10 ms·

Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

• tslocum 2y ago
  I've seen a YC startup post for the same back-end job for a year now. I admit that I did not apply, but it doesn't look that unappealing.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • jagged-chisel 2y ago
    > … developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857294 I hear bullshit excuses like this often. “Not enough experience with $[unusual product]” (‘enough’ experience is acquired in about a week); “Not a cultural fit” (oh the many things this could mask - not old enough, too old, wrong gender, wrong cultural group - all of which would be illegal to admit); “we … uh … well, we moved on to other candidates” - at least you didn’t ghost me, but this one feels like cover for the previous one (though that one is cover for legal issues…) I’ve aced technical screenings, made it to the final interview, all sounds positive, then I get some bullshit response. In one interview, there were three dev leads on the call and one unrelated manager who ran the call (and completely ran over the other three), was clueless about the technology he was asking about, and when I disagreed about something (the other three suddenly went from yes-men to silent), this guy decided I wasn’t worthy of hiring. How can anyone possibly solve the social issues around hiring? I have a (non-starter) idea: some amount of accountability to the people they turn down late in the process.
  • HFrank 2y ago
    Companies need many backend engineers as hey scale. Logically, for a general backend role, it would be the same backend role advertised continuously.
• very_good_man 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • alberth 2y ago
    Just curious, why do you say that - given that many job board cost money to post on.
    • luismedel 2y ago
      I never thought about this, but maybe it's way cheaper than other methods of personal data capturing.
      • ryandrake 2y ago
        Plus, the personal data on a resume is likely high-quality and accurate because the job seeker is incentivized to be contact-able. High value PII and it's just being handed over...
        • FungalRaincloud 2y ago
          I was advised by a few recruiters to remove all PII from my resume but my email, both for privacy reasons and because it's better to funnel all offers to the same location. I still keep my phone number on there, but if someone really wants my data, it's remarkably easy to find, so I am not really doing much by just removing it from my resume. Oddly, I've had a few people actually try to find more PII on me and fail miserably. They claimed to be good at it, and should have known enough to find at least my legal name with ease. Used to be able to find old AIM conversations of mine if you knew what to search for (or got lucky).
    • georgeecollins 2y ago
      Many do, but not all. Also the cost to post a job is trivial compared to the cost of filling the role. I don't know what the OP was thinking but it is very common for companies to say they are hiring when they don't have a specific position to fill at the time. First, because it is a sign of health, particularly if you want to position yourself as growing. Second, a lot of HR people want to have a pool of people to contact when a position opens.
• TheGamerUncle 2y ago
  I would like to assume that I am a good candidate I usually get calls back from even LinkedIn posts or even indeed, but after well applying to more than two hundred offerings on the who is hiring posts in this place, and only having had been called twice. I can assure you that the ones here usually are not hiring and at best just want a rooster of possible replacements for their current employees. Most notable offender is mixrank, I know more than twenty people that have applied to no avail, even people with more than 22 years of experience and very fancy titles.
  • aimazon 2y ago
    Some companies are just very selective, i.e: they're hiring the right people not the best candidate. Most of us get jobs because companies need to fill a role and we're the best candidate of a bad bunch... most of us (whether we have 22 years and a fancy title or not) would not get a job at a company that hires carefully because we're probably not a good fit for their very niche view of what a good hire is.
    • ninininino 2y ago
      I agree and there's nothing that disincentivizes companies from "over-soliciting applications". Having 100000 applicants vs 100 has no downside other than: 1) you need to literally post your application URL more places. 2) you might not get through skimming or auto-screening / OCR-ing all the resumes/apps. From an incentives POV, the job application space does not properly incentivize saving the mental energy and time of either recruiters or applicants. Automation and reduced friction has made the situation a kind of arm's race and mess.
    • LittleTimothy 2y ago
      It makes total sense for a startup to be highly selective. But being overly selective at the CV/application stage is dumb. If they really do have some really highly specialized requirement that should be on the advert. If they don't then being having a high rejection rate at the CV screen stage is going to be easy - it's easy to reject people, but you're overwhelmingly likely to screen out the few candidates that are actually a good fit. So sure, expect a low success rate but a low reply rate is an indicator the company isn't serious about hiring.
• ceroxylon 2y ago
  It is a complicated scene right now. Bots are taking over on both ends, both in creating and interpreting resumes. Companies can have ulterior motives for posting job ads in many directions, including just scraping data. My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. The largest hurdle is that adding money to the scenario opens a whole new can of worms for scammers.
  • serial_dev 2y ago
    It's crazy, now candidates apply to everything they see with crap, fake, or AI generated resumes, and companies filter most of the candidates out with APS automation, AI, even if you carefully considered a position and spent time on their application.... Candidates generate a lot of crap, companies filter out a lot of crap and more.
