[Osmium]

I say this partly in jest but... it's nice to see a lean startup using its limited resources correctly by creating levels for Portal 2. For all I know, this could've been an employee's pet project, but if not I'm not sure I see the value.

Also, the jobs homepage lede is a little grating:

"We're seeking brilliant people ..." [Click "I'm brilliant" to continue]

Because who doesn't think they deserve brilliant people? Nice employers and a good corporate culture are obviously very important, but can't it be taken too far? I think, what it comes down to, is that I don't like seeing a company's ego on display so brazenly, especially when they're a startup which still has a lot to prove.

[TillE]

This whole obsession over Super Ninja Rockstar MegaUltraDevelopers is getting to be a bit much. Everyone says they want the top 0.1%, which they just aren't going to get. Maybe it's because I don't consider myself "brilliant". I'm a reasonably intelligent guy with a good education, loads of experience, and a diverse skillset. But I'm not a genius. Very few are.

You've gotta be realistic, and I get the impression that unless a company is paying rather large salaries and/or offering extremely interesting problems to solve, they're only likely to attract people with overinflated egos with that kind of rhetoric, rather than the true best of the best.

[teh_klev]

I'm in agreement here. I wonder how many solid and experienced devs are put off applying for these jobs by this current fad. I consider myself a fairly good dev with a broad range of skills in development and devops, but as soon as I see "Super Ninja Rockstar" etc I roll my eye's and skip to the next job listing.

I wonder how many companies miss out on actual "Super Ninja Rockstar" devs, who are in reality modest individuals, because of this type of wording?

Or maybe I'm just a boring old mid-40's fart.

[jtbigwoo]

Or maybe I'm just a boring old mid-40's fart.

That's part of it, right? I assume that all these silly requirements and hoops are really saying, "We want the best of the best as long as you're under 30."

[scrumper]

They do tend to come with things like, "Benefits: monthly mountaineering trips, and we spear-fish for team sushi lunches once a week," which are perhaps slightly more appealing to young singles than the over 30s.

Certainly this 'boring old fart' would rather get home to his family at the end of a long day than spend even more time comparing haircuts with a bunch of yippy twenty-somethings.

[daeken]

> Certainly this 'boring old fart' would rather get home to his family at the end of a long day than spend even more time comparing haircuts with a bunch of yippy twenty-somethings.

I'm 25 and fully agree. While in my case it's not getting home to my family, it's having time to have a decent work-life balance. I spent years doing nothing but startup work, and I'll never go back to that, no matter how much equity is thrown at me. At the end of the day, I like being able to sit back, relax, and hack some stuff, write some music, and spend time with my friends; I don't need work to provide those things for me.

[rhizome]

"Getting?" Frankly I'm a little shocked that people are still using it after all the derision it's received. It's getting to be (I'd like to think) a black mark along the lines of the Web Economy Bullshit Generator.

[madaxe]

The best hires are fresh CS/maths grads with little commercial experience and a burning desire to learn.

All you have to do is provide an environment in which they can, provide a raise as and when they "level up", provide infinite caffeine, interesting problems, and the rest, as they say, is history.

[sramsay]

I assume you're basing that on your direct experience with twenty-five year veterans who have used their complete mastery of a popular toolchain to ship a couple of dozen production systems to customers who were in turn delighted by the quality of the work and the high level of professionalism.

[madaxe]

Show me a 25 year master in web technologies.

I'm basing it on personal experience of having grown a company from nothing without funding to an enterprise carrying over £1bn of client commerce in 6 years. But what would I know.

Oh, and 100% client retention and no marketing except word of mouth. I'd say that's satisfaction.

[somebehemoth]

This is called a fallacy of dramatic instance. Your problem domain and your company are satisfied with young programmers, but you cannot extrapolate that to all software enterprises.

[madaxe]

Sure, but you can extrapolate it to the entire web industry, which is my domain. I've built teams for clients (we started out taking equity in startups in exchange for prototyping and team assembly), and in every instance have followed that formula. In every instance they've had successful eight figure exits.

Sure, it's likely not universally applicable, however you shouldn't underestimate the power of an open mind.

[matthuggins]

"Best" in what sense?

[madaxe]

Productivity, enthusiasm, willingness to learn new tricks (get 'em in knowing PHP, watch 'em learn C, Java, and ASM as they go deeper into our stack), and willing to take the risk of sticking their neck out with outlandish but brilliant ideas.

[ryaf]

Frequent use of ASM in a web dev shop? Really?

[madaxe]

Not to a huge degree, admittedly, but enough that more than a few of us have ended up with a more in-depth knowledge of assembly than one might expect.

This has typically arisen from working with existing OSS projects which incorporate vector transforms and the ilk in ASM, often badly or subtly brokenly, and from building optimised functions for doing fun things like creating n-dimensional maps of customer/product relationships in order to determine purchase propensity based on cluster profiles.

So yeah, ASM in a web shop. Except we're only kinda a web shop these days - client sites are our marketing platform, but our business is business systems.

[rwhitman]

At first I was going to agree with you, but then thought about how extortionate the commissions are for most tech recruiters...

If they are trying to recruit smart talent with a lot of free time on their hands (IE nerdy college students), then there is probably high ROI from a stunt like this. Its on the front page of HN, probably Reddit and maybe some other blogs by now. Huge PR gain, plus a challenge that has smart creative young people clamoring to work for them. Its actually a smart investment.

[contravert]

Well, at the very least, it's getting attention, including yours. How many other startups are desperately seeking employees that you have no idea exist?