We're a young company that's so hot, we melt ice in our sleep. Some of our investors even believe we're responsible for global warming. Out hotness is to be expected: our 5 founders hail from top engineering schools, and one even won $5,000 in a single night playing online poker when he was 13 (for reals).

Our users? Cooler than a polar bear's toe nails. Think Tom from MySpace, but even cooler. They're young, they love technology and they all have fat bank accounts. Oh, they're all beautiful people too.

Our trajectory is clear: extreme penetration of a lucrative niche market in Year 1, and world domination in Year 2. We've already grown 500% in our first 2 weeks after launch. See http://yfrog.com/kfu2tcj

We're looking for an awesome Python developer with a big ego and low self-esteem. Someone who knows he's the sheeeeet but doesn't want to prove it at a big company that does lame stuff like QA. Someone who can down a can of Coke and a box of Mentos and then go on to devour a four-course meal of web-scale challenges the likes of which no other startup has ever faced. Seriously.

What do we offer? Put simply, The Life. As an early employee, you'll receive a salary that will enable you to rent a condo in Palo Alto with 3 other startup dude roommates, a huge equity stake that will be massively diluted as we raise new rounds of funding from some of the most respected angels and VCs in the Valley, and the ginormous confidence that comes with knowing you're changing the world one unique visitor at a time.

If you're ready to take your awesomeness to the next level and think you have what it takes to hang, send us an email at socially.awkward.hipster.startup@gmail.com and tell us why we shouldn't laugh at your Github account.

But they wouldn't get it, of course, unless they'd lived through the same history as the artist.

what happened to the 6pack of beer and a pack of filterless Camel? Sounds like technology has profoundly changed.

I viewed it out of context, through the news:yc iPhone app, from "best comments" page, and there's no link to 'parent' post (at least not that I'm aware of).

I really thought it was a genuine job ad. I think this says a lot.

So anyone who claims that developers are somehow immune to hype probably doesn't realize the hype he/she is actually falling for.

As they say "it's called work for a reason."

Sure, we all (well, mostly all) want a fun, happy workplace... but if I'm working on something that's mind-numbingly boring, I'm going to zone out and not give a flip about the red-bull and the nerf fights and the after-work LAN parties and all that B.S., in about 2 minutes.

:)

"We're in niche X."

Example: We're in cloud storage. That gives away nothing about your "secret sauce" while still providing the minimal amount of info needed for a hacker to know if they are interested in what you are building.

==================================================

Wassup broz.

We're an awesome new startup that totally kicks ass and we drink alot of beer and stufzlol.

Anyway, we need a nodejs ninja rockstar bro to chill with us and write some codez.

We aint gunna tell you what we do cuz thats not how we roll but email us at throw.away@gmail.com ==================================================

My company is hiring:

We do e-commerce where people can set up their own fashion boutique -- we have a massive catalog full of top-tier designer products. We have made incredible partnerships with brands, the fashion industry, etc. People who set up stores facilitate social shopping via their store and make a small commission per sale. If you don't get why this is cool b/c you wear sweatpants or the same pair of jeans, that's OK, I have data to show you.

Our site, www.styleowner.com is solid on the backend but needs a lot of frontend love. If you like backbone.js, web standards, etc., come join us and help make it one of the best sites on the web. Backend developers wanted too however. We use Ruby, Sinatra, DataMapper, Node, Redis and more. Interest in IOS is also a plus.

We're hiring for 2-3 positions. We are looking to make some key hires right now and the goal is a superb team.

If you're in San Fran let me meet with you over coffee or beers and show you our codebase, tell you in incredible detail what we're working on, etc. I'd also like to see some of your code. The goal is to give you an idea if you want to work on our app and what that would entail over at least the next few months.

We're funded by Accel, have great investors, etc. The only challenge has been in tech hiring b/c if you're good you probably already have a job you enjoy. So give it a shot and meet us and see what you think.

Putting together an awesome engineering team is our #1 priority. We're in the stage where we're making key hires and ramping up.

email matt@styleowner.com

I wouldn't upvote the post in normal circumstances, but it isn't off-topic and downvoting it only makes it unreadable.

The OP indicated that if the hyperbole were removed, he/she would potentially be interested in finding a new job!

