How effective has been these posts? Anyone here who has out the job post and can share some numbers? Anyone who has applied to these job posts? Others, what do you do/think when you see a job post?
We are working on a startup idea, and this question carries some value in validating our concept. However, it is not related to job openings. Our validation is primarily to understand user behavior.
I have been writing my whole life (I probably put in my 10,000 hours before I left high school). But until recently, I'd never really considered it as a serious job option. Journalism rarely pays a living wage. Trying to sell book proposals is like trying to make a career out of buying lottery tickets. Unless you are confident you're the next J.K. Rowling [1], you should leave writing where it belongs: on nights and weekends, as a hobby. Or so I'd always imagined. And so I spent the last decade of my life resisting the call to foolishness and misadventure.
I've been lurking, arguing, and mucking about on HN for the last few years. I took awhile to realize that HN had become my primary outlet for writing. Once I figured it out, I committed more time to lurking here.
I responded to my first HN jobs post in mid-2013, for a writing job with Priceonomics (YC '12). They responded rapidly (same day, if memory serves), and I got to work right away. I have done some very fun, very interesting work with those guys. (And I hope to continue; in fact, I owe them beers when I get back into town!). That work went really well. In the span of three or four months, I landed an agent, a book deal, some NPR appearances, and some columns in national publications. I have yet to make Harry Potter money, let alone my previous salary. But in the meantime, I'm paying rent in San Francisco, doing something that doesn't feel like work to me. That's pretty cool.
Lately I've picked up a lot of freelance content marketing and writing jobs through HN Freelancer threads. I get a good response rate, and the people I work with have been awesome. I hope to keep landing these gigs every month or two.
And at some point, I'll get around to writing that book.
I apologize if this post seems glib, humblebraggy, or even non-humble in its bragginess. That's not my intent. I just saw this topic and felt an overwhelming need to share my story here. My path is atypical and ill-advised. Especially if you like making money. But I know of no other path by which I could have reshaped my destiny so quickly.
[1] Or Robert Galbraith, or whoever.
I know normally corrections are frowned upon, but this should be an exception, it completely inverts the meaning!
What genre is your book in, and what kinds of work do you produce? Do you think you could possibly answer a few of my questions over email? Thank you!
That sounds really, really, ridiculously trite. But it's the best advice I can give. It's the best advice I've been given, and it's the best advice I've put into practice.
Read a lot, and expose yourself to diverse writing styles. Write enough to develop your voice, and to recognize it when you find it. Know that there is no such thing as a universally "correct" style, though there are certainly better and worse styles for any task at hand.
Another good bit of advice is to write as though you're talking to someone. Put your conversation down on paper, then go back and pretty it up as needed. First be clear, then be stylish. When in doubt, be clear.
I found that job aggregation sites like Monster performed absolutely terribly. In that same category are the careers website that large companies like Microsoft and Boeing have, which are basically black holes. I can't remember ever getting a response from any of them. It's easy to spam your resume to dozens of jobs at once, but 0/1000 is still 0.
My favorite technique (which got me my current job) was to apply to the company directly after finding the job opening through Craigslist or other means. Applying directly got me a response rate of 14/17, and an interview rate of 10/14.
Emailing companies directly through Craigslist was fairly poor for me, and gave me a response rate of 2/8, and an interview rate of 1/2.
I realize that my sample size is small, but I hope it helps.
When I say "emailing through Craigslist", I mean that the job listing did not have the name of the company, so my only option was to email them through CL.
Who is hiring, March 2014: I received three responses to my applications. One for code samples (no follow up afterward), one for quick phone conversation, and one for phone interview (Ed: three different companies).
Seeking Freelance, March 2014: No response.
Who is hiring, Feb 2014: No response.
Seeking Freelance, Feb 2014: No response.
YC Companies /jobs: No ACK or response in last two months.
If you get an onsite interview or phone interview, they should at least have the decency for a form letter "Thanks for applying, but we chose someone else." (especially after an on-site interview)
However, with the rise of the code puzzle/challenge test/work sample, I wonder if it might be time to forge a new professional ethic where it's understood that it is an important courtesy to give an applicant's work attention and useful feedback in return for investing time in completing a challenge.
With that in mind, lately I've been thinking it's important to set expectations (and figure out if you're likely to end up wasting your time) by asking at least two questions before agreeing to submit work on sample problems:
* if they have reference solutions or other rubrics that someone in-house has recently completed, and if they'll be willing to share those with candidates who submit work
* what kind of time they're planning to devote to giving attention and feedback to candidates who submit work
If they have a reference solution, that's a good sign that they have clear ideas about what their standards for success are and a good baseline of the likely time involved in completion.
And if they're willing to at least say that they'll spend real time on studying solutions and giving feedback (ideally something within an order of magnitude of the time they ask candidates to invest) -- or at least show you the rubric -- that's probably an indicator that you're not going to waste your time.
If they don't give an indication that they can do either, it may be a better use of time to move on. And if enough developers use that as a standard, I think it'll be less common to submit work with no response.
