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Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

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Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#101

Post by kdamica »

scarface_74 wrote: post #88
kdamica wrote: post #24

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.

Hypothetical candidate: “Hi, my name is John and I’m a ‘full stack developer’ interested in working at your company” Me: “Okay submit your resume to our job board and someone will get back to you”. Doing a “warm introduction” isn’t enough.

This is not what I would consider a warm intro. I mean that someone within the company or who is a friend of friend of someone in the company can vouch for the candidate, or has some specific reason for referring (like a project they were impressed by).

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#102

Post by synicalx »

themanmaran wrote: post #42

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…

> 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.

Devil's advocate; why would I have made an API request if my employer has never used that service? Maybe that lack of interest on their part is why I'm trying to leave and get a job in a field that's of interest to me.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#103

Post by gentlesoulcarp »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#104

Post by [deleted] »

mikhael28 wrote: post #69
jjice wrote: post #51

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 pe…

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]

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#105

Post by what »

scarface_74 wrote: post #91
themanmaran wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Atlanta, and $175k is pretty square with ATL ranges[1]. It's not a Google salary, but startup comp is always more equity weighted. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...

My bad, looking at the page from mobile it didn’t look like a salary range. I misinterpreted it. I just saw $125K. That being said, I would hope that position is remote for $175K. I would have jumped on it when I was a pure software developer working in Atlanta. But working locally in SF for that amount?

If you can’t live comfortably on 175k in SF, you have a spending problem.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#106

Post by logotype »

themanmaran wrote: post #89
scarface_74 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, I looked at how much your company pays. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai/jobs This doesn’t come close to what a mid level enterprise CRUD developer could make in Atlanta.

I'm from Atlanta, and $175k is pretty square with ATL ranges[1]. It's not a Google salary, but startup comp is always more equity weighted. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...

you guys like sunglasses

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#107

Post by lytefm »

no_wizard wrote: post #73
themanmaran wrote: post #42

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…

Interesting to me that 'working with AI' is using OpenAI's API. Thats really working with someone elses AI, no? FWIW I have used it quite a bit, but its not really the same thing as developing AI (nevermind my usual rant that we shouldn't call any of this AI, but I digress)

I'd be fine calling myself a "AI Engineer" for having worked with TensorFlow, PyTorch and scikit-learn and having experience in running AI Models in production.

Nowadays, making requests to the API of a LLM provider is what makes an engineer a good fit for working at an AI company? Really?

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#108

Post by sshine »

rors wrote: post #55
themanmaran wrote: post #42

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…

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.…

Having a PhD vs. making that API call might ironically suggest you don’t emanate hands-on product thinking.

I know PhDs in data science and language technology who are not startup material because they’re too uncomfortable outside of MatLab/Jupyter/R.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#109

Post by jagged-chisel »

heurist wrote: post #58
TheGamerUncle wrote: post #7

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 offend…

Not a YC startup, but jobs I've posted recently had over a thousand applicants in the first few weeks. I post multiple places, including HN. There's a huge culling process to find the 20-30 most applicable candidates, then to narrow down from there to the 1-2 that fit best. The best way to stand out (for me) is a real application not written with AI. Everyone uses AI now and it all sounds the same. Express your hones…

> Express your honest enthusiasm for joining the company/mission in the cover letter…

I just can’t muster honest enthusiasm for all the companies/missions to which I must apply to get even a call from their internal recruiter. I have enthusiasm for creating viable, efficient, maintainable software. I can adapt those skills to the mission du jour. But apparently, that’s not sufficient - if it were, my 30yrs of experience would get me hired.

If, by chance, a company or mission are reprehensible to me, I just won’t apply. If I’ve applied, I’m certainly willing to apply my skills to your project.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#110

Post by scarface_74 »

what wrote: post #105
scarface_74 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad, looking at the page from mobile it didn’t look like a salary range. I misinterpreted it. I just saw $125K. That being said, I would hope that position is remote for $175K. I would have jumped on it when I was a pure software developer working in Atlanta. But working locally in SF for that amount?

If you can’t live comfortably on 175k in SF, you have a spending problem.

And according to the calculators I saw, it would be 46% more expensive than living in Atlanta. But we you can choose other metro areas that are not on the west coast for comparison where you could also make $175K as a senior
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