AwesomeGriffin

I've heard this sort of thing happening in Third World countries. Perhaps the US is - for all its advanced technology and creature comforts - essentially now a Third World kleptocracy. Silicon Valley and Manhattan are like Dubai - gaudy showcases that don't represent the true nature of the hinterland. I would be very wary about working in Dubai; I would be equally wary about working and living in the US for the same reasons.

> probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck

More probably these decisions are made at a very high level and the individual abilities of these workers aren't even taken into consideration. The real lessons here are never trust your employer, loyalty is a two-way street and always have an exit plan.

> Find someone in your network who works at one of these places and get them to forward your resume.

People who haven't been to college aren't likely to have those kinds of connections. If they do, they're not going to be desperate for work.

> Oh yeah, if you really need the money, maybe an early stage startup isn't the best idea :P

If you really need the money you'll work for the next paycheck no matter who's paying it, even if it's just for the next month or two.

Perhaps some way that Yelp independently verifies the identity of the reviewer (maybe some two-factor authentication such as an SMS message), but keeps the reviewer's identity anonymous from the public to prevent harassment of honest reviewers.

This identity would also include some additional checks such as business affiliation and location, so for example a restaurant owner in a given zipcode can't post reviews on other restaurants within a certain radius of their business premises.

Not sure how scalable or workable all this would be though.

Sounds more like a "let's see how their mind works" rather than a question of serious intent.

When I started doing Django projects back in 2007 I certainly found Django very cumbersome - the lack of features in the ORM, the clumsy template language, the terrible authentication system (User.get_profile and so on). I preferred Pylons by a mile (the Flask/Pyramid of its day).

Django in 2015 though pretty much does everything I need. I still have gripes but when you factor in extras like the Django Rest Framework it's still my go-to for new projects unless it's something completely unusual.

Unfortunately my experience. If you want to learn how to code professionally, don't work at a startup (except as a lesson on how not to do it).

> Rather, those people were the communists, Stalin-defenders in the 60s

I think you'll find a lot of them were rather Trotsyists rather than Stalinists[1] which made the leap to the right during Reagan's early anti-USSR years somewhat easier as they had a long term hatred of the (post-Stalin) Soviet Union.

But yes, they were still assholes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism