Ask HN: Would the job postings be better with comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would the job postings be better with comments?

59 pointsecaron42 comments

Since I'm the kind of person that likes Stripe's take on email transparency[1], I might just be over-opinionated on the matter when I think that the YC job posts would be better if conversation was able to occur within them.

Some examples:

* Clever - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082693 - what does code refactoring have to do with that position?

* LivBlends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047329 - any YouTube videos of your product in action?

* Mailgun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7681316 - is there any correlation between the positions and the locations?

Sometimes the conversation is going to be asking for more details. Sometimes making suggestions. Sometimes OT. But I can't think of many situations where inspired conversations would detract from the quality of the posting...

[1] https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency

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> Clever - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082693 - what does code refactoring have to do with that position?

I've been on teams pushed to create feature after feature. After some time, we literally begged to refactor code. We begged to do what was best for the company. Guess what? They didn't listen and new features became painful to implement. Of course some of us refactored code on the down low, but this is dangerous (they aren't fully QA'd or reviewed) and kind of insulting to have to sneak around doing the right thing.

For me hearing a company refactors its code is refreshing.

Imho code that is not touched is not living and cant evolve.

If you consider evolving a part of maintaining, it's really hard to understand why touching code would ever be a bad thing.

In my personal experience team should optimize for confidence - eg explanation, refactoring for confidence, automated tests - without confidence bold and fast moves are not possible.

What I don't get is the mindset that refactoring is optional.

If I'd be the customer and people came to me to tell me "Of course we can do feature X but we also LIKE to do Y" what I hear is "We can do what you want for amount EUR x but we'd like to sell you something that costs EUR x+k".

So I'm not talking about the customer believing it's optional, I'm talking about the development teams themselves believing it's optional.

I't would sound a whole lot different to state "Sure we can do X. It's EUR x. This is what is necessary..." (the list of work packages would include refactoring, maybe worded in a way that is better understandable by my customers).

I'm going to spare you the the usual comparison to car makers or whatnot. I think the mistake is with ourselves to simply state that it is necessary and not optional to maintain quality. After all if you can take the risk of implementing features without maintaining a quality product isn't -- and thus loosing customers as implementing features only when maintaining quality -- and thus loosing customers to competitors who are willing to reduce quality for the other risk, and a possibly lower price for a single project or two?

So i've been running a private job board with 3k members for few years now. People can comment on job posts.

There are 4 kinds of comments:

* Mention of someone, to make him/her aware that job may interest him/her

* Correct the person who posted on the job on a typo

* Mocking the job. Often a big circle jerk we have to moderate

* Someone saying that the company is awesome they have worked there or know the founders, ...

I find it quite interesting however, it's never really bringing anything valuable to the job post. The comments are never about asking what are the use of X language, how are the teams, ....

> Mocking the job. Often a big circle jerk we have to moderate

That's pretty much what I would expect to see. Ever clicked the link to discuss an ad on reddit? It's rare that someone commented because they had something nice to say.

What if job postings were a weekly thread here, where people could comment on all of them/talk about other positions, etc? There might be more useful discussion to be had in a general jobs thread.

There are general jobs threads posted monthly (two of them — "Who is hiring?" and "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?"). These comment-less job posts are a special privilege of YC companies that offers greater visibility.

The thing with the monthly threads is that there is rarely a followup on the questions.

Oh you're right, I forgot about those threads.

That is interesting. Since it's private, do you think that there is something about the community that leads to that? Aside from being discovered by a current employer/coworker or fearing that a question is bad, I don't really see any cost to asking questions. Maybe people feel protective of their process (i.e. they consider those questions private or proprietary).

Curating the Q's could help here

> * Mocking the job. Often a big circle jerk we have to moderate

If the position is actually bad, then it's fair game for others to call it out. About a year ago, there was a Who's Hiring thread on HN, and a very large bank in NYC was offering internships... for $7.50/hour (minimum wage). They were called out on it (and rightly so, because that's just exploitative). My point is, we need people to call out the "bad" jobs so that people don't sell themselves short or do something they will regret.

> Mention of someone, to make him/her aware that job may interest him/her

> Someone saying that the company is awesome they have worked there or know the founders, ...

> it's never really bringing anything valuable to the job post.

But both of those things that you listed are valuable! The mocking is a bummer though.

In an ideal world yes but:

> Mention of someone, to make him/her aware that job may interest him/her

it rarely end up in having this person mentioned applying for the job. I can't recall the last time it happened.

> Someone saying that the company is awesome they have worked there or know the founders, ...

To be honest, I don't really care what you think of the company or the founders. I want to know why.

We tend to stop the mocking, it happen a lot less nowadays.

Seems to have slowed recently but Clever was borderline SPAM there for awhile. On more than one occasion I wished I could flag their post. (I understand that would probably be a slight misuse of the flag button.) Had there been a comments section I likely would have said something to get myself banned for a bit. So maybe it was a good thing I couldn't comment.

I think that's a side-effect from allowing control of our industry messaging board to rest in the hands of YC instead of the community. I've actually hoped that the balance would swing back to /r/programming where moderation is done by the community. Also the revenue to keep the site running would be generated by neutral-ish advertising instead of YC gaining value by being able to push their own startups.