- The people I'll be working with - The product I'll be working on - The job I'll be doing

These posts are way to ambiguous to answer these real questions. The only questions they do answer is that you were good enough to get into YC. If you want someone to apply for the job just cause you are a YC company, tough luck - the applicants are gonna suck big time.

At this stage, most employees are going to be working on a shared vision more than anything, which comes down to how you feel about the people. The goal with our description was to reflect the people and at least define the problem space a little bit. "Non douchebags doing ads" might have been more direct.

my understanding was that they funded the people as much as the idea. i doubt the fact that a bunch of smart people were doing something cool with - shock - boobies would stop him.

Believe me, I've worked in and with the industry for years and it is ripe for a breakthrough. I actually was working on a project at a porn company that had the potential to disrupt the porn industry but was abandoned due to internal political reasons. If pg wanted me to build it again, I'd be all over it.

Young company looking for C++ programmers to help create a small fraction of the functionality provided by a Bloomberg terminal for a small fraction of the price of a Bloomberg terminal. Financial knowledge appreciated, but not required.

NOTE: If I had more than a few hours a week to work on such a thing, and I didn't have a large amount of student debt, then this would be a posting I would eventually like to make. For now, the above is only meant to serve as an example of how I think a job posting should read.

If you're looking to hire someone by posting a public job description, why are you unwilling to say who you are?

The older and more experienced I get, the more the notion of "secret companies" (aka stealth mode) seems absurd. The CIA might need to keep secrets. A web technology company does not. Like another poster said, nobody's suggesting that you have to reveal your deepest darkest technology special sauce in your job posting.

But why not at least reveal the name and nature of your business? It's fairly relevant.

#1) Don't just say what the job title is, be clear on what it means to you. I've had job interviews for a "frontend developer" be anything from a PSD-slicer to a 95% backend coder.

#2) If you want a passionate employee (you do), you need to give enough information about your company so they can tell if it interests them. I could care less what cool technology you use if I don't know whether I'm reforming healthcare or inventing new ways to impose banking fees. You can say what you do without providing any sort of specific information.

#3) Sarcasm online can be very easily misinterpreted. I suggest being upfront and professional in any job posting but if you must use some kind of sarcasm, be sure to note it.

Note: This is by no means a complete list, simply some reoccurring issues I've seen during my recent job search. Edit: Formatting.

The "Summer 2011 YC company seeks CoffeeScript drinking frontend engineer" post seems very generic to me. It's nice that they mention the industry they're working in, but otherwise, I didn't pick up on much differentiation in the job description from other companies looking to fill a similar role (and the post nearly admits that itself, at the end).

Seriously though, whoever started the whole rockstar/ninja thing should be punished. This is programming. Forget sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and throwing stars. I want to work with people who always know where their towel is.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2659445

I was trying to be a bit more diplomatic but my feeling was the same. It serves no purpose to be so discrete all the time.

Further, you can tell us what the business is, and what is compelling about it, without giving up the secret sauce. You can even mention the secret sauce without giving up the secret.

EG, if your startup was google: We're building a revolutionary search engine using the social proof inherent in the web to give people results that are far more relevant than Yahoo and Inktomi. There, did I give away the page rank algorithm? No, but I did reveal the compelling advantage that google had: they figured out how to derive social proof from the web... which at the time was unheard of.

Even if that's too revealing.... at least talk about your technology stack. If you write a 500 word essay and the only mentions of technology is that you use "rails/node.js" -- something at first blush seems like not a choice but a pair of choices-- you're being evasive one something you have no reason to be evasive on. "We're using rails to host the primary web app, and node.js to run a really nice realtime updating system, blah blah blah."

You can talk about that... and you are giving candidates an opportunity to know what you're like based on your technology choices and how you talk about technology.

I think it's rare that startups have anything as ground breaking as page rank, and even rarer that it seems ground breaking to anyone else at the time. If we had some specific formula for growing environment saving bacteria from leftover banana peels, we'd tell you for sure.

What we really have is a set of guiding principles, indicators that tell us we're pointed roughly where we should be pointed, and lots of things we want to try to get there.