(This isn't, by the way, meant to be anti-challenge. The merits seem pretty clear to me, and I've gotten offers including my current job from submitting responses to tests. I've also, however, spent hours or even days* doing free work with nothing useful in return.)
(* One more useful question: does the sample involve working with the Facebook API? Just say no.)
Many people just weren't good fits culturally or technically and when you are running a startup there things get overlooked.
hn0114@boun.cr - send me your resume with a subject line that says resume feedback and i'll take a look
Random anecdote, I was walking SXSW last week and some kids came up and said hi since they noticed the YC founder I was with. One said " I applied to your company and I don't think I got a response ". I took that kids card because his attitude is one to make things happen. So if you want something, make it happen.
Some follow-on questions: 1. How often do you visit HN in day? 2. How do you generally spend your time on HN? reading new articles, reading comments, Commenting and participating, or something else? 3. Are you actively looking for a job, or you stumble across a good job posting when doing your normal browsing?
Some follow-on questions:
1. How often do you visit HN in day? 2. How do you generally spend your time on HN? reading new articles, reading comments, Commenting and participating, or something else? 3. Are you actively looking for a job, or you stumble across a good job posting when doing your normal browsing?
I read articles and comments if I find article title/submission interesting. I comment only if I have an opinion, experience or something new to add.
I am actively looking for job, was laid off end of Dec.
I posted only once as ad in Seeking Freelance thread, received no inquiry.
From March thread, I contacted 12 companies through email or online applications.
However, we have a lot that appeals to the HN crowd: a flat organization, CircleCI is written in Clojure, the company is half remote, we make tools for developers and we're committed to private offices per dev for SF hires.
So your mileage will definitely vary.
(Can I let go of my remote employee in London? Do I need to "show cause"? How much will it cost me just to get a lawyer to answer that?)
Send directly to me? thomas at mycompany.
1) Who is Hiring threads, which are posted on the first of every month
2) Job postings by Y Combinator alumni, which are guaranteed to appear on the front page for a period of time.
Was not able to frame it correctly. So I have copy pasted your definition and updated the description. :)
of those 50 I'd say 65-75% of them are high quality candidates at least at first glance that are writing emails specifically about the postings we put up and referencing the things we say in the post vs just spamming everyone in the list with a generic cover letter and resume.
So far HN is the best source of high quality candidates for us as a startup working on hard technical challenges.
The last one was a great fit and I'm loving the work we're doing.
If you guys want to hire good people who actually respect themselves and will present your business well inside and outside, don't make candidates jump through your silly college-level puzzles. I'm too old for this shit.
Here are the numbers we saw:
HN - 12 candidates total, 7 made it to the initial phone interview and 3 made it to a full interview....we made one offer and he accepted (and he's awesome).
Stackoverflow - 28 candidates, 9 initial phone interviews, 2 full interviews, no offers.
Indeed - 40 candidates, 6 phone interviews, none of them made it to a full interview.
Craigslist - 6 candidates, 2 phone interviews, neither of them made it to a full interview.
Two other thoughts...
I think the reason that HN worked so well for us is that we we took a very targeted approach...before posting, we spent a lot of time thinking through exactly what we were looking for and what we thought made working at BuzzStream a unique opportunity for the right person. We wrote a positioning statement for the job that we used as the starting point for our post. Getting the message right was critical.
The fact that we don't mind bringing on remote people makes things a lot easier.
> We've hired SIX full-time people and TONS of interns from these "Who is Hiring" threads ... it really works!
My specific question is regarding the https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Also, some of the jobs show up on the homepage, how do they fare?
They were interested in conducting a further interview, but, based on the what I learned in the phone conversation, I decided we wouldn't be a good fit together and so declined to move forward.
I do enjoy reading the threads each month to see what the industry is up to from a hiring perspective.
I replied to every NYC posting one month. I got zero on-site interviews. (I do get interviews when I send resumes via other methods.)
I'm not wasting time responding again.
To put this in context:
We are an enterprise SaaS company (www.treasuredata.com). In other words, this is not something a lot of frontend folks are aware of let alone interested in by default. Still, we managed to find someone who was really good. He and another frontend engineer made a worlds of difference in our webapp and boosted customer engagement.
I only looked briefly at the code and it seems Wordpress is a popular but poorly written app. I understand why many talented developers would pass.
2. I don't look at job offers on HN
3. I never applied to job offers on HN
I hope this gives you a great insight!
If you're in our part of the world, have skills in frontend development, java, or python, and you want to work at a fast growing mobile payments company, send me a mail (email on profile)
I did a bit of geographic canvassing of HN, and while I only went through the "top 100" posters due to it being a pretty manual process, it does indeed seem pretty concentrated, with US/UK/Canada accounting for >80% of those I looked at. Summary at the bottom of this page: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html
Feel free to get in touch - hans@zoona.co.za
It turns out we've hired 7 our ~20 software engineers like this over the last few years.