I suppose that this is a strange thing to say, as I work at a YC company which takes advantage of those connections... In fact we maybe draw on it too much (I do work at Clever, sorry if our posts bothered you!).

Overall, I think YC are pretty benign overlords, and they have an incentive to not rock the boat. YMMV though :)

I'm not sure if this is a minority opinion or not, but since I don't see anybody saying it: the job postings would be better if they could be filtered out or at least throttled. I am so tired of being asked if I'd like to disrupt the big telecom companies or build drones in SF that it makes me contemplate writing a filtering RSS proxy whenever I see them.

since a lot of people on here have probably been involved / applied for companies posted on here, their feedback would probably be useful. in my case, an unnamed YC company made me a really insulting lowball offer. i feel the desire to mention that every time they post on here. maybe thats not what you want, but i think its good for everyone if companies are accountable and dont try to take advantage of people in the hiring process.

> in my case, an unnamed YC company made me a really insulting lowball offer. i feel the desire to mention that every time they post on here.

I think that's actually the danger here. I sympathize with you, but at the same time, I don't think it would add much value to just give a bunch of people the opportunity to air their grievances in job postings.

Totally agree with that assessment. If it becomes a place where only previously rejected candidates can voice their angst, then its all downhill...

I don't know if the offer really was insultingly low or not, or if he/she interviewed poorly, or if he/she is highly skilled or not, or whatever. These facts aren't terribly important.

Having a feedback mechanism might encourage people to be nice, and I can't see how that's bad. Yeah it might suck to have to spend an extra two minutes talking to every candidate, but I don't see that making or breaking a company.

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

You'd have to be one hell of an idiot to air your grievances about being rejected for a job application on a public forum like this. Great way to reduce your job prospects for the future.

I suspect this sort of thing would be fairly rare, because it looks bad on both the applicant and the company.

Some folks create throwaway accounts and post anonymously.

Hasn't the internet taught us that there are quite a lot of idiots out there?

(And no, I'm not excluding the possibility that I myself am one of them)

well there is a line to walk i guess. on the one hand, i think a lot of people would like to know about things like my experience so they can decide if its worth the trouble for a certain company if thats the risk. you are probably right to worry if people are actually just going to stick to the facts and not get too emotional though.

What is "insultingly lowball?" Were I a YC company I'd definitely leverage its reputation in targeting a certain group of eager, young, and naive labor. I'd view it much like I'd view the labor market in the video game industry: there may be an overall shortage of tech talent, but in specific cases there is an abundance of labor that can be had (relatively) cheaply.

I too received an extraordinary lowball offer from a YC company, at least $40k below market.

I'm not sure what goes through some of these companies' heads, but if they can't compensate adequately, then as a leader, I would not be able to assure employees that the company would be competitive hiring the best, unless the company had a particularly special angle such as being in the edtech space.

Personally, I think comments would be valuable for FAQ type questions, but they would likely require more moderation than your average news topic.

Why? If people cant answer questions about a job post there is something wrong. I criticised a job post on a mailing list fairly brurtally and got it much improved, and had positive feedback. Hopefully they got a better person for the job. I see the posts here and would never apply to many with the strangely asymmetric thing of no comments. It could at least be an option to have comments.

Don't you require some sort of "trusted" status to post a job? I think that level of trust would mean the same accounts should be able to moderate their own postings.

The "trusted" status is that you took part (and succeeded?) in a YC batch.

Those three you selected co-existed alongside 295 days of many mediocre, dull, boring and ridiculous job posts that don't foster good or valuable discussion. I think there was also problem(s) with startups trying to stay secret + being identifiable from their job listings. There did used to be comments, until those reasons.

Seems like defaulting to comments on with the option of disabling them if the startup is in stealth mode would be a good solution.

There is discussion about all this buried in PG's submissions history - I found where points and submitters stopped being shown on jobs 1380 days ago, I think it was all part of the same overhaul:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2542355

Might be time to revisit it but I think presenting them as HN content is wrong - they're not HN content, they don't get to the front page because they're good or because one of our peers thought the rest of us might like it and more of our peers agreed.

> they're not HN content

HN is explicitly part of YC. If you disagree with that[1], there's always https://lobste.rs or Reddit

[1] I do, to a certain extent, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They're YC's ads shown alongside HN's content. If they weren't inserted on the front page automatically they would almost universally never get there because they're not even similar to our content - otherwise non-YC job posts would be upvoted to the front page too.

That's native advertising for you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

Valuable to the readers or to the people posting job ads? I wouldn't want comments on my job ads and I assume the same is true of YC companies posting here.

I would wager many comments would be negative opinions of the job, the company, or something entirely unrelated.

Hacker News job postings are a part of the YC package, allowing users to comment could lower its value. We're a cynical bunch.

In almost all cases it will be people griping, picking issues and holes in the job ad, running down the company.

There's a reason why few places on the Internet have comments on job ads - it's because recruiting is the business of rejection.

The naive would think comments would be polite positive enquiry and enthusiasm.

Maybe not the most noble or forward-thinking reason, but I'm happily employed and have no interest in seeing HN job posts, so I appreciate that the job posts have no comments link, because it makes them easier to mentally filter out when I'm scanning the front page.

Mailgun - since you asked...no correlation. We have distributed teams across the offices.

Absolutely. Companies that are afraid of failed candidates badmouthing them on here ought to consider making their candidate experience better.

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