Ask HN: Does it feel like Jerry is abusing posting privileges? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does it feel like Jerry is abusing posting privileges?

32 pointsgmjosack25 comments

I see Jerry is Hiring posts pop up what feels like multiple times a week and rarely see these posts from other YC companies. I wonder if others notice this and feel they're posting too often or if I'm just over sensitive to it...

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I visit this website every day and I have no idea who Jerry is.

The Hacker News curation looks fine to me.

Its a company funded by the sites owner company, YC

I kind of feel this way about BuildZoom. It's sort of spammy at this point, imo.

BuildZoom and OneSignal are my top nemeses here. Never mind that they both put a word in front of another, more famous property. Perhaps that's why they so desperately need the exposure.

I can’t say I’ve noticed that, and it seems like they’re only posting once a week at https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs (I’m assuming each post only shows on the front page for a fraction of a day?)

Oh thanks for pointing out that page, I'd honestly never noticed it. I think because it's behind a `more` tab in HN Enhancement Suite. I'm honestly surprised to see they're there only once a week because I feel like I notice it incredibly often and somehow none of the other posts on that page really stand out. Either way I appreciate you sharing that as it confirms maybe something just stands out more to me about these posts than others.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.

[A few years ago, the algorithm to determine the position was public. It was something like starting at the 4th position and dropping 4 places each hour, but I may be misremembering. Perhaps now they changed the details, but my guess is that it would be something similar and easy to guess if you track them for one or two days.]

Looks like other users have already explained that these are job ads and all that (thanks!) - but I'm curious what you guys think we should do. I don't want startups' job ads to be landing like spam in readers' minds. The only thing I can think of is to slow down the frequency—but it's currently limited to 1 per week, which already seemed pretty infrequent to me. Thoughts?

Btw if you want to take a look at the instructions we give to the startups about these ads, they're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobguide.html.

I’m super into shipping containers, so when I see job ads for that shipping logistics YC business, it makes me smile.

I’m not really invested in what Jerry or BuildZoom do for their business, so I gloss over them when I see them.

I don’t think “Jerry is hiring” is meaningful when the company name is Jerry. Like, I can work out that BuildZoom must be some kind of property mumble something, and that Flexport is doing “port” work with shipping logistics, but I honestly can’t imagine what Jerry does.

I think, then, that my objection is that “Jerry is hiring” is a bad headline, if that’s the actual headline they used. They’re not informative, they don’t explain to me what’s unique, they just say “hiring”. Yay, I guess, but not really the right spirit. Frequency isn’t the problem, useless headlines is.

Here’s an example from two minutes that talks about this:

“Meticulous (YC S21) Is Hiring #2 Founding Engineer in London”

None of this is “curious”. I mean, sure, it’s useful to know, and it makes their job add stand out from the pack of job ads. But HN isn’t a pack of job ads.

What does Meticulous do? Why do they matter? YC must have invested in them because of something, but that’s absent from this headline.

I looked them up and from their search blurb, here’s a made up headline:

“Meticulous is hiring: We analyze browsing sessions to find website bugs”

Is this a fully accurate summary of Meticulous? No. Is it enough to tell me whether I want to consider working there? Yes.

What does Jerry do?

EDIT:

Here’s example downthread of a zero-curiosity headline:

“Why Hive Is Such A Uniquely Dope Place To Work”

It’s clickbait, sure, but my point is that it doesn’t tell me why Hive deserves customers, and without that, I don’t know how to evaluate whether I’m a good fit for them. Especially compared to what I remember from a Flexport headline, reconstructed from memory:

“Flexport is hiring: Help us solve the shipping logistics crisis”

That tells me what they do, and why they deserved YC funding. That lets me consider whether I would be a good fit for their business. It’s absent from most hiring ads and so I openly ignore most hiring ads.

I think this might be part of why it sticks out in my mind so much. The name with no information just feels like an ad and nothing about it makes me curious it's just "there's that headline again..."

I think it's clear to me at this point that it's not just Jerry, other people seem to notice other ones more. Maybe it just depends on what times you're more likely to visit the site or which headlines you pattern match on more.

I don't have a great suggestion unfortunately but I appreciate your thoughtfulness on the matter. I didn't intend this post to be inflammatory, it honestly feels like I notice Jerry in particular all the time but it seems clear my memory is faulty in this regard. I plan to take a more analytical approach to how frequently I notice these and if I have any thoughts I'll send an e-mail.

All the YC companies get to post a Hiring here and it fixes at like spots 8-15 or so, an they all repeat as others have mentioned Smarking and BuildZoom are also frequent, there's a few others all on the Jobs page

https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

You notice this on the front page, or when you're browsing /newest? I can't remember seeing these, but it's possible HN shows different users different YC hiring posts based on location or other criteria.

I do see those Jerry posts but also a few others like the one that searches for parking spots or whatever it was. I figure posting those ads is part of YC's function, or at any rate, that they know about it and are ok with it.

One tip to Jerry though: I'm usually very resistant to replying through consolidators like lever.co or angel.co. I'd rather deal with the company directly. I don't know how common that is.

Lever is applicant tracking SaaS rather than a consolidator. If you are applying to a company through Lever, it is only going to their Lever instance.

It still makes me uncomfortable. I don't like the idea of having so many programmers' personal info in one place.

I was going to complain about Hive's post today, which seemed out of place when originally posted with it's original title as "Why Hive Is Such A Uniquely Dope Place To Work" but it did get renamed to "Hive.co (YC S14) is hiring".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29432218

Email the mods with this sort of question.

Never even heard of these guys or seen their posts. I'm on here a bit.

Huh, haven't noticed that one but I was thinking the same thing about another company. Wonder if HN started targeting job postings resulting in repeat shows?

Perhaps if it bothers too much someone could construct a ublock filter to remove the "X is hiring" threads.

But generally I find it pretty easy to ignore.

they could be optimizing for how YC posts "new roles", essentially if they deleted their job posts and created a brand new one, YC would register it as a "new" post, so to answer your Q, they totally could be monopolizing it.

I'm not familiar with the mechanism in which these posts occur. I'd expect if it were automated I'd notice them more often but I feel like I only have memories of Jerry posts and it feels like it's very often. May be confirmation bias but there's not exactly a way to search for these kinds of posts.

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