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Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

by logotype on 1/28/25, 7:24 PM with 136 comments

• by TheGamerUncle on 1/28/25, 7:49 PM

  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 offender is mixrank, I know more than twenty people that have applied to no avail, even people with more than 22 years of experience and very fancy titles.

• by themanmaran on 1/28/25, 8:18 PM

  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 messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.

  2. Purely automated applications. There are a lot of "Apply to 1000 jobs with AI" startups out there that just spam job boards [1][2][3].

  3. Qualifications. There is a shocking number of engineers applying to work at an AI company who have never made a single API request to OpenAI. 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.

  The signal to noise ratio is so bad that it's better to just do outbound. At this point the job listing is mostly there so we can share it with candidates that we reach out to.

  [1]https://lazyapply.com/

  [2]https://aiapply.co/

  [3]https://www.reddit.com/r/GetEmployed/comments/1eo8uyp/i_used...

• by kdamica on 1/28/25, 8:04 PM

  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.

• by ryandrake on 1/28/25, 8:00 PM

  It would be cool if the monthly Who's Hiring threads asked companies to optionally disclose useful information like "How long have you had this job open?" or "When was the last time your [company | team] hired someone, and how long did the process take from first posting to the employee's first day on the job?" Better yet, a response SLO for getting back to candidates (this will never happen).

• by jjice on 1/28/25, 8:24 PM

  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 people before a technical interview with the rest of the team and found over half of them either had no clue how to really write any code or were completely lying about any experience they've had.

  We then had five interviews set up for the following week. None of them were a fit. We have a pretty straight forward set of real world examples for our programming questions and no one got them. Keep in mind, all the other engineers on the team had gone through these questions without issue in the past, and we're not particularly amazing engineers. The "trickiest" of them is essentially performing an in memory group by given to arrays of data that have relations to each other. These were all full open internet as well.

  We decided to pause hiring for the next quarter. I think the main issue was the absolute flood of applicants that had no ability to fill the role, and filtering through that with limited man-hours while features still need to be shipped is really difficult.

  Years ago, when I'd be part of engineering hiring efforts, we had a recruiter who would handle screenings, so I don't know if it's always been like this and we need to get better at screening, or if it's notably worse now.

• by ceroxylon on 1/28/25, 7:50 PM

  It is a complicated scene right now. Bots are taking over on both ends, both in creating and interpreting resumes. Companies can have ulterior motives for posting job ads in many directions, including just scraping data.

  My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. The largest hurdle is that adding money to the scenario opens a whole new can of worms for scammers.

• by awkward on 1/28/25, 8:07 PM

  In my career I've split time between startups, fintech, and consulting. Last year I've had a few interviews with VC funded startups that went to second and third rounds, where I would be told outright that developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for.

  I think there's some active memes in the startup community about not hiring people from finance specifically.

• by tslocum on 1/28/25, 7:48 PM

  I've seen a YC startup post for the same back-end job for a year now. I admit that I did not apply, but it doesn't look that unappealing.

• by scarface_74 on 1/28/25, 8:11 PM

  @burgerrito posted a link to a similar submission three months ago where one commenter said for one job they got over 1000 applications.

  It’s almost impossible to stand out and rise above the noise these days if you are just randomly submitting your application to a job board.

  When I mentioned this before, someone asked me should they reach out to the company directly. That doesn’t help either unless you have a special set of skills or experience that would make you stand out.

  Neither “I am a full stack developer” or “I worked for a FAANG” set you apart.

• by linebeck on 1/28/25, 7:51 PM

  It’s likely they know someone they’ve effectively already offered the job to, but equal opportunity laws require a job posting to be made. So while they are technically “hiring”, the job posting is fairly meaningless.

• by burgerrito on 1/28/25, 7:57 PM

  Related:

  Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672>

• by steve_adams_86 on 1/28/25, 8:39 PM

  Not a direct answer, but months ago I was applying to YC startups that were actively posting opportunities. I had great references from past YC startups, what I'd consider a good resume, a proven track record of actually building stuff. Not a single company was interested. This was true outside of YC companies too, though. It was surreal. I started to think I must be a fraud or something.

• by rvz on 1/28/25, 8:00 PM

  Here is the truth: They really are not.

  Why? They don't have the money nor will they risk it on people who they do not know.

  The best way to get "hired" by them is to fiercely compete against them to the point where they wave the white flag and buy you out.

• by CoderJoshDK on 1/28/25, 8:04 PM

  When I was ready to move on, to a new opportunity, I spent most of my effort in the HN thread and work for a startup (owned by YC.) And while most applications resulted in no response, that is on par with any other platform. That said, I did hear back from multiple companies! I made it to late stage interview with 3 companies but stopped once I took an offer from one of them. And this was all in the span of 1 month.

