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The nicest thing Patrick McKenzie ever said about us was:

If I were looking for a day job, I wouldn't be looking for a day job any more: they're friendly, happy people who get social license to join the Dark Side, do smart stuff all day, and then go home while it is still light out.

I have a set of things I need to get done. It is my job as a company owner to help constrain and groom the subset of what's getting done every day so that the business prospers without burning through people like charcoal briquettes. And In my experience doing that, the lifestyle that team members want to lead hasn't proven to be correlated at all with what's actually getting done.

You can hire however you want. It is, I sincerely believe, your loss.

If you can code, particularly in C, are interested in software security, are good at learning lots of things very fast, and get rejected from whatever job "subwindow from Hacker News" was hiring for because you aren't startup-y enough, please consider dropping us a note. We don't think like him.

"please consider dropping us a note"

People in the startupsphere (who in many cases have been doing things since, what, 2007?) fail to understand the amount of capable accomplished people there are that have never read HN or know who Arrington or Wilson or Graham are. In their mind these people simply aren't cut from the right bolt of cloth to work at a startup. I mean they don't know what the word pivot means and god knows they might actually waste time doing sysadmin work themselves on a server. And wow it actually took them like 10 or 20 years to learn what some young hotshot learned in 1 year.

I happened to mention sometime over the last year to my "go to" guy (who happens to run a security team of 17 at some major consulting company and who flys around the world on assignments so, um, I guess he knows what he is doing which is why I rely on him) anyway I told him he might find HN interesting to read. He took a look and said he had been reading PG's essays "for years" but never knew about YC or HN.

Yup. Give those people 2 days to learn a new instruction set for an architecture that's only ever synthesized onto an FPGA, then reverse firmware compiled to that architecture back to an exploitable overflow. They'll do it. And they won't even use Mongodb to do it.

You're simply measuring passion in a different way. The (very, very small number of) people who can do this are very passionate about the work, as we both know, and this shines through in the work they do in and out of the day job.

But let's say you saw someone that was coming from a security consultancy that started doing interesting, challenging work and then turned into a shop doing nothing but the same web pentests day in and day out. Don't you think you'd seriously question whether they're capable of doing the challenging work, or still hungry for that kind of work? I know I'd think twice about it. I think that's why people are so against the people left at Yahoo; it's a company that's been on a downward trajectory for a long while, and is actively doing Bad Things (TM). It's not unreasonable to expect that someone that's ok with that (or blind to it) isn't going to be a fantastic hire, but that doesn't mean there aren't certainly exceptions.

Some people have had their choices severely constrained by circumstances. A categorical 'I won't hire from company 'x'' without any willingness to look at circumstances is silly.

Another thing the guy overlooks: these people could simply be extremely loyal and may hope that given Y!'s scale that there is a chance that the right management team could make things work. Other companies have been in bad shape and have survived eventually.

Loyalty is an excellent quality and penalizing it is stupid. You really shouldn't hire based on where people used to work, you should hire based on your needs, team fit and skills.

I have no idea where you got the idea that I want people to be burned like charcoal. I'm absolutely not in favor of that. Work hours are the least important factor in why I wouldn't hire the theoretical employee you described. It's the lack of ambition- the lack of enthusiasm towards the field.

In a startup you can't have unambitious employees- regardless of how talented they are. You have to have people who challenge the way things are done or the company will grow stagnant and won't seize opportunities to pivot.

I think people should care. If you spend half of your waking life at work, you should be proud of what you do and the people you work with. Pride in your work is one of the single largest contributors to happiness (more so than family, but that is largely tangential to the point).

Quite frankly I don't think that most of the people left at Yahoo care. If they cared, or had ambition, or had enthusiasm towards the web, they would leave.

If they cared, or had ambition, or had enthusiasm towards the web, they would leave.

A similar heuristic applied to me would have returned NOHIRE approximately 80% of the days during my working career and, critically, 100% of the days I was actually available for hire (+). There exist at least a few companies looking for caring, ambitious, enthusiastic employees at which somebody similar to me would be a pretty good fit. Isn't that a fairly silly heuristic next to attempting to measure e.g. ambition or enthusiasm?

On the other hand, if your company is just drowning under a deluge of qualified programmers willing to work for peanuts at the moment, and you get 5 star-spangled resumes thrown over the transom every day, feel free to be picky.

+ Joel Spolsky had a great article back in the day about how the best prospective are on the public employment markets essentially never. This plus the general market economics argument that you're most likely to find value by exploiting a difference between the true value of something and what other people value it as suggest to me that if there were a rock that Silicon Valley culturally scorned I would be checking under it very carefully looking for juicy wor... OK, the metaphor breaks a little bit, but you get the idea.

The article Patrick is referring to:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

As a developer, it's fantastic to read your perspective on this: I am glad there are entrepreneurs out there who don't buy into the cargo-cult of startup geek burnout.

If anything, I'd be wary of someone who is too into their craft - they might consider actual results a lower priority. Nobody likes a "star programmer".

