Tell HN: The next “Who Is Hiring” thread will be on Monday | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: The next “Who Is Hiring” thread will be on Monday

107 pointsdang39 comments

By popular demand, Who Is Hiring is moving to the first weekday of each month. The next thread will be on Monday, August 3 at 11 AM EST.

Since the Internet abhors a vacuum, this weekend is at risk for an ersatz who-is-hiring thread stampede. Would you all please flag these? They're unfair to the users who get trapped in them, and figuring out who eventually found their way to the official thread vs. whose jobs need to be moved there is a royal pain.

Also, we've updated the FAQ to clarify that no one is allowed to submit job ads as stories to HN. That includes YC startups, since the job ads we let them post are not stories: they don't have points or comments, and come in through a different mechanism. So if you see a job ad in the form of a story, on /newest or elsewhere, please flag it. Edit: this isn't a rule change—we just noticed that not everyone knows what the rule is.

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To clarify: are interesting blog posts that double as job ads still allowed? It's fairly common for companies to post good technical blog posts that are also meant as a "look at this fascinating stuff we're doing – you could be doing it too!"

Yes, those have always been ok. If a story is a good HN post in its own right, there's no problem. Sometimes people push the limit in weird ways and we have to decide which side of the line a post is on, but that's rare.

Rather than looking at the lowest common denominator, I'd hope that such blog posts are something that would have been worth writing and sharing even if the company was not in a position to hire. To put it another way, if a competitor wrote it and posted it, and it made the front page of HN, you'ld still be glad that they did despite it giving the competitor a leg up on attracting candidates.

I posted an ad last month and got spam saying "I see you're hiring for x, but instead you could use our product and you wouldn't need a person to do x".

So if you are going to post an ad you should be aware that there ARE people harvesting them for spam.

There is a thin line between cold emails and spam. What you described looks like a marketing email sent by a human, albeit cold.

I've received similar emails, some of which showed obvious signs of automation (wrong name or remaining template variables).

Just flag them as SPAM.

I hope there are vacancies for someone who is learning Python and wants a job which deals with Python.

FYI - it would be so so helpful if the postings mentioned whether or not they support remote workers.

Most do, and there are instructions at the top of each thread about it.

Cool - thanks

Thanks for the heads up, dang.

If find it unfair that you put YC startups job ads between the stories, but do not allow the rest to do the same. Shame on you!

It's supposed to be unfair. This site exists in part to promote YC (and always has) and the staff can do whatever they want with it.

That's a simplistic view.

This site serves the startup community, and it's warped by the wants/needs of YC because of its genesis.

Bringing in moderators like dang has helped a lot - the site definitely got too cultish around pg and YC, and it seems like things have improved since then, both content and attitudes of people on the site. There seems to be more of a chinese wall between decision making for YC and HN now.

I would hope/think over time that the remaining unfairness will drift away, like the fact that YC founders see each other highlighted, so they can form a casual voting rings around YC stories (and the job ads I agree are unfair and bad for the community too). It's not even healthy for HN/YC long term - the community will go elsewhere if the values of the site don't lead to good content/community.

Following the money is rarely simple and is an heuristic of high utility. Alas, it often leads to a world view that is less comforting than I would wish. The success of HN is, in my opinion, due to the large degree of alignment between YC's motivation for HN and the benefits of HN for individual users. The alignment is possible because YC's business thrives on monetizing extreme outliers and ignoring the fat middle. This enables it to thrive on HN's exhaust fumes.

If for no other reason, job postings for YC companies is useful for reminding the HN community that HN is a business asset not Usenet. The reason it is useful is to rationalize a set of standards somewhat similar to a workplace.

> This site serves the startup community,

No the site serves YC that it happens to have some overlap with serving the general startup scene and hacker crowd is a good thing but it's not the primary thing.

> the community will go elsewhere if the values of the site don't lead to good content/community.

Only if a threshold is reached and there is a consensus that it's time to move on, there appears to be no sign of that, realistic people realise that HN while a valuable resource belongs to YC.

This comment is unfair to PG. There's no way for you to know this, but behind the scenes PG has always been protective of Hacker News and has been aware that HN exists outside of YC and has utility for the community at large.

