The title can be parsed ambiguously. At first, I was surprised as I read it as: "We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews. Here's Why." and expected an article focusing on interviewing one team member at a time. It's perhaps better stated as "Why Some Groups Aren't Invited To Interviews".
Back <i>many</i> years ago when I used to interview people for restaurant work we had a stock phrase that we would write on rejected applications: "others more qualified." It's as simple as that. Nothing especially wrong with the candidate, but we had better choices.<p>Interesting to see the same dynamic in place in the gamut between mundane restaurant work and YC applications.
It's fine if you don't want to tell people since there are legitimate reasons not to. But this is mostly a cop out.<p>We know that YC application reviewers make notes and obviously do some sort of internal ranking. There may be cases where better startups just push slightly "worse" ones down, but there's obviously some startups that are passed over for specific reasons that YC knows about. I guarantee most of these reasons/notes would be very useful for an early startup.<p>Too bad they'll never know.
Somewhere YC is <i>doing</i> ranking of applications. When ranking gets done some function <i>does</i> get applied to each group. It might be beneficial for YC to know how this function works so they can debug it. For instance the YC's ranking function can generate set of components that contributes to final rank.<p>If YC wants to scale it is imperative to understand their own ranking ranking function. If we say that I have no idea why group A was considered better than group b then its not very scientific and there can be not much hope to improve something that we don't understand. Of course, it's different matter if this information is passed back to group because I suspect that would make ranking function more vulnerable to gaming.
I think most people would appreciate some feedback on something they work hard for, even if it's just an "atta boy, looks good, keep on going--sorry it didn't work out", or even better some productive feedback ("you need to narrow your focus" or "market already saturated").<p>I have never applied for YC, but I have applied to other things in life that seem like a black hole from the outside. Just an acknowledgement of something that surely took a lot of time would be a nice gesture. I mean, I'm sure you're nice folks, right? Would you ignore applicants if you met them on the street?
This is just one of those things you learn in life. You'll never find out the real reason someone rejected you. It doesn't matter if it's a girl or an interviewer. That's just how it is. The only thing to do is to take your best guess and improve on that next time.<p>Oftentimes, the people doing the rejecting may not even know the real reason. Sure, everyone can come up with something that sounds rational but how do you know it's not because you looked at them weird the first time you met because you were nervous?
there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" <i>is</i> paradoxical and i'm not really convinced it's a reason...
Hopefully the one who wrote this article is not a moderator on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/</a>. Very misleading title.
I think the only useful case for an explanation is if your application was defective per the outline, but I doubt that's the main reject reason anyway.
So just to confirm, if we didn't receive an email or any notification on Hacker News, we were not selected, correct? Not sure if we were supposed to receive a 'Sorry' email.