The conversation

jjiceHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I work for a small YC startup and we have recently wanted to hire another engineer

I work for a small YC startup and we have recently wanted to hire another engineer. Our CTO posted a listing on WorkAtAStartup and within two or so days, got over 200 applicants. Apparently, WorkAtAStartup (which I've used successfully in the past) allows you to bulk send applications. He went through and found that almost all the applications he was able to go through were absolute nonsense. He then screened some people before a technical interview with the rest of the team and found over half of them either had no clue how to really write any code or were completely lying about any experience they've had. We then had five interviews set up for the following week. None of them were a fit. We have a pretty straight forward set of real world examples for our programming questions and no one got them. Keep in mind, all the other engineers on the team had gone through these questions without issue in the past, and we're not particularly amazing engineers. The "trickiest" of them is essentially performing an in memory group by given to arrays of data that have relations to each other. …

Original discussionAsk HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?136 source comments · at import
3

What was this responding to?

Parent context · original excerpt

LO
logotypeHN

Having applied to 20-30 YC startups without any meaningful replies and I’m wondering, are YC startups actually hiring? Having worked in finance for a decade and other high pressure jobs I don’t consider myself a spring chicken. Edit: I now run a fintech startup https://fixparser.dev and we do look for a technical/business co-founder, feel free to reach out.

Full original

Community replies 0

No community replies yet. Add your perspective.

Replies from the source 3

Direct replies available in this import. Original-language excerpts.

MI
mikhael28HN

Crazy to hear how much spam & straight up liars are applying nowadays. Not being able to pass a technical interview is one thing, but sending a fake resume and then expecting to not be exposed as a fraud is just crazy, sociopath behavior.

Full original
AI
aimazonHN

Yes, you need to get better at filtering. Yes, it has always been like this. Public job listings have always attracted mostly junk. The typical good candidate becomes a good candidate through years of experience. The years of a good candidate's experience has exposed them to many people, many people who would love to work with the good candidate again. And so when the good candidate is looking for a new opportunity, or even when they're not looking, there's a bunch of people waiting in the wings, longing for the opportunity to hire them. A good candidate is probably not going to end up trawling job listings. A bad candidate probably is. Public job listings aren't all bad as they can bring in candidates that you might not have otherwise encountered... and these can be very influential and beneficial hires, but in general, public job listings are for the people who couldn't find a job othe…

Full original
IS
IshKebabHN

If you got no viable candidates presumably you aren't offering enough money, or are offering "competitive salaries"?

Full original
Continue on Hacker News

Respect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.

Sign in to post, reply, repost, and quote.