YC founders are actually subject to voting rings as well, and often get dinged.

I get that there is a knee-jerk anti-authoritarian kind of sentiment here, but in this case, the tone and attitude is undeserved.

1) I wish you'd dispute the meat of what I said:

* That YC founders can see each other differently on the site (colored names).

* This naturally leads to more upvotes for YC stories.

* These upvotes would be unlikely to trigger voting rings.

* This provides a non-transparent (unfair?) advantage for YC startups, and a false signal about the interest in these startups overall for people unware.

2) The job listings thing I have less to harp on, but I still find it a little weird that there is a hugely popular job board reserved for a few hundred companies.

3) The comment wasn't intended as an attack on pg, and I understand the YC is from the top down well-meaning and full of good people. But the site is better, more transparent, and more fair under the new management, at least it seems that way to me.

I imagine the cultishness is recognized and unwanted... hence pg not being on the leaderboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders (and totally withdrawing from the site overall)

their playground, their rules...

I think the way they do it is ok (limited frequency, no votes so they fall down quickly, ... and allowing free job ads by other companies in one collected place), many other sites probably would be worse.

YC is not a publicly owned company and therefore they don't answer to you or me but to their shareholders and authorities and they get to draft their own rules and regulations the way they see fit as long as they violate their jurisdiction laws.

Hope that was of help to you.

I find it unfair that HN only displays the YC logo. In the interest of equal time, I should get to put my logo up there too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwdk6dFDqTc

I can see why you might say that, but consider that hosting, maintaining, and moderating HN is a lot of work. For YC to get nothing in return for that would also be unfair. So the question is what the right balance is.

I always thought pg's solution was pretty tasteful. It doesn't disrupt the site too much, it's transparent (albeit in a minimalist way), it's strictly limited. But that's obviously a matter of opinion. What's not a matter of opinion is that HN has worked this way nearly since the beginning, so whatever may be wrong with the status quo, it at least hasn't prevented the site and community from flourishing.

A tiny, tiny perk for hosting an awesome forum.

Okay, now it is clear that your feelings about this are that it is “unfair” and that you feel YC should be “ashamed” of this [ note that “this” refers to HN job listings only being for YC companies. ]

When something is not working for you, what are your options ? You can try to blame someone else, or you can take responsibility and create improvements yourself. In this case it appears you are trying to blame YC for what is not working for you. What comes of this trying to blame someone else? Well, you get to pretend that they are wrong, and therefore, by implication, you get to feel “right”. This is a compelling fake pay off because, without ever doing anything, you get to feel you are “right”. So that is what can come of trying to blame someone else.

If you goal is to effect change, this choice is self-defeating. Since the only thing that changes is your perspective of yourself. Nothing in the world changes. Now, you may believe that by shaming other people and saying things are unfair, things may alter in the world. Well, maybe they will, and yet still you are expecting other people to alter them for you.

This attitude is the very antithesis of the founder, or hacker, or startup attitude, which is the belief, that a small group of committed individuals can change the world. If that small group of individuals had instead sat around complaining about what wasn’t working for them, well, then they wouldn’t have been the ones who changed the world.

Now, let’s look at what you can do besides this. How can you take responsibility for what is not working for you and choose to create improvements ?

There could be a number of reasons that only posting YC companies’ jobs is not working for you. Perhaps you applied to YC and were declined. Perhaps you have a startup, and didn’t apply to YC, and are looking to hire, and would like to access the HN audience.

Let’s just take the latter as an example. Now what can you do to access the HN audience for your hiring in this case ? How about writing a blog post about the opportunity your startup is meeting, and at the end of the blog post, have a link that says, if you read this far and you’re interested in working on stuff like this, we’re hiring!

> Also, we've updated the FAQ to clarify that no one is allowed to submit job ads as stories to HN. That includes YC startups, since the job ads we let them post are not stories

That's right. The job ads YC companies post here are.. job ads. The job ads any other companies would post here "as stories" would be job ads too! Go figure.

Hey, is ZeroCater hiring?

Always!

