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Comment by austinz | Hacker News Reader

That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware.

> Most startups take the building of their culture very seriously, especially when the culture is still new and quite fragile.

If your culture is so fucking fragile that a guy wearing a suit (as opposed to a T-shirt and jeans) poses an existential threat to it, you need to re-evaluate whether you are actually building a company 'culture', or just some random agglomeration of the personality traits of the company's earliest employees.

> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.

If I were a founder and you were a candidate who tried to bribe me like this, I'd politely show you the door. Why does the gift need to come before the interview? If it's a token of appreciation, why not after the acceptance or rejection? Are you hiring candidates based on their technical credentials, or their hipster credentials?

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> Sometimes we’ll have a thirty minute interview extend the rest of the day and into the evening. We don’t mandate it, and we don’t ding you if you have other plans. But when it works out organically, it’s a nice thing for everyone and it moves the process along much faster.

Yeah we're not going to penalize you if you don't have your schedule completely open. Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It's cool! But it's also sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good fit here.

> My friend Shawn just brought organic heirloom carrots and a 6-pack of Sightglass coffee to an interview as a gift. That’s awesome.

If you want to improve your chances of getting hired just bring some awesome gifts along. Also it helps a lot if you're already a friend of someone here, which totally isn't insularity it's just having a strong network and connections.

Like if you have kids or commitments or something. It's cool! But it's also sort of a strong signal that you're just not going to be a good fit here.

You have entered exceedingly dangerous territory, and I don't think you realize it. Morally and legally. What you're essentially saying is, "We want people like us."

Honestly, I'm running into a bit of Poe's Law. I can't tell if what you wrote is serious or satire.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am it was satire. So, good work.

To think, all this time, I've been bringing non-organic carrots to interviews. Oh the shame.

I wouldn't want to work for a start-up that wasn't happy with a box of Micro Chips and a tin of special brew.

"This is a Golden Sunrise carrot, in burnt orange with off-green foliage. Heritage. What do you think?"

"Very nice, Bateman," Bryce replies. "When did a dork like you get so tasteful?"

It's all going well, and then Van Patten places his carrot on the table. It's fucking magnificent.

"This," he says, "Is a Pioneer Ridge carrot, in deep ochre with leaves in a color called 'hazy forest.' The seed stock is heritage, and the planting was organic."

"Amazing," says Bryce. "This is the best carrot I've seen all day."

I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's carrot to mine.

I was very surprised that a guy interviewing for what's basically a sales position - representing 42Floors to its clients, and asking them for money - was being dinged because he turned up to his interview dressed professionally!

I'd like to think that the interviewee responded along those lines when the issue of his clothing was pointed out. Were I in his position, I'd be concerned I was being interviewed by a group of amateurs.

Why were you surprised? Did you look at the 42floors team bios page? One of them actually reads, "Also, accused of having a resting bitchface (RBF). She's working on it." Really.

What's amazing is not that 42floors dinged a candidate with "strong experience leasing SF office space" for wearing a nice suit to an interview (real estate professionals tend to dress well for obvious reasons). It's that such a candidate actually gave 42floors the time of day.

The hiring practices of some US companies is really surprising.

I have no idea how they avoid legal trouble.

A sufficiently aggressive lawyer just hasn't gone after them, yet.

Which, for all the nonsense this post points out, might end up being a net negative for our industry. I'd like these jokers to at least worry a little bit about it in order to stop us from entering that world.

Well, it doesn't have as much to do with aggression as it does with payouts. The average startup doesn't have enough capital (or any revenue to speak of) to make it worth a lawyer's time.

Once a company gets bigger, the stakes change and they have to be much more careful in their hiring practices lest they tempt the flock of lawyers circling overhead.

Is there really a statute of limitations on this sort of thing? I wonder if a lawyer can just wait 2-3 years for them to grow / get enough VC money to be a viable target.

It's pretty sad how people become exactly that which they hate.

I really, really, really hate rich people.

> That linked 42Floors blog post is terribly self-unaware.

It seems it has been taken down (http://blog.42floors.com/interviewing-at-a-startup/), or is someone getting content?

You can read it at the Way Back Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140618142018/http://blog.42flo...

OMG, talk about unintentionally hilarious. No wonder they took it down.

This guy is very much not a good ad for either YC or "Tuck" (which I assume is a famous business skool in the US).

If an interviewee brought me a gift, I'd think they were either deeply incompetent, or a lick arse, or both.

As a worker, if a company expected me to bring them a gift just to interview, I would figure that they either come from some strange foreign culture, or are complete arrogant assholes.

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