Hacker News Reader

Comment by JustSomeNobody | Hacker News Reader

> "Top 3% only!" or "Only top 1% Ninja Rockstars need apply!"

Do people apply to these places? I don't. Ever. Not that I feel bad about myself, but I don't ever ever want to work for a manager who approves this type of job ad.

View on HN

I worked at one. I didn't apply - I was recruited by the owner (he knew me from a past job), so I didn't go through the interview process, he just asked me if I'd come work for him, quoted a number, and I said, "yeah, sure". It was a struggling startup, but it was making (some) money, and had (some) potential. But man, when I started interviewing people - he'd tell me, "we only take the best of the best", it was a struggle for me not to point out that the best of the best - or even the worst of the best - or even the best of the worst - had much, much better options than a struggling, no-name startup with no outside capital that was renting office space from an office hotel (and cramming people five to a room). I would go through rounds and rounds of interviewing people, determining that they were perfectly acceptable and would fit in well in the environment we had and could get the job done and help us move forward, and he'd reject them because they were "average". I was like, "so are you, you self-important idiot!"

> office hotel

Is that what we're calling co-working spaces these days? I can get on board with that.

Is that what we're calling co-working spaces these days?

It's at least what we where calling them in most of Europe long before the term "co-working space" was invented.

Wouldn't an ad like that attract the biggest egos, not necessarily the best coders, nor people you would ever want to be on a team with?

It would attract young coders who you can convince to work long hours for less pay.

The other day I ran across "programming athlete".

You mean someone who does stuff like TopCoder competitively?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com