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  • Hacker News
  • His apology seemed AI generated as well
    by 650
  • Feels like SF Standard gonna get a copyright strike from The Onion for this headline.
    by jeffrallen
  • I could imagine how a potential interviewee might say something like “I’d tattoo myself with your logo for a chance at a job” and a CEO might respond “Hell, yeah! That’s the kind of energy I’m looking for.”

    What I can’t understand is how in a whole executive team, no one thought bringing a tattoo artist to tattoo potential interviewees with was a stupid idea. This wasn’t an accident, or surprise, like a tattoo artist just happened to be there and things got wild. They specifically brought a tattoo artist to do this. What the fuck.

    by dpark
  • Lizard people.
    by rapind
  • You seem to think people in tech/leadership are actually smart. Your mistake
    by tennisflyi
  • Group think. Monkey see, monkey do. It's actually remarkably difficult to be the only one to dissent unless you grew up in a culture where dissent is encouraged.

    The people who work at a company all were filtered from the hiring process of the founder. If his filter included sycophants and suck-ups, he filtered out any dissent or critical thinking that could challenge his decisions. It's easy to get an exec team who doesn't diverge from decisions of the guy at the top, but obviously that much homogeneity / thought alignment comes with a cost.

    Anyway, I'm glad this was publicized. Some rumored or one bad GlassDoor review can be easily overlooked; this will be a stain on the CEO's reputation for a while.

    by thephyber
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

    Or maybe

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux

    by inigyou
  • They didn't think it was a bad idea because they don't have a sense of right and wrong. If something is potentially profitable and technically legal they will do it. This is what YC screens for.
    by oatmeal1
  • > I could imagine how a potential interviewee might say something like “I’d tattoo myself with your logo for a chance at a job” and a CEO might respond “Hell, yeah! That’s the kind of energy I’m looking for.”

    If I were that CEO I'd avoid that person because of their very poor judgement, lack of boundaries, and questionable self respect.

    That you think it's even on the edge of normal describes the current balance of power in the tech job market in a nutshell, though.

    by danans
  • Ew. At what point do we just decide that this whole community has eaten itself? Remember when a "YC founder" was a diligent nerd just trying to make something people want and get to ramen-profitable before the runway from their tiny seed check ran out?

    Now being a founder is such a valuable status that it's attracting people who thinking that ghoulish worshipful body art (on the bodies of people afflicted with the same status envy, it needs to be pointed out) is a great idea.

    Do the nerds even have a home anymore?

    by ajross
  • Come and gone. Gatekeeping has some merits
    by tennisflyi
  • Don’t judge a whole community by one freak.
    by khazhoux
  • Was that image of the plucky hacker shooting their shot actually something based in reality or something cooked up to get people interested in founding a company? Look at the inaugural YC class. Do those people today resemble what you're describing? It is important to have critical literacy about things like this. Describing a narrative that isn't consistent with reality in order to convince people to do something is not unique to Silicon Valley. I'm not encouraging wholesale cynicism but just a healthy level of skepticism.
    by CoolestBeans
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48538229
    by gfat
  • The fantasy series, Farseer trilogy, and beyond (great read) has "Map-Faces". People subjugated to slavery, wearing their current owner's crest on their cheeks so everyone immediately knows who they belong to. Of course, when traded/sold to another, means yet another "map".

    Seems like the valley is getting there and dropping all pretense pretty rapidly.

    by harshalizee
  • I've seen this all over the news. It served its purpose.
    by elmer2
  • What purpose is that? Are you claiming they aren't looking to hire people, and just want their company name out there for other purposes? Or that having this story somehow helps their actual hiring goals (e.g. by dissuading people who think that this is awful from applying, or that it will actually make people want to apply)?

    I can think of several purposes someone might claim that this has. All of them seem pretty dubious to me though, so if you think it's obvious, I would be interested in hearing what you think it is.

    by saghm
  • As a person covered in tattoos, my greatest fear here would be if the company rebranded.
    by enahs-sf
  • You are then dangerously obsolete. New branding means old flesh thrown to bio-degradable trash can and new flesh for the nexgen corpo needles.
    by lenkite
  • Even worse is when the branding (sic) remains, but the image changes.

    I'm wonder if there are lefty geek Tesla lovers that branded themselves and then regretting the image shift.

    Certainly I've seen plenty of tattoos that have become sadly dated (by me).

    by robocat
  • Is it modern slavery already or more nuances required?
    by zx8080
  • Maybe "indirect" modern slavery? First we teach a man how to cult, then we show him how to enslave himself?
    by canadaduane
  • Not quite weimar conditions yet
    by dukeofdoom
  • In Stargate SG-1, the Jaffa slaves had their forehead tattooed by pouring liquid metal. We're getting there.
    by OutOfHere

  •     "We need to find smart people who will work 100 hours a week like Musk"
    "How do we do that?"
    "Let's ask them to tattoo our logo before we'll consider interviewing them"
    "brilliant. That shows the kind of commitment we need"
    "The press will be fantastic as well"
    "lets do it"
    by labrador
  • > We are bold, we take risks, and we do things that haven’t been done before.

    This is a very annoying line. Risk for the sake of risk is self-destructive. The risk-reward profile is what matters, and people respect risk taking with large upside.

    Having your company’s logo tattooed on a bunch of random people is zero or negative upside.

    by janalsncm
  • This whole affair has the dirty shadow of a society like the one depicted in Jennifer Government.
    by richie_adler
  • It's the kind of action founders imagine who would be willing to give optional tattoos to any of their their proud employees after all their unusually generous equity packages have skyrocketed, matured, and been cashed in.

    But they know they don't have what it takes for that.

    by fuzzfactor
  • There seems to be a line of thinking that past unicorn startups had bad risk-reward profiles, and therefore a good founder should be taking lots of bad risks. If they take good risks, they will never succeed and become a unicorn. Very "tres commas".

    So, demonstrating there's no risk too outlandish for you becomes a form of social signaling to investors.

    by ip26
  • Tattooing company logos has already been done https://www.huffpost.com/entry/billy-gibby-aka-hostgator_n_2...

    So really, they are just boring and derivative. Probably an analog to be drawn here for modern SV.

    by chomp