Like a lot of people here, I've been on both sides of the table. Currently on the hiring side of the table interviewing web application developers. I agree with a lot that's said in TFA, especially as someone who's suffered through a months-long motivated job search where I shared the pain. For example:

> There are easily several thousand people in the town who are capable of building that business. Get over yourselves and just freakin hire someone. You're running a website, not curing cancer.

I hear you here. I've posted my team's hiring principles here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18586590

At the top:

- Hiring cycles will be structured and as short as possible.

- When we start a hiring cycle, we will finish it by hiring the most qualified applicant who accepts our offer.

But on this point, I'm a little confused:

> So let me get this straight. You want me to bootstrap a multi-million dollar business, from scratch, operating with minimal marketing and operating funding in a highly competitive channel. Or get your consumer product slotted at a major retailer. Or launch your new web application. For $100,000 a year and no equity.

The general advice I come across here is to treat equity as a lottery ticket and focus on salary. Is the complaint here that salary is an insult? In the Bay Area, sure. But Atlanta? This comes off a bit self-entitled to me. At least without more context.

I think there's also signs of what I'll call premature hindsight bias (feel free to offer a better term). You assume, perhaps reasonably, that once hired, you're going to come in, make friends, kick ass and provide value. I want to believe that you can do it at a salary we both find fair. But until you get here and have been on the job for a few weeks or months, it's going to be really hard for me to know if that's what's going to happen. And if you happen to not be a great fit for unexpected reasons, how do we deal with that? That can be a lot of stress for everyone if not a full-scale disaster. In short, you don't want to get suckered, I don't want to get suckered.

There's a lot of risk and uncertainty in hiring and I imagine risk aversion drives a lot of it. I know it does for me even as I do my best to control it. Hence the 4-5 interviews mentioned in the top comment. (That seems excessive to me. I always wonder what a company gets out of the 5th interview that they didn't get out of the 4th, or the 10th hour of meeting with a candidate that they didn't get out of the 9th.)

Here's an exercise I call Black Boxes that I came up with recently for one of our hiring retrospectives. I think we have a pretty good hiring approach but I'm always looking to improve it. I share it here because I'm interested in hearing the ideas of others:

BOX OPTIONS (alphabetical order):

- Car Type (what type of car does applicant drive?)

- Cover Letter (box may be empty)

- Gender

- LinkedIn Profile (box may be empty)

- Phone Conversation (20-30 minutes)

- Resume

PART 1

Ten people have applied for our web application position. You know nothing about them. You have only a black box for each one. Ten black boxes. You get to look into each black box. Then you have to hire one of these ten applicants.

You get to choose the contents of the box from the options above. Which type of box do you choose to make your hiring decision? In a comment below, list your box. You may include a brief explanation if you wish. Example:

> Resume: This is the first thing I always look at. It should contain the most relevant info and is pretty low investment as it's a standard part of application.

PART 2

Now rank the rest of the boxes above in order of utility.

PART 3

What other boxes would you like to have as an option? Consider time/money costs associated with each box.