This is simplistic binary thinking - life is not black and white. Judging people by ticking boxes on a checklist shows a lack of understanding of people and the complexity of motivations.

Maybe the employee feels the project they are working on is worthwhile, maybe they thinks that if they can get their project to succeed, it will negate the need for Yahoo to pursue patent litigation, or maybe, the employee has loyalty and passion for Yahoo and will stick with it through thick and thin to try and turn it around. They sound like qualities any startup would benefit from in an employee.

Yet, you judge all employees on a single issue made by someone else at the company.

I don't get the start up hype. Start ups are great. But not all start ups are great. Similarly not all big companies are bad.

There are a certain things only a big companies can do, Big companies put man on moon, put satellites into orbits, invented the first mobile phone, build mainframes, manufacture drugs that save billions of lives on planet etc.

Minus some very bad places, if you can't do great work where your are now. You won't do it any where else.

There are a lot of brilliant people who work in big corporations on things that are important. You may not see them or their work as upfront as Google's homepage. But every time you take your medication, every time you swipe your credit card. Some one some where is building stuff that makes such a thing possible.

Just curious, what specifically is the indicator that a person doesn't care for the company? I didn't get that impression from reading the GP.

Is it not paying attention to the news cycle? Or knowing that the company is on a bad trajectory but still working there? Surely it's not the focus on work-life balance.

I could see myself working at Yahoo. I bet they still have interesting problems to work on. Yahoo Research does awesome stuff with computational advertising. Hypothetically speaking, would this opinion disqualify me from your hiring consideration?

It's not this particular issue. I don't care all that much about patents. It's mostly that Yahoo has been a zombie corporation for a long while and has key symptoms of not being able to foster creativity or innovation.

There may be interesting things going on inside Yahoo, but I'm not aware of them. Every single thing that I found interesting about Yahoo has withered or completely died in the last 5+ years.

Exactly. It's amazing how many people are saying "well, there are lots of programmers who don't pay attention to the latest technology, you can't just refuse to hire them".

But you can and you should.

Anyone at Yahoo/MS today is (on average) already under suspicion of being 2nd tier and a notch below a Facebooker/Googler. And those Yahoo engineers who stick through this one will tend to be the 3rd tier. They aren't going to see this Yammer thread and they sure aren't going to get hired by a good startup.

So why even bring them up in this thread? We're talking about the good folks left at Yahoo, the guys who are like Jeremy Zawodny and Prabhakar Raghavan, who want to leave before Jerry Yang's company completes its transformation into SCO.

Not the time punchers who don't know what the clock says.

Yahoo is an enormous company with lots and lots of different products some of which are operating at massive scale and would require a very knowledgeable team to work on them.

They pioneered a lot of those 'latest technologies' there and you'd be lucky to be able to hire them. Ditto for microsoft. If you think these are 'backwards' companies then you have no idea of what is going on there.

You are making blanket statements about untold thousands of people without any knowledge about the individuals at all. You can not make such statements. You can only make such statements about individuals, never about groups.

Of course you can make statements about groups. In a different context, most of the people here agreed with this:

  http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

  I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. 
  Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they still don't 
  realize how much they suck. They still think they can 
  write software in house. Maybe they can, by the standards 
  of the desktop world. But that world ended a few years 
  ago.

That was 2007. A generalization about a group of people's ability to write software, which arose from observation of their company's products and behavior. If that's not legitimate, I suppose all must have prizes.

No, you can't.

Within every large enough group there will be individuals that you'd be more than happy to hire.

What most people here agree with does not change the facts.

Microsoft as a company may suck (and even that depends on your viewpoint, I would agree with that statement but plenty of people do not and they may have just as much reason to believe their opinions as I do) but that does not automatically translate into 'everybody that works at microsoft sucks'.

Oh, and they're still one of the largest software companies and one of the largest companies in general. There's bound to be interesting work and interesting people within its walls.

Im sorry but this is an incredibly sad and dehumanizing way of perceiving people and their skills. Can you make us a full list of all SV companies so we all can know where we stand on your tiered list and accordingly, what startups will and won't hire us?

  SELECT * FROM companies WHERE field='tech' ORDER BY growth_rate, market_cap;

That will roughly correspond to a rank ordering of companies that are both growing and big. Apple and Facebook will be near the top of that list. Yahoo and Microsoft much lower.

You could also do it Turing style, analyzing LinkedIn data to see which company is raiding which for talent. Very few Googlers are going to MS. And very few Facebook people are going to Google. Like PageRank, these migration signals give you a rank ordering of desirability.

You can rank colleges the same way, which is why people from Stanford and MIT are usually in the headlines for technological breakthroughs and why people from Directional State are not.

To be fair to MS, there's lots of interesting stuff going on there. I have a friend who's working on the .NET CLR, and it would be foolish to think that he's not working on extremely awesome stuff.

At the same time, I don't know of anything like that at all going on at Yahoo. And he doesn't go home at 5pm.

You misinterpreted and/or mischaracterized what was said. Paying attention to new software development practices has nothing to do with reading tech news. Additionally, your perspective seems grossly shallow.