How to hack your way into a hot startup with no experience

I'm also troubled by the expansion of the New York finance style intern culture.

We find that having someone do real work for a decent length of time is a great way to evaluate them when they are inexperienced or otherwise hard to evaluate in an interview format.

Internships have their place, but not when it's taking advantage of the applicant. That's when we hire them for short term contracts, we pay them contractor rates (so slightly more hourly than the paycheque would be) to compensate for the lack of security.

We're finding that we end up with people who can treat the business seriously and professionally when that's needed as well as the normal stuff everyone wants like enthusiasm, intelligence and work ethic. Someone willing to run on a treadmill because I'm dangling a carrot in front of them like a jerk is not someone I want on my team, I want someone who will spend their time wisely when I'm paying them for it.

Who would have guessed that treating applicants with respect would pay off, even for a small startup? Oh yeah, we did. And we were right.

> 4 whole months?

I didn't state 4 full months. It was however something that I spent my free time researching over the course of 4 months. I also did a lot of other things though :)

>Read about the Dunning-Kruger effect and avoid coming off as overconfident at all costs, when interviewing young developers/technical people that is a giant red flag in my experience.

Don't worry, when doing interviews a bigger risk for me is coming off as too unsure of myself. I like to state my opinion as directly and confidently as I can on HN. Mainly because it's good writing practice and because there's nothing at stake (I care very little if some of the readers on HN get a bad opinion of me because they don't agree with what I'm saying).

> No, that's not an Ad Hominem

It very clearly is an Ad Hominem. He's trying to refute my point by arguing against my person (You don't have the right kind of experience to be talking about this) instead of refuting my arguments on their own merit. This happens often as I'm not shy about what I've done in the past and enjoy saying things that I believe in but that I feel many others don't like to hear (makes for good discussions ... well at least if they try to refute my points)

All right, most of these comments seem to be about how he went the completely wrong direction looking to get hired and how each of us would have done it completely differently. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

Would he have done better if he had just "launched something himself"? Perhaps. How about being a fantastic coder and orator too? Certainly. That's not the point. He had persistence. When it comes to running a company and trying to be successful, there are few traits more valuable than persistence -- and he has more of it than the majority of extremely smart people I know.

I know a lot of absolutely fantastic coders. Many of them are very creative too. But the lack of persistence and drive is what will prevent them from dealing with the emotional rollercoaster and disappointment that is running a company.

Somebody with persistence and intelligence can learn any skill. And most importantly, they can keep performing their skills when everybody else -- even those 50 times better at it than they -- have quit.

EDIT: And I should have included: Amar, hats off to you. You're going to go far.

I have read almost to the end and I still have no idea what a "growth hacker" does. Is this SEO (another blurry, but less blurry term) or content generation or scaling?

this is depressing. cheers to the guy for his persistence and interest - but seriously - why would you still want to work for a company after being literally treated like crap like that? also - what bargaining value do you have at all w.r.t. salaries or equity if you go in seeming like the most desperate person alive? It should be the other way around - if you´re good and talented - which the author of the article obviously is - then companies should court you to be come a part of their business. Case in point - the 42floors guys - who were awesome enough to really try to woo Dan Shipper publicly - http://42floors.com/blog/consider-this-a-job-offer-to-work-a... - at the end of the day - you want to be valuable to a company - and you want them to want you - telling them that they can use you isnt that.