"Network" hiring, in a nutshell.
I feel comforted that I compete with companies that think this is the way to hire, and also feel like the comprehensive rebuttal to this PDF would be doing my competitors a favor.
It might help a few young engineers who have only ever seen toxic hiring practices and assume that's how it ought to go.
Judging the hiring process at the company of a person based on a essay is naïve. There's a lot more to it that what fits on paper and what is in that essay has evolved in the past few years. I've met a lot of the people who Steve has hired at his previous company and all have been solid people I'd work with. Both Tom-Preston Warner and Chris Wanstrath worked at Powerset. Cliff Moon is brilliant as are the people who work with him at Boundary.
On a side note, after reading your hiring page, I'm not looking for work, but I am curious about what resources you'd recommend to people interested in learning about pen-testing web apps and building fuzzers. Never done any of that type of stuff before, and I know nothing about it and I'm curious.
95% of the time, it's obvious to the person being downvoted, why they were downvoted. However when it is nebulous, then there is no lesson that the downvotee can learn from the situation.
If it makes for boring reading, there should be a feature that allows you to make a comment that is only visible to the downvoter or make it possible to ask the downvoter why they downvoted you in a way that allows them to respond anonymously.
His profile page https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek has a link to his amazon reading list which maps to http://www.amazon.com/lm/R2EN4JTQOCHNBA/ref=cm_lm_pthnk_view...
Thanks for the reading list.