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Comment by throwaway5959 | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t great optics: https://archive.ph/pxy91

Serious question: with how much instability there is with this company, why would anyone want to work there? Are they the best in their business and just have hit a rough spot? Why is Flexport so commonly discussed here?

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Flexport is commonly discussed here because it’s a ycombinator company and brands itself as a tech company.

The main reason I know Flexport exists is because up until probably a year or two ago there was constantly a Flexport is Hiring being promoted on the front page of HN. Either it’s unprecedented growth or there’s some turnover requiring that level of constant posting. Starting to uncover that it might have been the latter

> Why is Flexport so commonly discussed here?

Because they're a YC start-up https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flexport

and their founder CEO is well-connected like other tech start-up CEOs https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-10-28...

"Flexport is hiring" posts were popping up like weeds here on HN for a while. And they never allow comments, which I found to be highly suspicious.

"We're hiring" ads from YC companies get special placement on the front page, and (AFAIK) they always have comments turned off. Nothing nefarious about that.

I know that, but I think these hiring posts should allow comments. It is suspicious to me that they don't.

If these companies are truly as great a place to work as they claim to be, then they should be able to very easily defend that in a comment thread. The silence from a lack of discussion on these hiring posts is deafeaning.

They’re not posts, they’re native ads.

Then they should allow native comments

Are there comment sections on linked in jobs? Indeed?

Of course not don't be silly

Neither of those are discussion sites.

The real issue is one of expectations: those kind of job ads are shoehorned into the site’s format, but then seem out of place because they don’t offer one of the most basic and central features that this site offers.

LinkedIn is as much a discussion site as this

corporate virtue signaling is not commentary

Presumably you can’t be referring to the constant stream of self-serving posts with all the substance of an MLM marketing pitch. So what have I missed about LinkedIn? Can you point me to an example of one of the discussions?

The rationale against YC job ads comments, FWIW: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299432>

Otherwise, HN moderates YC and YC-company stories less:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937269>

Can it be called rationale really? Saying job ads aren't intellectually interesting is an argument against job ads. Not for blocking comments. It was a business decision obviously.

I’ve been frequenting here for perhaps 5-6 years both lurking and posting and no one other company as far as I can tell has even remotely made as many “X is Hiring” posts as Flexport. Maybe Smarking. I bet it’s possible to pull numbers to prove me wrong but my memory at least says that Flexport is a specific outlier in terms of how many times they have posted vs other YC companies

Flexport made a large number of hiring posts on this site, so most people here have presumably heard of them.

A major competitor is Maersk Go started [0] as Twill https://maersk.com/twill. After Sanne Manders [1] in 2014 left BCG for startup Flexport, BCG went to the board of Maersk and explained them about the upcoming competitor of Damco https://maersk.com/damco. Maersk and Berlin based BCG Digital Ventures https://bcgdv.com subsequently co-founded Twill in the summer of 2016, initially in Berlin and in march 2017 moved to The Hague across the street of Damco headquarters.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220807165943/https://www.twill...

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/sannemanders

why would anyone want to work there?

Because they can’t get offers elsewhere?

A colleague who had an engineering manager offer from Flexport rescinded was able to find an alternative offer in less than ~2 weeks. n=1.

Regardless of reason why someone wants to work at an org, it's likely they can find gainful employment elsewhere.

There are what seems to be weekly Ask HN posts about how someone can’t get an interview in months of trying and a bunch of people reply confirming that “things are bad right now”.

If I was laid off and been sending my resume out for the last six months without any success I’d not be picky.

There’s also monthly “who is hiring” and “who wants to be hired” these post typically have hundreds of comments. I don’t sit on the site all day but I haven’t seen the regularity of posts you’re speaking of.

Indeed, and you shouldn't be picky when you can't afford to be. But! You should also be networking and looking for your next job on day 1 at your current job. Reputation and network gets you hired, and throwing resumes into the abyss is suboptimal. If you do not have a list of former and current colleagues you could reach out to today and be confident that they could either refer you into a role or connect you to someone who can, I highly recommend fixing that over the long term. This also enables you to consistently negotiate from a position of power (another gig is your BATNA).

This is not to say you won't get hired by applying through a website career page, LinkedIn, an ATS, whatever, but having a strong network will always win vs pipeline luck. Some people are just not good at interviewing, and some are simply not a fit for the role.

I would consider working there. There is something very real and tangible about a supply chain and shipping company. It is like computers meeting one of the oldest technologies (ships) in the world, on a global scale.

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