  • logotype 2y ago
    Exactly! The system is flawed right now because it’s automated on both sides, for often the wrong reasons
  • mywittyname 2y ago
    > My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. Turns out, maybe those recruiters that we love to hate on, do actually serve a valuable function.
  • drillsteps5 2y ago
    > My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. Was this not the sole premise of LinkedIn? Then they were acquired by the M$ and investors demanded ROI, and it turned out being honest (ie, demanding users to be honest in job postings and job applications) is not a profitable business model.
• linebeck 2y ago
  It’s likely they know someone they’ve effectively already offered the job to, but equal opportunity laws require a job posting to be made. So while they are technically “hiring”, the job posting is fairly meaningless.
  • bpodgursky 2y ago
    There are easier ways to address equal opportunity requirements (really just immigration stuff) More often you just want a way for extremely strong tactical inbound candidates to find you. Even if you're not desperate to fill the role, you want strong candidates to find you, reach out, and then work with them to find a role to fit the candidate.
• chrisoconnell 2y ago
  In the past, I have applied to many YC startups, and have a pretty high response rate. Being that the job board is pretty prominent in the tech world, and engineering jobs are highly competitive, it is likely that a smaller startup does not have the resources to reply to every applicant. This being said, I've been self employed for several years, so this may have changed since ~ 2021, but I don't think it's likely. Also, the landscape has changed, and some job posting may have been made during more optimistic moments, and they may just be stale, rather than fake. I have referred many people to "WorkAtAStartup" in recent years who have had quite a bit of success. While it's unfortunate that you are not having the best of luck, definitely be optimistic and continue to try! There are many great companies that recruit through the YC boards, and I recommend using WorkAtAStartup to have the best chances of response, even more so than their direct job listings.
• burgerrito 2y ago
  Related: Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672>
  • caminante 2y ago
    It is related, but tells the same anecdotes, including people complaining (e.g., hurt ego about not getting shortlisted after completing an internship 2+ years earlier).
• rgbrgb 2y ago
  yes, but most are hiring very selectively and with AI applications some companies are getting thousands of cold applications.
• rvz 2y ago
  Here is the truth: They really are not. Why? They don't have the money nor will they risk it on people who they do not know. The best way to get "hired" by them is to fiercely compete against them to the point where they wave the white flag and buy you out.
• ryandrake 2y ago
  It would be cool if the monthly Who's Hiring threads asked companies to optionally disclose useful information like "How long have you had this job open?" or "When was the last time your [company | team] hired someone, and how long did the process take from first posting to the employee's first day on the job?" Better yet, a response SLO for getting back to candidates (this will never happen).
  • Pedro_Ribeiro 2y ago
    I believe HN is a high quality forum that enforces high quality standards, there is no reason this shouldn't be a thing. Companies that advertise here should be held accountable.
    • mikhael28 2y ago
      Maybe a startup could work on this problem - HN has two moderators, I’m not sure it’s realistic to ask them to track more than what they already do. How would they even track and verify such hearsay anyway?
      • ryandrake 2y ago
        I'm mostly just spitballing un-implementable ideas. At the end of the day, the HN "Who's Hiring" tradition relies on people acting in good faith, which cannot be assumed anymore. There is nothing to stop a "hiring" company from lying about every last thing in their job ad.
      • Pedro_Ribeiro 2y ago
        HN has two moderators but the YC Job Opening ads are not just part of HN, they're part of YC as a whole. I expect YC to do due diligence if one of their companies receives several reports that they heard no replies (it's not that many companies). If it's found to be more than hearsay, they lose HN ad privelleges. --- I wouldn't do a startup but I certainly could see myself creating a bunch of fake developer profiles of varying skill levels and sending them to companies en masse. If they don't reply to anything even though they have had a job opening, they get placed on the (public) name & shame list. Would also be interesting to automatically keep track of which job openings a company has and how long they've been open for.
• lispforlife 2y ago
  [dead]
• steele 2y ago
  Hiring deepseek
• kdamica 2y ago
  The reality is that the vast majority of startup hires are referrals. For hiring managers, having someone you trust tell you that they've worked with a candidate and vouch for them is invaluable, especially when the company is at a stage that you don't have good performance oversight. The cost of a bad hire is immense. My advice: never do a cold application. Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.
  • z3c0 2y ago
    This is likely what's going on. Public pools are often the very last stop on the search for candidates. The precedence is almost always 1) internal hires (obviously not as possible at a start-up) 2) referrals 3) direct engagement from a recruiter 4) talent pools curated by online services like LinkedIn or Indeed 5) forum pools, like those here in HN 6) applications from the Careers page Almost all my jobs have come from referrals or directly from recruiters. I've gotten calls back from four-and-beyond, but have never made it through the process, despite being overqualified in those cases. On the flipside, I've been underqualified for jobs I got via referral. The power of having someone inside can't be overstated.
