Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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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".

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