The tech details weren't meant to be evasive as much as de-emphasized. They're there because we think good candidates might find those specific technologies interesting. We had variants on the description with many more specifics, but none of them seemed entirely important at the time. I do like talking tech, though, so here's an exhaustive look:

* We use CoffeeScript at several levels and happen to think it's pretty awesome. Anything that we could have done in JS has been done in CoffeeScript instead, this includes super tight ad serving javascript, the frontend code for our user facing apps, etc.

* We have two major classes of users, those who use our tools to do better advertising, and those who see ads. The "magic" for the first class is whatever the latest release candidate of Rails 3.1 is (rc5 maybe?), the second is the Node.js version that Heroku's Cedar stack supports (0.4.6 I think).

* Both apps feed copious amounts of information into a backend Mongo replica set, and the Node layer leans on Redis for some things.

* We've done limited data visualization with that d3 toolkit I mentioned. We feel that data viz is often underrated, but an extremely useful thing for us to devote resources to. If we could justify buying the entire New York Times data visualization team we'd do so.

If my rails/node reference was to you, it wasn't meant personally. Just as an example that struck me, and one of many.

The four bullet points are very useful, and more importantly they are genuine. That's really good about them. They give me a good perspective on where your business is at, and where you're thinking right and where I think you've made a wrong choice.

I think I didn't mention that one of the more important piece of information one can get form a job listing is whether the owners of the company have their heads up their asses. Seeing that you made what I consider a "wrong" choice reminds me of that. (And I don't think you have your heads up your asses, but that's the kind of situation that developers really want to avoid... ad asks for "rock stars" and mentioned cutting edge technologies and languages, and then you find out you'r doing ASP programming.) Those four bullet points make the company real in my head.. if that makes any sense.

It's not just you being "old", and it's not just job descriptions. The negative effects of obvious hyperbole in web ads is well documented.

FWIW, I think both of the job ads cited in startupcto's original post are poor, though one is clearly much worse than the other. (I'm willing to provide specific criticisms, but I won't do so here unless someone asks me to.)

The irony of our post sounding hyperbolic is that "dragging advertising into the modern world" often means getting rid of ads that make peoples' eyes bleed, visual hyperbole just doesn't work that well.

And, please, no job descriptions involving rock stars or code ninjas! :)

YC is awesome, but it definitely causes scrutiny where it wouldn't otherwise exist. Having to be a little sneaky with job posts is one of the few downsides of that attention.

Also, we're hiring gourmet code chefs if you prefer them to ninjas.

YC startups aren't newsworthy until they earn it.

In aggregate, their opinions and predictions might be a peek around the corner of time.

I like your idea too (sorta) although I think you'll pivot into a matchmaking service in time.

You also have to consider that many of these YC companies are young, small and inexperienced, regardless of their job descriptions, so take it with a grain of salt before you commit to anyone. These guys could pivot at any given moment, change technology stack on a dime (just happened to me), fire you because you don't fit in, etc.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I wrote the first job description.

You had me at "syncretic.sausage"! Please promise me that you'll make .sausage a custom TLD someday!

Locking yourself into a technology choice is a hard decision to make, but if you're living the dream and need to attract a certain kind of person to make that possible and it makes financial sense in the short term, which is what you're probably after, then you have to go with it. Rails and Node.js are a perfect fit for a low-level technology service provider, but beyond that they lack mainstream credibility and when you're dealing with recruitment issues, which hopefully you will, it's always easier to hire someone who has versatility over a guy who just does one thing.

Good luck and I hope to checking out your work some time soon.

I'm not the OP here, but I'm curious if you've never heard the idiom or the if the idiom just rubs you the wrong way.

> Replace god in this expression by gays, Allah, children, science, music, bits or whatever

That's just it, "for the love of X" doesn't really get a rise out of me for any value of X.

A less common variation of the idiom is "for the love of Mike", which I think points out how arbitrary the object one's affection is in this expression.

> And it doesn't provide any useful and constructive information to the main point.

Without commenting on whether the use was appropriate in this case (frankly I don't have much of an opinion either way), usually that expression is just a way of underscoring the importance of the part that comes after it. For example:

"for the love of x, please stop doing that"

implies more emotion and greater importance than:

"please stop doing that"

Also, there is a hilarious south park episode that delves into this issue. Here's a clip for some yucks: http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/230805/science-help-us

That you choose to get "annoyed" about such things is your problem, nobody else's.