Ask HN: Can we persist hide YC job postings from the same company?

65 points by dpres 6 years ago | 52 comments

Frequent job posts by YC companies prioritized on front page:

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineer in SF - 1 hour ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21508840)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 20 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318785)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineers in SF and in ATX - 32 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21213893)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring 2 Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 39 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21146429)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring 2 Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 46 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21080481)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 54 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21003584)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Director of Engineer in SF - 75 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20822555)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 89 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20695766)

ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring Full-Stack Engineers in SF - 3 months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20571209)

Would love a setting to turn this off, so new posts from same company are auto hidden.

dickeytk 6 years ago |

As the only form of advertising that HN does—I think this is a totally acceptable trade-off to being able to use it for free.

dang 6 years ago | |

There are also Launch HNs, which get placed on the front page, mostly when YC is in session and especially towards Demo Day, when our inbox piles up with founders handing their papers in before the deadline.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

muzani 6 years ago | |

Sure but as with other forms of advertising, it should be relevant. There are lots of other good YC companies too.

toomuchtodo 6 years ago | |

Even if someone has decided they have no interest in pursuing a gig at a YC startup (no complaints personally, great folks, great opportunities for those interested)? Just prominently advertise https://www.workatastartup.com/ on the HN homepage instead or give us an option to hide them in our HN profile.

jamiequint 6 years ago | | |

Yes, because you're using the site for free it's not up to you.

bcrosby95 6 years ago | | |

They aren't that common. And are easy to ignore. It's not like they have a banner constantly taking up the top 4-5 spots. Or popups. These sorts of posts aren't even on the front page more often then not.

wizzwizz4 6 years ago |

If you really want to hide it, you could write a CSS rule with the :has selector. Probably won't be too long 'till that's standardised and implemented. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:has

But, as the only thing really funding Hacker News, I think unobtrusive, easy-to-identify job ads are a worthy price to pay.

tedivm 6 years ago | |

Are these actually funding Hacker News? I just thought since YC owns Hacker News they were giving out free job postings to the companies they fund.

IMO hacker news basically pays for itself with all the publicity it gives YC and the various YC companies. I'm sure other companies would be willing to pay a fortune for that kind of marketing (although it can obviously be a mixed blessing).

kristianc 6 years ago | | |

> ‘IMO hacker news basically pays for itself with all the publicity it gives YC and the various YC companies.‘

‘I’ll just take this soda, the grocery store can afford it.’

rapnie 6 years ago | |

> the only thing really funding Hacker News

Wouldn't YC also get value - maybe enough to fund HN - from analysing usage data (upvotes, downvotes, link clicks, maybe PII even, etc.), e.g. to perceive market trends, other topics of interest for services they provide their startup ecosystem?

muzani 6 years ago | | |

I think the only data they're interested in is whether this person makes a good founder. They link HN accounts to the YC application.

kristianc 6 years ago | | |

> Wouldn't YC also get value - maybe enough to fund HN - from analysing usage data (upvotes, downvotes, link clicks, maybe PII even, etc.), e.g. to perceive market trends, other topics of interest for services they provide their startup ecosystem?

That kind of thing isn’t so popular around here.

badrequest 6 years ago |

The funny thing is, I've noticed these too, and all I come away with is the impression that nobody wants to work for ZeroCater. I can't imagine that impression bodes well on recruiting.

pmiller2 6 years ago | |

If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can see they've grown from 188 to 248 employees in the past year. Of those, 8 have been engineers. Overall, it looks like they have about 57 engineers in total now.

toomuchtodo 6 years ago | | |

How many people have left in that period of time? Churn is a valuable metric.

whalesalad 6 years ago |

Alternatively it would be cool if comments could be open on job posts so that folks who've had experience applying, interviewing or working at the company can leave notes for others.

ianai 6 years ago | |

Cool idea but highly unlikely to go anywhere constructive. Lots of anon accounts at the least.

I’d like it, but it’s doubtful.

dang 6 years ago |

The job ads are already staggered so that a company's ad can't appear on the front page until it has fallen off https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs. That's why you're seeing a week or two elapse between any of those posts.

redmattred 6 years ago |

Not sure why YC would build a feature to limit the audience of their job postings on a platform they own and operate

jacquesc 6 years ago | |

You could argue that it might even increase the audience if specific users can hide companies they won't be working at and as a result they'd see more job postings from other places.

redmattred 6 years ago | | |

Fair point

dang 6 years ago | |

We actually do, at least on a per-company basis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21510998

itronitron 6 years ago |

I think a lot of companies post job openings as a form of advertising. I'm not saying that is what is happening here, but there always seems to be a set of companies that have the same positions listed for over a year, despite being relatively small companies.

JMTQp8lwXL 6 years ago | |

When I see a position that's been open for awhile (one company has popped up here on and off for what feels like ~2 years), it seems to raise a red flag. If you can't fill the position, something is off.

hamandcheese 6 years ago | | |

Growth stage startups, as well as any engineering org above a certain size (a few hundred maybe?) are perpetually hiring.

rco8786 6 years ago | |

As anecdotal support, I used BuildZoom for a recent home build solely because I saw their job postings on HN.

(The experience was just ok, but we did find a builder we love through them)

the_watcher 6 years ago |

There's a "hide" button on every post on HN, including job posts.

thrower123 6 years ago | |

It's extra helpful on the 1st of every month. There seems to be more and more varieties of the "Who's X-ing?" posts every month.

The hide button is a great way to unobtrusively clear out stuff you don't care about. One of the best features.

dang 6 years ago | | |

I'm glad you like it. I was going to remove it at one point, but a two-initialed founder of this site who shall remain nameless protested strongly against that idea.