Ask Y Combinator: How often can YC companies post jobs to the front page of HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask Y Combinator: How often can YC companies post jobs to the front page of HN?

61 pointswebmaven37 comments

For questions like this, e-mailing the mods is more reliable. Their e-mail address is in the footer

I think it's more a complain than a question. At some point, I got tired as well of all the "Muse" hiring post every week or so.

Not a complaint at all, I was just curious if there was any sort of "rate limiting", even if informal.

More reliable maybe, but not more transparent. Others might be curious about this too.

Don't know why you're down-voted. This is literally in the guidelines

"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com. "

If this was about YC you would be right. But I am asking about HN's interface (so to speak) with YC.

Our recent experience has been approximately once every two weeks.

Job posts are submitted and go into a queue. Only posts from companies that have not recently had a job post shown are picked from the queue.

They appear near the top, and then work their way down over the course of 3 hours. Only one job post is shown on the front page at a time.

The job postings would be more interesting if discussion was allowed on them.

I'm sure they're afraid that people will bash certain companies in them. But I'd like that too. They should let the company moderate the discussion in those posts. I don't care if they're highly censored, I think there would be a lot of value to being able to ask the company questions about the roles.

I actually think companies would get positive and negative feedback on their job postings which would mean that future postings would be better. The company will always win. No need to be afraid of bashing IMHO.

And it would help the applicants, if the bashing is justified.

I would feel morally obliged to warn people against working in the YC company I spent a few months with.

Don't you feel morally obliged to mention it here by name, then?

I seriously doubt that they are afraid of negativity.

It's just that public comments on these posts would serve no tangible purpose for the companies.

>They should let the company moderate the discussion in those posts. I don't care if they're highly censored, I think there would be a lot of value to being able to ask the company questions about the roles.

Ew no. The illusion that a company is good is way more harmful than just disallowing comments in the first place.

Maybe just a toggle to have them on or off then?

It's struck me as somewhat suspicious that hiring posts disallow comments so conspicuously.

It's in the faq: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

It only takes one Genius thread to ruin everything.

Letting the companies moderate the threads would be just an incredible drama factory.

Not necessarily from anything the companies were doing...

At one point, I believe it was said that one reason discussion isn't allowed is so that stealth companies hiring aren't outed in the comments.

I think adding a "We are stealth, dont allow comments" option would be good then

They'd be more interesting if they weren't so cookie-cutter. "Help us disrupt the X industry". "Passionate about [insert particular software thingy], so are we".

The job postings are basically ads due to the fact that YCombinator runs the site for free. Considering how often someone posts a comment that is mean spirited and possibly even wrong which gets to the top I don't think that allowing for discussion would help at all.

Unlike everything else on the front page of HN, job posting are not there to be "interesting". Before the current system, when people could comment on them, "interesting" quickly became a problem.

I don't get why ycombinator doesn't advertise on a sidebar to the right similar to stackoverflow or reddit ads.

There would be a lot more 'job ad' inventory and it wouldn't interfere directly with the user experience.

In fact they can also use it to advertise other initiatives like open applications/events/research grants/...

It would be less effective though. More inventory is useless if nobody is looking at it and, generally, people don't look at side bars often.

It would decrease the impact on UX, as you suggested, but I don't think the current experience is not significantly injured.

There is already an inventory: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

See the link on the menu bar at the top.

Also, constants ads would be a bad distraction. I'd definitely try to block it or leave the site.

I think stackoverflow, reddit, etc. clearly know this is less effective, but they are probably simply following the law regarding "Native advertising" [1] which applies to "content that bears a similarity to the news, feature articles, product reviews, entertainment, and other material that surrounds it online"

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/nat...

They already curate them in a link visible at the top of the site, which fits in vastly better with the overall ux here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

Last I knew it was about once a week or so, but there's also an absolute limit on the number of active posts across all companies to prevent Hacker News from becoming Job News.

Additionally, does HN keep track of how effective these postings are? I mean, as in, how many quality hits do YC startups get from being on the front page of HN?

It is just one of many many places we utilize at Zapier. As a remote company, we are able to draw candidates from all over the world, so the top of the funnel is pretty wide. HN alone wouldn't provide the diversity we look for when we open a new role.

It'd be really interesting to dig into geodata about the HN community; I'd imagine as a job listing tool, it is less useful for YC companies that aren't based in California. That's assuming a much higher concentration of readers in tech hubs.

I think once a week, but I don't remember exactly and don't have the code in front of me at the moment.

I posted recently about drchrono posting way too many Django dev ads.

The post was voted up rapidly and then killed assumedly by a mod.

It seems like some yc companies see it as a strategic advantage that they can spam hn to get cheap devs.

That's one of the benefits of being accepted as a YC company. They have the distribution advantage with Hacker News :)

How about infomercials? Is there a limit on those?

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