"It was surprising how honest some (very smart) people would be on this. E.g. "I am average compared to other engineers". For an early stage startup, average is not enough."

Well, they want better than average liars. Could go either way.

Me, neither, although I have run across people who think this way.

What this is, in my view, if it is taken too seriously, is the perfect recipe for instigating employee burnout in short order.

People have definitely found ways to turn PG into a monster, so I am prepared for anything... but Elad Gil? That would be a first, so super excited to hear which parts rubbed you the wrong way. If possible, try to keep the context in mind (early stage startup: 5 people with less than 12 months worth of runway).

I didn't think it was satire, but I'm at the point of my career where I wouldn't want to work for a company like this.

If I'm expected to make a 3-days homework exercise plus a half day live coding session, and then I'm expected to jump at their every whim too (respond email when it's convenient for them, honesty seen as a weakness, expected to be proactive but not too much or you become argumentative), I'd rather look somewhere else.

This reads more like "how to screen for people who will blindly follow your orders". And sure, if you have a small startup maybe you do want people like that. But as a developer I don't think this guide has my best interests in mind.

You're absolutely right that there are many types of people and stages of careers where an early-stage startup is not a good fit.

It's in a serious tone but focused on early startup hiring. I've experienced early-stage startup life, and the article makes sense to me.

I think it's semi-serious trolling.

I feel like HN has become a mecca of FAANG workers, laissez-faire engineering that complain about this and that, look down on startups as slavery, hardwork is considered right-wing ideology and perspiration is toxic.

I wonder if HN has become a parody, have you considered that?

I've been doing startups since 2001, with brief stints at larger places due to acquisitions, and then a sojourn at a FAANG. Something that irritated me well before Hacker News existed, and manifested as Hacker News came into being, was the performative nature of startups. By that I mean all the boxes that startup founders would tick in order to be seen as a 'real' startup. This would create an excessive focus on superficial aspects of a company's culture: things like open plan offices, underpaying employees to keep them 'hungry', employees work 24/7 churning out code... In my own experience I never saw these things actually improving a startup's output. And along side that were many experiences of actual employee exploitation: promising employees the moon on equity by obfuscating their actual stake, shaming employees who did not conform to the founder's superficial sense of a productive programmer, etc.

I believe there is a lot more cynicism around now, because we're several decades into the whole startup thing, and such cynicism is often a good thing. Employees are way more savvy about looking into a startup's finances, business practices ( so many startups were built around the idea that regulations didn't actually exist...), and work culture before listening to the company's hype.

Not to mention that in my large company stints I encountered many people whose work ethic I found admirable. Really the difference between a startup and a large company in my experience, and the reason I prefer startups, is quite simply that startups are not large enough to experience the inevitable communication/hierarchy issues that come up when any group of homo sapiens becomes sufficiently large. I tend to get lost in my work and will work most of my waking hours, and that often isn't even possible at a large company because of the cross team orchestrations, while a typical startup has a big pile of things you can simply dive into individually and solve. You certainly can do that at a large company if you look for things to do, but I like my work to have measurable impact as well.

HN isn't nearly as bad as some "open" source projects, whose code and infrastructure has been completely taken over by seriously under-performing but power-hungry Microsoft, Google and Facebook employees (Amazon and Apple are less prominent here).

You can still say many things here that can't be said practically anywhere else on the Internet.

Sadly, like "open" source developers, startups are quite afraid of MAGAF as well, so they no longer talk as freely as they did 5 years ago.

Maybe the startup ecosystem has just burned a lot of people? Startups seem great for the owners. But for the employees, they can easily be a terrible deal.

There are just so many more Big Tech workers than us scrappy startup people reading and writing here than in the early HN days, and frankly, we have much more to do that keeps us too busy to post on HN as much as they probably have. Yeah, I said it.

Look, I fully support lots of vacation, staying happy, diversity, avoiding burnout - all the things big tech workers rally for. But HN offers zero optimism about solving hard problems, joy of discovery and innovation, struggling through challenges and facing them head on, cooperating with others, leadership and straightforwardness, etc. It's become a cesspool of big tech agony, mixed with social drama, activism and shunning down people that are looking for inspiration. Used to be not like that and it is affecting people like you and many new brilliant people that see no hope but to get a cozy gig at FAANG, check the stock market everyday.

Anecdotally, I used to get sucked into HN for hours because the discussions were good. Now I scan and many days don't find a single decent discussion. Lots of Rust vs Go and politics under the guise of technology. Then again, maybe this is reflecting our society, which is being eaten alive and conglomerated.

Don't forget the occasional wave of Julia!

I am embarrassed to admit that many years ago, I wasted one of my few moments with PG to make the dumbest suggestion ever - in my mind, HN could make some minor SEO tweaks and easily acquire a ton of new traffic, which would help YC get more exposure. He just smiled and didn't say anything. I knew right then and there why I was wrong, but the true extent of my stupidity has only been recently dawning on me.

HN is no longer the site you're looking for. It's no longer the site I'm looking for, either. That irritated me to an unreasonable degree for a while, but I just accept it for what it is now.

I find it's still a useful pointer to interesting links, but if I go into the comments it's knowing they'll be annoying. Align expectations with the reality and it's OK.

What do you use nowadays?

/.

Really? Has Slashdot cycled back around to being as interesting as it was in the 90s?

Other than the Beta redesign, /. _the site_ has always been good. The content has been consistently interesting.

However, the _community_ has changed. I still read the headlines to get an idea of what is happening in the world, but the fine comments have been garbage from the moment Taco left.

> optimism about solving hard problems, joy of discovery and innovation, struggling through challenges and facing them head on, cooperating with others, leadership and straightforwardness,

Enough of us have been given speeches by corporate culture execs or flashy tech leaders making vapourware, so when we hear those words, we await a pile of nonsense to follow.

I've felt this recently, was there a wantrapreneur-exodus I wasn't aware of? Where are all the tales-from-the-trenches posts? Where did the hustle posts go!? Was there a "startups considered toxic" moment that I missed?

Thank you.

Any suggestions for alternatives?

I read lobste.rs but don’t have an invite. It’s absent of politics and ideology discussions. Pure tech as far as I can tell. “What are you doing this weekend?” threads are fun.

Meh. It's a very small subset of tech and has all of the problems of '90s IRC (unnamed rules, cabals of power, cliques of opinion, minimal accountability) with none of the structure that more "modern" organizations (like OFTC) embraced. It's focused mostly around programming languages, tech minimalist culture, and open source culture, though they won't write that anywhere on the site. Anything else is either ignored, flagged, or shunned. Opinions there are strongly held, and opposing them will result in people being nasty to you. I largely view Lobste.rs as an anti-pattern of how to run a community.