In response to a story currently on the front page titled "FB is the Only Other Platform Used by 20% of College Students. Join Us!" [1]<p>Do you actually want to hire people who are going to fall for dishonest linkbait like that?<p>YC companies, I understand that you get to post job ads on HN and they automatically show up on the front page. Great. But please, show some respect to the people you are trying to recruit, and show some respect for this exclusive privilege PG gives you.<p>If you read the full post[1] you'll see that what they are referring to is the college students at a single university. At this university, apparently, 20% of students signed up at launch, and 30% of those use it daily. Making it more like 6% of students, at one university, who use their app. Probably a little more if you count weekly or monthly users. But still. That, in comparison to what the headline claims (20% of college students, everywhere) is ridiculously inaccurate.<p>And also, what about Google? Way, way more than 20% of college students use Gmail, Docs, etc. And what about things like Craigslist? It is even claimed that their app can tell you "exactly what you need to get done every day, with no input". No input is qualitatively different than "very little input, but it's really easy and quick."<p>You can, and should, do better. In addition to misleading people being a mean thing to do (even when effective), it doesn't do you any good to mislead <i>your own future employees</i>, anyway. Geez.<p>---<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6269664
YC companies always have the worst link-baiting lines to get you to click on their job offers. Just put them in a standard template so we know who is looking for what before clicking on the link. I propose:<p>{company} ({yc season}) looking for {role}<p>Role should be the actual function title and if applicable mentioning the language-stack (i.e. RoR, node) the candidate should master.
As a newer HN user I was surprised that there are no comments on job postings. I've also noticed some interesting posts and think there could be some constructive conversation around them.<p>I can appreciate why there are no comments but also I think it would be interesting to allow direct feedback to job postings.<p>Anyone else ever thought this, too?
It wouldn't have been that bad had they made one simple change .. from (20% of College Students) to (20% of <some big name school>) or (20% of a major public university).<p>It would have actually been more impressive if they weren't so vague .. now they are probably going to turn off a lot of good prospects.<p>I say this as a YC alum whose 1st job post was fairly ill-advised (though not dishonest). Believe me, it is quite tempting to play around, so I wouldn't be too hard especially on the smaller teams who haven't been recruiting/employing for too long.<p>They will learn, soon enough. It's also important to note that many teams consist of 17-22 year olds, and as this app is aimed at college students it seems like it could be one of those teams. So cut them some slack.
Thanks for addressing this, I was wondering what was going on with that other post. The content did seem intriguing, but also a little shady at the same time.
Hats off to that! Lots of the job postings on HN tend to make outlandish requests/offerings just because 'hey we got HN front page'. Some are downright shameful.<p>Also, in before the HN cabal muzzles this one.
The way I saw it was that they only operate at a few universities, and at the ones they do, they have 20% of the student body.<p>That being said, I agree it was disingenuous at the least and downright misleading at the worst.
Unfortunately, dishonesty sells. How did all the large megacorporations get to where they are now?<p>Not by being great programmers and free thinkers, but by being greedy businessmen and, later, buying tons of lobbyists.<p>This piece of shit company is ... well... just being a normal company.