Who Y Combinator Companies Want

Not at a YC company, but yeah my guess would be that it's hard to get the trend followers on board with other stuff. I've anecdotally seen myself a lot of candidates (esp at the recent-university/recent-MS level) who've taken some ML courses cause it's trendy and sounds interesting but (a) don't have a serious enough interest in it or knowledge of how to apply it well enough to be a good fit on our ML teams and (b) aren't open to other roles because they sound less cool or have a perception that the day to day work will be more tedious.

> "Second, companies dislike programmers with enterprise backgrounds. Our data shows that companies are less likely to hire programmers coming from Java or C# backgrounds."

This I totally understand. Enterprise software is systematically horrible in almost every way: terrible UI/UX, insane degrees of over engineering, high footprint, high cost, and usually at least two to three generations behind on every technological trend. Of those traits I can't stress over-engineering enough... it's epidemic everywhere but most of all in "enterprise" where you'll see insane things like simple web application servers that use gigabytes of RAM and XML schemas that lead to ten-page-long messages to do trivial things. (The use of XML at all is usually a smell unless the domain is very HTML-like such as word processing... and even there extending Markdown would be better in every way.)

It doesn't have to be that way. Those facts reflect the management pathologies that exist in large companies and governments where you have a lot of people managing software projects who don't know anything about software... lots of "pointy haired bosses." You also have a lot of dumb requirements in those areas that twist things out of alignment with what users actually want. Startups very often have the luxury of ignoring stupid requirements unless they have to interoperate with legacy stuff.

It's so bad that I've actually heard people advise startups to pass on some enterprise revenue if they can afford it (pass on REVENUE!) if it might lead them down an "enterprisey" path, since doing so would in the end result in a systematically inferior product. If the systematic diseases of enterprise are that extreme (and I think they mostly are), then I understand the desire that some startups might have to also systematically avoid developers with enterprise backgrounds.

That being said and while I do understand, I think this underestimates the versatility of a good developer. A good developer might have gone into an enterprise job because they need the money but they might be otherwise great at what they do. You can find some great developers by offering to rescue them from enterprise hellholes. Sometimes that alone is all they need to inspire a ton of motivation and loyalty. I mean, you just dragged them out of hades. They're gonna love you.

A good example of why working at a place with such restrictive PTO is a trap. But, around here we like to have philosophical discussions about how unlimited vacation time is the real trap. I dunno, guys. It seems to work pretty well for me.

Some companies reject people based on green card status, because they don't have the resources to sponsor them. Some companies have specific salary ranges, too. Are those factors considered during your analysis? You seem to be focusing primarily on what companies want, but sometimes what they want and what they can accept are two different things. Thoughts?