I didn't think it was satire, but I'm at the point of my career where I wouldn't want to work for a company like this.

If I'm expected to make a 3-days homework exercise plus a half day live coding session, and then I'm expected to jump at their every whim too (respond email when it's convenient for them, honesty seen as a weakness, expected to be proactive but not too much or you become argumentative), I'd rather look somewhere else.

This reads more like "how to screen for people who will blindly follow your orders". And sure, if you have a small startup maybe you do want people like that. But as a developer I don't think this guide has my best interests in mind.

There are just so many more Big Tech workers than us scrappy startup people reading and writing here than in the early HN days, and frankly, we have much more to do that keeps us too busy to post on HN as much as they probably have. Yeah, I said it.

Thank you.

Any suggestions for alternatives?

HN isn't nearly as bad as some "open" source projects, whose code and infrastructure has been completely taken over by seriously under-performing but power-hungry Microsoft, Google and Facebook employees (Amazon and Apple are less prominent here).

You can still say many things here that can't be said practically anywhere else on the Internet.

Sadly, like "open" source developers, startups are quite afraid of MAGAF as well, so they no longer talk as freely as they did 5 years ago.

Maybe the startup ecosystem has just burned a lot of people? Startups seem great for the owners. But for the employees, they can easily be a terrible deal.

I've been doing startups since 2001, with brief stints at larger places due to acquisitions, and then a sojourn at a FAANG. Something that irritated me well before Hacker News existed, and manifested as Hacker News came into being, was the performative nature of startups. By that I mean all the boxes that startup founders would tick in order to be seen as a 'real' startup. This would create an excessive focus on superficial aspects of a company's culture: things like open plan offices, underpaying employees to keep them 'hungry', employees work 24/7 churning out code... In my own experience I never saw these things actually improving a startup's output. And along side that were many experiences of actual employee exploitation: promising employees the moon on equity by obfuscating their actual stake, shaming employees who did not conform to the founder's superficial sense of a productive programmer, etc.

I believe there is a lot more cynicism around now, because we're several decades into the whole startup thing, and such cynicism is often a good thing. Employees are way more savvy about looking into a startup's finances, business practices ( so many startups were built around the idea that regulations didn't actually exist...), and work culture before listening to the company's hype.

Not to mention that in my large company stints I encountered many people whose work ethic I found admirable. Really the difference between a startup and a large company in my experience, and the reason I prefer startups, is quite simply that startups are not large enough to experience the inevitable communication/hierarchy issues that come up when any group of homo sapiens becomes sufficiently large. I tend to get lost in my work and will work most of my waking hours, and that often isn't even possible at a large company because of the cross team orchestrations, while a typical startup has a big pile of things you can simply dive into individually and solve. You certainly can do that at a large company if you look for things to do, but I like my work to have measurable impact as well.