  As a data point, yes, some companies do hire here. Maybe not all. But I had a great experience through YC.

  I think in general, the hiring market is a mess (on both sides) and HN suffers from similar issues.

• by 0x0000000 on 1/28/25, 11:06 PM

  Wow, that edit is something. Post something inflammatory that will garner engagement, then turn it into your own "I'm hiring" post once it's on the front page.

  Quality hack.

• by chrisoconnell on 1/28/25, 7:54 PM

  In the past, I have applied to many YC startups, and have a pretty high response rate. Being that the job board is pretty prominent in the tech world, and engineering jobs are highly competitive, it is likely that a smaller startup does not have the resources to reply to every applicant.

  This being said, I've been self employed for several years, so this may have changed since ~ 2021, but I don't think it's likely.

  Also, the landscape has changed, and some job posting may have been made during more optimistic moments, and they may just be stale, rather than fake.

  I have referred many people to "WorkAtAStartup" in recent years who have had quite a bit of success. While it's unfortunate that you are not having the best of luck, definitely be optimistic and continue to try! There are many great companies that recruit through the YC boards, and I recommend using WorkAtAStartup to have the best chances of response, even more so than their direct job listings.

• by mjasher on 1/28/25, 8:20 PM

  Sorry you've had that experience. My 2 cents is that unless they've done a "big" (> 5 million) seed or series A they probably don't have the money or appetite for much hiring. So target later stage if you aren't already.

• by bobthecowboy on 1/28/25, 8:32 PM

  I've applied to a couple of these. If I remember correctly PostHog and Enveritas both posted here and for both I went past the initial screening step, but that's where it ended for me.

  I also participated in the hiring side for the previous startup I worked at - SoftIron - and we did actually hire someone we found through a post I made here on the monthly Hiring thread. He was a good candidate, but eventually everyone got laid off anyway. I actually felt bad about that - I think we were only around a year after hiring him.

  On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting.

• by gentlesoulcarp on 1/28/25, 10:14 PM

  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.

• by tptacek on 1/28/25, 8:20 PM

  The smaller the company, the less likely the hiring process is a well-oiled machine, from responses to inbounds to true-ing up the JDs currently advertised on the site; compounding that, smaller companies get fewer inbound applicants and can end up holding out for a unicorn fit for a role for a long time. I wouldn't read much into no-response from a startup (totally reasonable to be irritated about it, but it's always a numbers game regardless, so you might not want to be hanging on a response from any one company).

• by fasteddie31003 on 1/28/25, 8:15 PM

  I think we need to turn hiring on its head. I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company. I'm running https://customizedresumes.com/ as my side project and it shows how applicants can now basically spam job applications. It's only going to get worse for hiring managers.

• by rgbrgb on 1/28/25, 7:58 PM

  yes, but most are hiring very selectively and with AI applications some companies are getting thousands of cold applications.

• by carlbren on 1/29/25, 1:24 PM

  They (YC W23) are actively looking for devs: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/capimoney

• by asdasdsddd on 1/28/25, 8:22 PM

  There's a lot of coping here. These YC startups only hire a few applicants. If they have hundred of applications (which is low) then the interview rate will likely be less than 5%.

• by xenospn on 1/28/25, 8:18 PM

  Yes, they are. I’ve gone through multiple rounds with multiple YC companies a few months ago before ultimately starting my own venture.

• by dang on 1/28/25, 9:33 PM

  There are over 5000 YC startups, over 3500 of which are still active. For sure some of those are hiring.

• by Hormold on 1/28/25, 8:27 PM

  Time to build something by yourself!

• by scarface_74 on 1/29/25, 1:33 AM

  Based on the edit:

  What are you offering to pay your “technical cofounder”? I bet it’s peanuts and “equity”. If that’s the case, do you not see that you are part of the same toxic culture that defines many startups hiring process.

• by mikhael28 on 1/28/25, 8:36 PM

  Yes, they are. It’s a numbers game.

• by clarkalistair on 1/28/25, 8:30 PM

  Also a YC company who's actively hiring. We had two new joiners start last year, we have another two lined up for March/April and we have one open position (with more to come later in the year if all goes well). I'm "in charge" of hiring at Devyve (YC S22), and by "in charge" I mean that I'm acting as the TA team because, you know, startup. I don't mean "in charge" as in I make all the decisions on who gets hired - we do that as a team.

• by wendyshu on 1/28/25, 9:20 PM

  Not as far as I can tell

• by steele on 1/28/25, 8:02 PM

  Hiring deepseek

• by very_good_man on 1/28/25, 7:43 PM

  [flagged]