Comment by normac2
5 years ago
I'm on a job search, and Replit is one of the places I was going to apply, off of their listings on HN Who is Hiring?. So much for that, and I suspect a lot of devs are going to feel the same. (I don't think I'm good enough to get in, but there're a lot of really good devs who read HN who are.) In a seller's market for developers, this could hurt them in the form of less good talent applying.
That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
which is hilarious given that the CEO of repl.it is literally building something similar to a product that he worked on at codeacademy
This is the absolute best part of this. Re-read his snarky language now knowing this and it's just...funny.
It's very easy to justify doing something to benefit yourself while writing it off as justified, and getting massively offended when someone does the same thing to your perceived detriment.
The irony here is delicious.
Replit's to be a new-age cloud company (ala fly.io) rather than Lynda.com for code. At least, thats what I gather from its founder's posts on Twitter.
> That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
Agreed, I think it's totally fair for the CEO to be a little peeved by the project, and the complaint is about how horrible his handling of it was. This is exacerbated by how unfailingly polite and professional the ex-intern is in the (presumably) unabridged email thread.
Not only am I not interested in working for repl.it but I have asked my org to never pay for their products due to this behavior, we should not reward it and money has the loudest voice.
Would it be against HN's rules to reply to Who's Hiring posts from Replit with a link to this article?
Yes, it would be against the rules at the top of the Who Is Hiring threads.
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved [1]. That's why the OP has been at #1 all day - normally we downweight indignation posts at least a little, to compensate for the default tendency to massively upvote them, but we haven't touched this thread in any way. I don't think we'd take that so far as to selectively turn off the Who Is Hiring rules, though. It would set a confusing precedent.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Thanks for the reply - I definitely won't then. I didn't realize replit was a YC company, and understand the value in keeping Who's Hiring threads clean from criticism - could lead to interesting discussion but at the expense of distracting from the purpose of the thread.
im very glad that negative coverage of a YC startup is so highly upvoted on HN. we still only have your word for it, but thank you for doing what you can to err on the side of caution when it comes to YC startups.
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It would likely go against the spirit of the community to hound a job posting like that. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but turning the hiring posts into any sort of flamewar/off-topic discussion dilutes the value of those threads.
I disagree: If a company posts a job on HN, it is 100% reasonable to point out to the community that working there can come back to bite you.
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I do think it should be allowed to post the link of a related thread. If I see the hiring post on HN, I would like to know more about that company. It's true that I would search the company to find out more about them, but it would be easier to just scroll a bit and find a few threads about them.
I don’t see how it would be especially if you pair it with a questionable asking if they treat all former employees like this.