Because it may be that they are vulnerable to others copying concept and/or giving away hints about the direction they plan to take based on the types of positions they're hiring for.
Playing your cards close to your chest usually does not hurt.
> During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A
> new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The
> first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online
> demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could
> tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT
> flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The
> safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to
> worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java
> developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit
> frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical
> side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting
> looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.
I don't know why this is voted down. I'll go on record as someone who's currently working primarily in PHP and though the phrase "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is certainly true ... PHP has a lot of advantages for hacking.
Free, with robust sets of libraries, frameworks and support in the community. Used by a number of "big guys" (Facebook springs to mind) ... furthermore ... it's 'forgiving' in terms of rapid development.
It has brackets (a small thing I know - but I think better with brackets)
Certainly, if I'm looking around for "my next language" - I think Node.js+MongoDB might be the most exciting stuff out there. But again - there's an advantage for rapid development in PHP on this one. I can get ridiculous bandwidth and storage on a $10 hosting plan if I develop in PHP - wheras if I'd like to take on node.js I've got to buy actual server accounts (not a significant increase in price - but actually a huge leap up in required knowledge).
What about PHP indeed? Or maybe"why not PHP?"
With respect to PG's position, I think he comes from a LISP background - so for his purposes, it's the hammer & nail scenario. His knowledge of LISP makes him aware of what a powerful tool it is (wheras to me - it's just about talkin' funny)
With respect to the other 'hacker languages' it's probably that the differences between .py and .php aren't significant enough to mention both.
PHP is the best tool if it's what you know.
I really don't know why you were downvoted for what seems a legitimate question. But who cares? At the end of the day, Hacker News Karma is roughly as valuable as owning in World of Warcraft ... people who're involved care but the rest of the world will really wonder what you're excited about.
Few webapp concepts can't be reimplemented in a short amount of time. Seems to me often the key is in user base and quality of execution (tech & non-tech) which stealth doesn't really help with.
Of course startup founders can think differently and may be right, I just think the support for this in the community is amusing in light of the "radical transparency" chic we're all into now - do YC startups have more important/valid secrets than the US government?
If that was the reason then why are they telling the positions they're hiring for?
The only thing that they're not telling is their identity, which should be fairly easy for a curious competitor to google - or to social engineer by e-mail.
> If that was the reason then why are they telling the positions they're hiring for?
I've yet to see a job posting that did not have that bit of information in it. Sort of helps when you let your prospective hires know what you're looking for ;)
As a "potential employee" I think that additional information is critical to convincing me of the stability of the company. If I think they're going to be around long enough to pay the cheques etc...
I know that many companies don't post their name, but from the point of view of someone who's been looking around - I think it's critical for me to be sold on the product & culture of the company.
Irrelevant at the end of the day though ... if they don't want to publish their name, it's likely that it's not a good fit for people who care about knowing the name.
(I know that's such a circular definition that it's almost useless - but - in my head it makes a lot of sense)
Playing your cards close to your chest usually does not hurt.