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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by how unappealing and depressingly earnest it all sounds.

Yes, this reads an awful lot like an optimistic (and naive) kindergartner's first day at school. Interesting look inside nonetheless.. I enjoyed it. But, indeed, I too felt kinda odd after reading all of it.

Thanks for enjoying, do you have a suggestion on how to improve it? Not sell hiring at the end perhaps?

Unless your going to a company doing something really unique or gimmicky, I think sounding very normal is appealing. Far better than getting thrust in with little to no process set up around you.

I thought it sounded pretty low key and nice. I'm not sure I like the team lunch, and team Yoga as much...my inner introvert needs some time "not with the team"...but I can see an appeal (now team Kung Fu might work better for me).

For some reason I like it a heck of a lot better than dropbox's http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/inside-the-psychobox-a-tour...

Not everyone goes for yoga. It's not mandatory for all. There are times when only a handful of the team goes. Same for team lunches together.

Thanks for the compliment!

Sure thing! I can tell you've spent a lot of time thinking about the new hire experience...something lots of places don't really spend a lot of time on.

Likewise - this reminded me a lot of bubble 1.0. Time will tell, I suppose, but it does all feel very "me too"...

Sorry to hear that. What would appeal to you? This is just a single post. Maybe you'd like to come by :)

It's a mix of things. For one, I'm kind of allergic to marketing-speak, and the relentlessly positive and enthusiastic tone typical of it grates after a while.

But the other is that I'm not currently the kind of engineer who would want to work at Quora. Right now, I'm more of a tools / low-level guy than a web guy, and I'm pretty close to the machine (at this very moment, I'm writing an x86-64 disassembler). Doing development (rather than testing or debugging) on an EC2 instance is not something I would like to do; nor would I like being more or less forced (via peer pressure if nothing else) to use a Mac (I run Windows almost exclusively on my 2nd gen Mac Air) and develop with vi, Emacs or TextMate. I far prefer a powerful desktop with multiple monitors to any laptop + external monitor, and I like and appreciate what an IDE with integrated debugger does for productivity (though that's much more the case in non-dynamic languages).

There's no forcing done here actually. I worked on a Windows stack for many years (including loving the Visual Studio IDE). Eclipse or other IDEs would not be counter-cultural at all, it's just there isn't a need for that given the languages we work in. I also have 2 Windows machines at home, 1 Ubuntu VM, 2 Ubuntu machines (although one died), access to CentOS, and recently got an MacBook Air for home too. I thought I would be best at my work with a MBP and chose that among my options between a Mac/PC.

It's true that we don't have that many requirements at that low-level right now, but we certainly do have some work done lower than the web-stack -- we even got an ex-Ksplice engineer joining us to help with that.

But maybe I could also have included some of the deficiencies too, to make it a little more balanced--I agree with you it does seem too rosy with what I had mentioned, but overall the experience has been really positive. I've tried to keep things as real as possible, no-holds barred, instead of being filled with corporate imagery. So you can see the messy desks, cardboard boxes, boring food, lack of 6-core Xeons with 12GB RAMs :)

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