I can't imagine that they're hiring 100s of people.
I also assume that people do apply because it's YC.
And yet, the position goes unfilled for months.
Either they have extremely unrealistic standards (a dna-spliced cross-breed of Carmack and Torvalds with business acumen of Steve Jobs) or there's something extremely unappealing about this job (after all it does seem like building CRUD apps in rails; you get to rub shoulders with Greatness Of Other People but there's curious absence of "competitive salary", or any salary, in the job description).
Well, it you view this page's source. You'll see tags that haven't been used since the 90s like <center>. Maybe the jobs are to maintain legacy systems and alot of engineers don't want to maintain legacy systems. Still, seems like having Y Combinator on your resume would look great.
Hiring engineers is competitive :). Great engineers have a lot of options. We are seeing pretty good traction on our monthly job posts but we would still like to find a couple more great people.
Can you talk about engineering benefits for working on this team besides "you will get to network with hot startups and stuff"? Maybe a bit more color on the technical challenges / culture ?
I think the greatest engineering benefit is being able to take advantage of YC's reach to have a lot of influence.
For example, the YC startup school MOOC was built by one engineer in 2 months. It's now had a major effect on over 10,000 companies who participated. That's pretty cool.
That's a great question. One interesting bit on the job application page:
> We offer standard startup benefits, including equity in YC. As a member of YC, you'll also have opportunities to get to know a lot of the best people in the startup world.
But no mention of a salary. In this particular case I'll make an exception to the rule that you should value your stock at $0.
"Ordinarily a startup should be a C corp. It's cheaper to be an LLC, but if you plan to succeed, you may as well do things right from the start.
With an LLC profits don't get taxed twice like in a regular corporation. So it makes sense to be an LLC if you expect to have substantial profits, but don't expect to grant options, sell shares, or get bought. Consulting firms and law partnerships are often LLCs. YC is an LLC."
The valuation of a company is a reflection of the value of the underlying assets. In the case of YC that is the sum of the value of all the companies YC holds stock in plus intangibles such as the value of the YC brand.
But shares in law partnerships aren't worthless. Presumably YC pays its profits (when its portfolio companies have exit events) out to shareholders, so its shares are worth the future value of those profits.
Everybody says that. Without actual numbers, this is the some as all the other job listings that people rail about where you go through N levels of interviews to find out they want to pay you half a grilled cheese sandwich per day.
Sam has mentioned before that partners have a sliding scale from minimum wage to $300k, with significantly more and less equity, respectively. Most people choose the lowest salary (of course most of those people are already independently wealthy).
Is there much interaction with YC portfolio companies on the technical side? Also, have there previously been folk on the Software Team who have joined (or founded) YC companies?
They've been posting this job for several months in monthly "Who's hiring" thread (here's one from 227 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628215)
I can't imagine that they're hiring 100s of people.
I also assume that people do apply because it's YC.
And yet, the position goes unfilled for months.
Either they have extremely unrealistic standards (a dna-spliced cross-breed of Carmack and Torvalds with business acumen of Steve Jobs) or there's something extremely unappealing about this job (after all it does seem like building CRUD apps in rails; you get to rub shoulders with Greatness Of Other People but there's curious absence of "competitive salary", or any salary, in the job description).