"stories" as in "a normal submission, with votes that can keep it on the front page and comments" vs the YC job ads that only have a link.

Yes, but the point is that only YC companies get to advertise jobs here.

They wanted to remind us that other companies can't advertise here, but also felt obligated to pretend that YC companies don't get any special treatment because they can't post job ads "as stories" either.

But in reality, rules concerning job ads are about job ads, not what constitutes a "story submission". Fair rules don't have tailor-made loop-holes for favoured companies either.

Note that I'm not actually opposed to YC posting job ads for YC companies here. It's their forum. I am opposed to dishonesty though, and that's why I commented.

There's no dishonesty, except perhaps to people who don't realize that news DOT Y COMBINATOR dot com is primarily a YC-startup job board, and always has been. There has never been any pretense of fairness that non-YC companies can post job ads, which are a different sort of entity from stories/text posts: no comments, no votes, no flagging, etc. I'm not sure why you put "story submission" in quotation marks; it's a very different sort of entity.

> primarily a YC-startup job board

That's far from the case. I spend less than 1% of my time thinking about job ads. I spend most of it thinking about the quality of stories and comments on HN.

HN is primarily a forum for intellectually interesting stories and civil, substantive discussion. Most, probably nearly all, of its value to YC is intangible. The quid pro quo of the job ads is relatively minor, but gets attention because it's visible.

Posting this sort of thing is like releasing web software. As soon as you do it, you start seeing the bugs you missed. Writing it late at night makes it worse. Oh well, at least my copy-paste code (s/whoishiring/dangispostponing/) to auto-submit at 8 AM didn't fail. I had visions of it making a new post (by me!) every 2 minutes until I woke up.

Let me try again. There are three rules.

  1. Anyone can post job ads to Who Is Hiring threads.

  2. Only YC startups can post job ads to the front page.

  3. No one can post job ads via /submit.

Obviously Rule #2 doesn't apply equally to everyone. But Rule #3 does apply to everyone. That was my point.

Why did I include that? Because we've noticed an uptick in YC startups mistakenly posting job ads via /submit instead of through the separate mechanism of #2. I wanted to let everyone know that these should be flagged just the same as any errant job ad. Otherwise users might see them and think, "well, YC startups are allowed to," when in fact they're not allowed to do it that way. The story stream (i.e. /newest) should be kept free of job ads by anyone.

I used the word "story" in the technical sense of what kind of post gets created when you post it via /submit. Job ads posted under #1 are comments; under #2 they're jobs; under #3 they're stories (and shouldn't exist). These are disjoint types.

I have to run out for a few hours now. I'll come back for the next round of bug fixes later.

Your patience is amazing. I've really appreciated the calming effect you've had over the past several months, along with your thoughtful explanations. So, thank you very much.

Thanks for the civil response. I'll keep this brief, because we shouldn't keep this up anyway.

    no one is allowed to submit job ads as stories to HN
    --> Alright, a general rule. 
     
    That includes YC startups
    --> The general rule applies to YC companies too.
        That's fair.

    since the job ads we let them post are not stories
    --> .. But the only reason it applies is because
        YC job ads circumvent the submission mechanism
        that can't be used for submitting job ads.

Of course you want only YC companies' job ads on the front page, and that's fine. It's your forum.

I have a problem with the wording because it's basically all about pretending that YC companies don't get any special treatment, based on the fact that they're not actually breaking the rules that apply to all companies.

But the only reason they're not breaking the rules, is that they get to circumvent them. That's special treatment right there.

Pfft. This took way longer than it should have. I'll just move on now.

> I have a problem with the wording because it's basically all about pretending that YC companies don't get any special treatment

This is false. No one is "pretending" anything of the sort, not now and not earlier. That ought to be clear from my second post, if not the first.

If we wanted to pretend something, we'd hardly specify its exact opposite in the FAQ.

As I said, I'm moving on now :)

It's worth noting that gravity pulls any YC backed company's job ad off the front page within a few hours. They don't get pinned (though occasionally one will be "replayed" after a short delay).

And just out of compulsion for technical specification, job ads for YC backed companies also lack a "flag" link.

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