  • caminante 2y ago
    > the vast majority of startup hires are referrals. > Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro. OP's process is actually that of a spring chicken by not realizing this reality. I still don't understand why people, especially "experienced hires," expect more from passive applications.
    • kdamica 2y ago
      I also think people don't appreciate the sheer volume of online applications that a desirable startup gets. There have been times were I would literally get hundreds of applications per week, with none of them standing out in any way. You want to give unknowns a chance but when it's a waste of time 99% of the time, you learn to reject quickly.
      • ryandrake 2y ago
• CoderJoshDK 2y ago
  When I was ready to move on, to a new opportunity, I spent most of my effort in the HN thread and work for a startup (owned by YC.) And while most applications resulted in no response, that is on par with any other platform. That said, I did hear back from multiple companies! I made it to late stage interview with 3 companies but stopped once I took an offer from one of them. And this was all in the span of 1 month. As a data point, yes, some companies do hire here. Maybe not all. But I had a great experience through YC. I think in general, the hiring market is a mess (on both sides) and HN suffers from similar issues.
• awkward 2y ago
  In my career I've split time between startups, fintech, and consulting. Last year I've had a few interviews with VC funded startups that went to second and third rounds, where I would be told outright that developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for. I think there's some active memes in the startup community about not hiring people from finance specifically.
  • logotype 2y ago
    interesting! I haven’t heard about this, thanks for sharing.
• scarface_74 2y ago
  @burgerrito posted a link to a similar submission three months ago where one commenter said for one job they got over 1000 applications. It’s almost impossible to stand out and rise above the noise these days if you are just randomly submitting your application to a job board. When I mentioned this before, someone asked me should they reach out to the company directly. That doesn’t help either unless you have a special set of skills or experience that would make you stand out. Neither “I am a full stack developer” or “I worked for a FAANG” set you apart.
• fasteddie31003 2y ago
  I think we need to turn hiring on its head. I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company. I'm running https://customizedresumes.com/ https://customizedresumes.com/ as my side project and it shows how applicants can now basically spam job applications. It's only going to get worse for hiring managers.
  • Pedro_Ribeiro 2y ago
    Don't you think part of the reason companies prefer that you reach out to them is that they want people specifically interested in them? Though it could be the case that the job spam is so fucked that that no longer works as an accurate cutoff.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company. That already exists, and had for some two decades now - it's called LinkedIn. It works the way it works. Whatever the reasons (which are most certainly related to running a two-sided marketplace and trying to squeeze both ends of it), any such project will end up in a similar spot.
  • pyb 2y ago
    You described Linkedin?
• xenospn 2y ago
  Yes, they are. I’ve gone through multiple rounds with multiple YC companies a few months ago before ultimately starting my own venture.
  • logotype 2y ago
    best of luck!
• mjasher 2y ago
  Sorry you've had that experience. My 2 cents is that unless they've done a "big" (> 5 million) seed or series A they probably don't have the money or appetite for much hiring. So target later stage if you aren't already.
• themanmaran 2y ago
  As a YC company that is currently hiring, yes! And all of the YC companies I know are also struggling to find engineers. But the job listings (HN, WorkAtAStartup) practically never bring in good candidates. A few big problems: 1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description. 2. Purely automated applications. There are a lot of "Apply to 1000 jobs with AI" startups out there that just spam job boards [1][2][3]. 3. Qualifications. There is a shocking number of engineers applying to work at an AI company who have never made a single API request to OpenAI. After three years of hearing about AI every day if you've never tested a single inference API then why are you applying to an AI startup. The signal to noise ratio is so bad that it's better to just do outbound. At this point the job listing is mostly there so we can share it with candidates that we reach out to. [1]https://lazyapply.com/ https://lazyapply.com/ [2]https://aiapply.co/ https://aiapply.co/ [3]https://www.reddit.com/r/GetEmployed/comments/1eo8uyp/i_used_ai_to_automatically_apply_for_1000_jobs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/GetEmployed/comments/1eo8uyp/i_used...
  • nedwin 2y ago
    Adding to this: we mostly focus on outbound, mostly using WorkAtAStartup or LinkedIn as a source.
