The Bay Area is a great place to be if you're an engineer. You get many job offers in your inbox every week. Your friends have long since stopped asking you if you want to work at their startups, but you know just how quickly that would change were you to signal that you wanted a new job.

I think the crunch is at least somewhat real. We've hired a couple great people we met through Hacker News -- I couldn't have imagined them working out any better. And recently I've been trying to hire more people at my startup and, frankly, it's tough to find good people.

We've worked hard to make our interview process quick, insightful, fun, and accurate. Do we do pair programming? Sure. Do we ask about data structures? Absolutely; any programmer worth anything knows something about data structures. Do we do whiteboarding? Yep. Programmers at our company, it turns out, need to be good at communicating with humans as well as with computers. Do we give people answers immediately, and tell them why we are rejecting them? Yes, we do. We are more humane and reasonable than so many other places.

(It drives me crazy how many bad interviewers there are out there. Some of my friends recently interviewed for entry-level positions and some shall-not-be-named companies in SF and were treated terribly: given the run-around by the recruiters, brought back in the office 4 separate times for interviews, and ultimately rejected by at least two companies when they decided they didn't want to sponsor H1Bs after all. Insane. In a war for talent, you'd think practices like this would cease.)

Anyway: this is all to say, I'd love to meet your friends or anyone else out there who's looking for a programming job. My colleagues and I are not awful people. We like to brew beer and write code and help make the world a better place. We have a book club and eat good food. Oh, and we pay well and sponsor visas and are generally, you know, warm and friendly folks.