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Comment by hokua | Hacker News Reader

I applied to Khan and they told me they have no slots to fill anymore (but thanks for trying...and feel free to contribute in your spare time). I can program in jQuery and know Django -- I sent them several demos directly related to generating math exercises. Either they are getting many applications from talented devs (and I didnt make the cut) or they arnt really hiring. I just hope they arnt using the prospect of a job as part of some viral marketing scheme.

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I can assure you we don't consider turning down applicants as marketing.

Please feel free to apply again in a few months - we try to err on the side of caution when hiring, and any interviewing process likely has a large margin of error.

Why so cautious? Are you not hiring programmers at-will? If Im not performing on par with a team, Id leave no hard feelings. The reason I applied is im highly interested in building tools for educators, and currently run a business that sells such tools.

Training is expensive and time consuming for the team as a whole. "Trying someone out" is usually not efficient.

You can try someone out before you invest in them. Its called internships/probationary period. Lots of companies do it.

To "try them out" you have to teach them enough about your process and code base to be useful. That still can take significant amounts of time. The primary investment isn't money, it's time.

Seriously, why do you advertise positions if you're not going to hire until "in a few months"? The impression that you're making on applicants is that you're just fishing for resumes. Please consider that applicants put time and effort into preparing a cover letter and their resume. If that's how you treat applicants, I wonder how you treat employees?

Sadly, you're not the only one in the industry who behaves like this. I experienced exactly the same thing with Mozilla this year. I welcome that hokua is making this public because that way of treating applicants should really be outlawed.

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