[ITriedThis]

Thank you for the nice response.

I may have used too harsh a tone in my earlier message, so I apologize if you felt attacked.

If you are tracking HN referrals with a special URL, you wouldn't have known I came from HN. I found your site and the Careers link from a Hacker News post that was not a hiring advertisement. Maybe you could allow people to self-identify their affiliation instead.

Unfortunately, I see no benefit I might gain by reaching out to you directly. I have posted a negative review of your company's hiring process in a public forum. If I was interested in applying for your current or future openings, that probably wouldn't help my case.

I'm happy to have helped identify any issues with your process, and again apologize for the tone in my previous post.

[antgoldbloom]

You're right: we will miss people with this way of tracking referral source. I'm actually less concerned about this issue than when I first posted on HN. We now only post on HN, Stack Exchange and Github and we've found that the quality of the candidate pool is much higher than when we posted more broadly. I view HN, Stack Exchange and Github as equally credibly sources, so distiguishing HN from other sources is less important for us now than it was a few months ago.

Re harsh feedback, I understand the perspective, but think it's actually not such a big issue for us for two reasons: 1. as a culture, we strive to give each other direct feedback, so your comments are in keeping with a culture that we aspire to 2. on a more light-hearted note, FAR more harsh things have been said to us on the Kaggle forums. Helps us develop a tough skin :).

[eganist]

This interaction seems to have gone well on both sides, leaving me feeling particularly warm. As a member of the peanut gallery with no stake in the outcome of this interaction, I'm nonetheless glad this was sorted out!