[majormajor]

Not at a YC company, but yeah my guess would be that it's hard to get the trend followers on board with other stuff. I've anecdotally seen myself a lot of candidates (esp at the recent-university/recent-MS level) who've taken some ML courses cause it's trendy and sounds interesting but (a) don't have a serious enough interest in it or knowledge of how to apply it well enough to be a good fit on our ML teams and (b) aren't open to other roles because they sound less cool or have a perception that the day to day work will be more tedious.

[ammon]

Author of the post. I think that this is exactly right. I don't know what motivated the companies to put that policy in place (they just told us that they had this preference). But I can speculate. There is an epidemic of interest in ML. Four out of 5 college grads we speak to list it as an interest. I think that interest has grown to the point where it's no longer any kind of signal about technical strength, and perhaps a signal that the candidates will not be flexible about what they work on.

[lackbeard]

I'd be curious to hear about the inverse. Have you found there are skills/disciplines that companies are highly interested in but no candidates are?

[j2kun]

What about we academic programmers who have real experience and knowledge about ML. Is that still a negative sign? Or does the academic part make it worse :)

[paulydavis]

Has age, race and gender discrimination been looked at?

[kevinschumacher]

Totally agree with this.

Many candidates I see that have a "strong interest" in machine learning have no idea wtf machine learning really entails; they are listing it as an interest because it is a buzzword and "sounds hard". Most of them have just used scikit-learn once or twice, and have no idea about statistics.

(also not at a YC company)