Ask HN: How effective have the job posts on HN been?

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.

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.

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.

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)