Broken record: startups are also probably rejecting a lot of engineering candidates that would perform as well or better than anyone on their existing team, because tech industry hiring processes are folkloric and irrational.

I co-manage a consultancy. We operate in the valley. We're in a very specialized niche that is especially demanding of software development skills. Our skills needs also track the market, because we have to play on our clients turf. Consultancies running in steady state have an especially direct relationship between recruiting and revenue.

A few years ago, we found ourselves crunched. We turned a lot of different knobs to try to solve the problem. For a while, Hacker News was our #1 recruiting vehicle. We ran ads. We went to events at schools. We shook down our networks and those of our team (by offering larger and larger recruiting bonuses, among other things).

We have since resolved this problem. My current perspective is that we have little trouble filling slots as we add them, in any market --- we operate in Chicago (where it is trivially easy to recruit), SFBA (harder), and NYC (hardest). We've been in a comfortable place with recruiting for almost a year now (ie, about half the lifetime of a typical startup).

I attribute our success to just a few things:

* We created long-running outreach events (the Watsi-pledging crypto challenges, the joint Square MSP CTF) that are graded so that large numbers of people can engage and get value from them, but people who are especially interested in them can self-select their way to talking to us about a job. Worth mentioning: the crypto challenges, which are currently by far our most successful recruiting vehicle (followed by Stripe's CTF #2) are just a series of emails we send; they're essentially a blog post that we weaponized instead of wasting on a blog.

* We totally overhauled our interview process, with three main goals: (1) we over-communicate and sell our roles before we ever get selective with candidates, (2) we use quantifiable work-sample tests as the most important weighted component in selecting candidates, and (3) we standardize interviews so we can track what is and isn't predictive of success.

Both of these approaches have paid off, but improving interviews has been the more important of the two. Compare the first 2/3rds of Matasano's lifetime to the last 1/3rd. The typical candidate we've hired lately would never have gotten hired at early Matasano, because (a) they wouldn't have had the resume for it, and (b) we over-weighted intangibles like how convincing candidates were in face-to-face interviews. But the candidates we've hired lately compare extremely well to our earlier teams! It's actually kind of magical: we interview people whose only prior work experience is "Line of Business .NET Developer", and they end up showing us how to write exploits for elliptic curve partial nonce bias attacks that involve Fourier transforms and BKZ lattice reduction steps that take 6 hours to run.

How? By running an outreach program that attracts people who are interested in crypto, and building an interview process that doesn't care what your resume says or how slick you are in an interview.

Call it the "Moneyball" strategy.

Later: if I've hijacked the thread here, let me know; I've said all this before and am happy to delete the comment.

A lot of people seem to think that Single Page App frameworks like Angular/Ember are suitable for use on the public facing client side. I've always believed that SPAs are meant to be behind a login, where you don't have to also deal with spiders and other sub-optimal browsing devices, and you have a little bit more wriggle room when it comes to routing and web history.

Just look at Blogger...their client-side rendering is annoying as all get out. It's just a blog post, render it server side and give me the content, then sprinkle on some gracefully degrading JS on top to spice it up.

I say this as a huge proponent of Angular who uses it for all his web app projects who also wouldn't ever use it on a public facing application.

Satire works when you hold folly up to ridicule. Central banking is possibly the greatest human invention since sanitation. The U.S. central banking system ranks among the finest of its kind.

Bitcoin handles 7 transactions a second on a good day, has no reliable institutional actors, and I can neither pay taxes nor satisfy court judgments with it. It is an impressive proof-of-concept for decentralized trust in cryptosystems, but it is hardly a currency.

I'm starting to be a bit disillusioned with this whole "we can't find great people" spiel that a lot of startups put up.

I have friends who are extremely good engineers (i.e., a mix of: contributors to major open source projects used by a lot of SV startups, have given talks at large conferences, published papers at ACM conferences, great portfolio of side/student projects, have worked at great companies previously, frequently write high quality tech articles on their blog, have high reputations on sites like Stack Overflow, etc.) and who have been rejected at interviews from those same companies who say that they can't find talent. (it also certainly doesn't help that the standard answer is "we're sorry, we feel like there isn't a match right now" rather than something constructive. "No match" can mean anything on the spectrum that starts at "you're a terrible engineer and we don't want you" and ends at "one of our interviewers felt threatened by you because you're more knowledgeable so he veto'd you").

Seriously, if you're really desperate for engineering talent, I can give you contact info for a dozen or so of friends who are ready to work for you RIGHT NOW (provided your startup isn't an awful place with awful people, of course) and probably another dozen or two who would work for you given enough convincing.

I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire, but that there's some psychological effect at play that leads companies to make it harder on themselves out of misplaced pride or sense of elitism.

Unless everyone wants to hire Guido Van Rossum or Donald Knuth, but then a) statistically speaking, you're just setting yourself up for failure and b) you need to realize that those kind of people wouldn't want to do the glorified web dev/sys admin'ing that a lot of SV jobs are.

"I have never seen a startup regret being generous with equity for their early employees."

Same here. I always advise startups to err on the side of generosity with equity.

You've had critial success. You've made so much money you could retire, buy an island, and still have enough left over to turn it into a supervillain lair! I get it. You're only in it now for the love of creating, so why not leave the headaches of A titles behind? This is perfectly sensible. Handing off irrational to a protégé, taking your buddies and spinning off a smaller studio would be a great way to do this. Firing half the company that brought you success, however, is a bit of a dick move.

Moby dick's kin the sperm whales are incredibly interesting. One of their remarkable ability is to dive deep, fast and long.

Among all free diving warm blooded animals they go the deepest. They dive to depths 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whales. The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited the earth.

To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is a picture http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg It needs to be magnified for perspective and for the little surprise at the bottom.

It is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness).

The whales are seriously challenging our assumptions about animal intelligence, empathy, society, culture and language. For a long time we believed that the primates were at the top. Search Ted talks and youtube for dolphin intelligence, dont miss the Attenborough ones. For lack of a better word they are just amazing.

Dolphins are for example known to build difficult to make toys (air bubble vortex rings) just to entertain themselves.

They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out too. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion. This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild.

Dolphins in captivity try to imitate us and seem to have no trouble mapping our body parts to theirs. A story goes that a scientist observing an young dolphin from an underwater portal had blown a cloud of cigarette smoke at it. The dolphin promptly went to the mother and did the same to the scientist with milk ! It is now strongly believed that they call each other by name. They try to imitate human speech which takes enormous effort on their part because unlike for example parrots their vocal tract is not conducive for this at all. People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us.

And they originated from ungulates: hoofed warm blooded animals. It came as a surprise to me that that there were hoofed carnivorous animals.