[kjksf]

I can't help but wonder.

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).

[vit05]

Maybe they have a lot of employee turnover. Always hiring because there is always someone going out to work on a new idea.

[TP4Cornholio]

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.

[snowmaker]

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.