  • rors 2y ago
    I have a PhD from one of the best universities in the world in Machine Translation, I was training feed forward networks in 2014, built models in TensorFlow in 2016, founded a generative AI startup in 2019 and signed deals with huge consumer goods companies, debugged distributed training jobs on a cluster with thousands of A100s, and wrote PyTorch training pipelines for a financial ML trading signal that made money. Yet, I am unqualified to join an AI startup because I’ve never made an API request to OpenAI
    • yapyap 2y ago
      Make ur first API request to OpenAI today and who knows, rooting for ya!
• tptacek 2y ago
  The smaller the company, the less likely the hiring process is a well-oiled machine, from responses to inbounds to true-ing up the JDs currently advertised on the site; compounding that, smaller companies get fewer inbound applicants and can end up holding out for a unicorn fit for a role for a long time. I wouldn't read much into no-response from a startup (totally reasonable to be irritated about it, but it's always a numbers game regardless, so you might not want to be hanging on a response from any one company).
• asdasdsddd 2y ago
  There's a lot of coping here. These YC startups only hire a few applicants. If they have hundred of applications (which is low) then the interview rate will likely be less than 5%.
• jjice 2y ago
  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. These were all full open internet as well. We decided to pause hiring for the next quarter. I think the main issue was the absolute flood of applicants that had no ability to fill the role, and filtering through that with limited man-hours while features still need to be shipped is really difficult. Years ago, when I'd be part of engineering hiring efforts, we had a recruiter who would handle screenings, so I don't know if it's always been like this and we need to get better at screening, or if it's notably worse now.
  • mikhael28 2y ago
    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.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • aimazon 2y ago
    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 otherwise. You're looking for a diamond in the rough. Your company is doing the right thing by pausing the search, it is a very bad use of time. Find people through the founder's and employee's personal networks. A vouched-for candidate in the hand is worth 1,000 applications in the bush. If personal networks aren't an option, the alternative is to do what candidates hate: keep your applications open without the goal to fill a specific role by a specific date but rather to wait for the right candidate to come along.
• Hormold 2y ago
  Time to build something by yourself!
  • logotype 2y ago
    100%
• clarkalistair 2y ago
  Also a YC company who's actively hiring. We had two new joiners start last year, we have another two lined up for March/April and we have one open position (with more to come later in the year if all goes well). I'm "in charge" of hiring at Devyve (YC S22), and by "in charge" I mean that I'm acting as the TA team because, you know, startup. I don't mean "in charge" as in I make all the decisions on who gets hired - we do that as a team.
• bobthecowboy 2y ago
  I've applied to a couple of these. If I remember correctly PostHog and Enveritas both posted here and for both I went past the initial screening step, but that's where it ended for me. I also participated in the hiring side for the previous startup I worked at - SoftIron - and we did actually hire someone we found through a post I made here on the monthly Hiring thread. He was a good candidate, but eventually everyone got laid off anyway. I actually felt bad about that - I think we were only around a year after hiring him. On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting.
  • rjbwork 2y ago
    >On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting. Also put an entry up on the monthly hiring thread a few years ago. Even though we explicitly stated US-Based and authorized to work in the US, we did not get a single application from US-Based people. All Indian, Eastern European, and South American.
• mikhael28 2y ago
  Yes, they are. It’s a numbers game.
• steve_adams_86 2y ago
  Not a direct answer, but months ago I was applying to YC startups that were actively posting opportunities. I had great references from past YC startups, what I'd consider a good resume, a proven track record of actually building stuff. Not a single company was interested. This was true outside of YC companies too, though. It was surreal. I started to think I must be a fraud or something.
• wendyshu 2y ago
  Not as far as I can tell
• dang 2y ago
  There are over 5000 YC startups, over 3500 of which are still active. For sure some of those are hiring.
• gentlesoulcarp 2y ago
  As an applicant, the sign up box forces everyone into narrow roles. It’s a radio button, so you can’t be good at “product” and “dev ops”, for example. It’s realistic for people to be good at multiple things. Last I checked, that radio category is account-wide, so if you do “frontend”, that’s all your account can do. This makes it difficult to apply to multiple kinds of roles through the interface and it makes it harder for founders to find people who can wear multiple hats. Most of them could probably use a versatile person at their stage.
• 0x0000000 2y ago
  Wow, that edit is something. Post something inflammatory that will garner engagement, then turn it into your own "I'm hiring" post once it's on the front page. Quality hack.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    And then it’s for a “technical cofounder”. I bet the pay is peanuts
  • logotype 2y ago
    :) it's all part of the game
• scarface_74 2y ago
  Based on the edit: What are you offering to pay your “technical cofounder”? I bet it’s peanuts and “equity”. If that’s the case, do you not see that you are part of the same toxic culture that defines many startups hiring process.
• carlbren 2y ago
  They (YC W23) are actively looking for devs: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/capimoney https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/capimoney
• Jackosas 2y ago
  [dead]