-day details of their actual work.
Which is why it helps to have a company name so you can do some investigation beyond the job posting to see if there is something that remotely interests you about the company. At the least you could find a webpage that has some marketing speak about what it is they do or hope to do or you may be able to ping your network to find someone who can give you the inside scoop.
Again, I may have missed the secret handshake because even internal job postings at the company I currently work for (and have for over four years) baffle me. I frequently talk to people at work and ask them what they do and get a title, which typically means nothing to me, and then I ask again "But what do you do?" Even the job I have currently has changed a good deal in the time I have been in it. I find the whole thing difficult to fathom. Again, stuff I have read suggests my befuddlement is hardly unique.
If it helps you enormously to know the company name, you have some kind of advantage over me.
Because it may be that they are vulnerable to others copying concept and/or giving away hints about the direction they plan to take based on the types of positions they're hiring for.
Playing your cards close to your chest usually does not hurt.
> During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A
> new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The
> first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online
> demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could
> tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT
> flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The
> safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to
> worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java
> developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit
> frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical
> side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting
> looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.
I don't know why this is voted down. I'll go on record as someone who's currently working primarily in PHP and though the phrase "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is certainly true ... PHP has a lot of advantages for hacking.
Free, with robust sets of libraries, frameworks and support in the community. Used by a number of "big guys" (Facebook springs to mind) ... furthermore ... it's 'forgiving' in terms of rapid development.
It has brackets (a small thing I know - but I think better with brackets)
Certainly, if I'm looking around for "my next language" - I think Node.js+MongoDB might be the most exciting stuff out there. But again - there's an advantage for rapid development in PHP on this one. I can get ridiculous bandwidth and storage on a $10 hosting plan if I develop in PHP - wheras if I'd like to take on node.js I've got to buy actual server accounts (not a significant increase in price - but actually a huge leap up in required knowledge).
What about PHP indeed? Or maybe"why not PHP?"
With respect to PG's position, I think he comes from a LISP background - so for his purposes, it's the hammer & nail scenario. His knowledge of LISP makes him aware of what a powerful tool it is (wheras to me - it's just about talkin' funny)
With respect to the other 'hacker languages' it's probably that the differences between .py and .php aren't significant enough to mention both.
PHP is the best tool if it's what you know.
I really don't know why you were downvoted for what seems a legitimate question. But who cares? At the end of the day, Hacker News Karma is roughly as valuable as owning in World of Warcraft ... people who're involved care but the rest of the world will really wonder what you're excited about.
Few webapp concepts can't be reimplemented in a short amount of time. Seems to me often the key is in user base and quality of execution (tech & non-tech) which stealth doesn't really help with.
Of course startup founders can think differently and may be right, I just think the support for this in the community is amusing in light of the "radical transparency" chic we're all into now - do YC startups have more important/valid secrets than the US government?
If that was the reason then why are they telling the positions they're hiring for?
The only thing that they're not telling is their identity, which should be fairly easy for a curious competitor to google - or to social engineer by e-mail.
> If that was the reason then why are they telling the positions they're hiring for?
I've yet to see a job posting that did not have that bit of information in it. Sort of helps when you let your prospective hires know what you're looking for ;)
As a "potential employee" I think that additional information is critical to convincing me of the stability of the company. If I think they're going to be around long enough to pay the cheques etc...
I know that many companies don't post their name, but from the point of view of someone who's been looking around - I think it's critical for me to be sold on the product & culture of the company.
Irrelevant at the end of the day though ... if they don't want to publish their name, it's likely that it's not a good fit for people who care about knowing the name.
(I know that's such a circular definition that it's almost useless - but - in my head it makes a lot of sense)
I'm not sure developers want a sense of of adventure when it comes to job descriptions. Relatively speaking, most job posts are about the same. I can't imagine many great developers read a job post and are so excited by the description they have to email in to find out more details. This is why recruiters have a tough time finding great developers. How many great developers read a job description from a recruiter and are so excited they take the time to seek out the company name?
