Fly.io uses their blog to educate people. They have some of the highest quality writing out there and talk about unique topics many people can't talk about with authority (SQLite, distributed systems, etc.).

This is amazing and I highly hope they keep doing what they do. I think it would be better if more companies did the same (sharing their knowledge).

1. Not really a recruiting thing.

2. You'd get disciplined at Fly.io for non-ironically using the word "thought leadership".

We're a company full of message board nerds working on something super fun. We're going to write about it. Best get used to it!

How is this not a recruiting thing? It's promoting your supposedly superior hiring process.

Well, for starters, we've paused hiring for a few months on the role it pertains to?

Once again: this started as a hiring challenge, and Ben and Kyle overperformed and made it something more interesting. I guess we could have waited a few months and ran this at a time when we could metabolize more platform candidates, but, once again: this isn't a recruiting thing.

If you're not hiring, maybe you should remove this call to action implying you are at the bottom of the post:

> We reserved this last challenge for evaluating our staff engineers at Fly.io. So if you think you'd be up to the challenge, we'd love to talk to you.

We're happy to talk. But the first thing you'll hear from us is "we've paused platform hiring for a couple months".

Looks fun and interesting. I will say your recruiting call at the end made some of the devs where I work swear off your service... I think there have been enough scams in this vein that it rubs certain people in a bad way.

Sorry, what? A company blog post that links to their jobs page means you won't use a service? Do you just not use any service that advertises? How do you get Internet access?

I'm not that sensitive and have loved recruiting code games/challenges put out by other companies (like Scribd's AI recruiting game way back...) I was just noting that when I shared this link with my extended team, there was a pretty negative reaction because of how this type of thing has been used in the past by unscrupulous actors.

Our "recruiting call at the end" of what? I'm sorry, I don't understand. This post isn't advertising a new service; it's literally just a series of blog posts.

I am not passing judgment, but it’s literally the last sentence of the link. Personally, I don’t see any problems.

Sounds cool, keep up the great work

Is the discipline shots of malort?

Not even I would come up with a disciplinary scheme requiring employees to ingest poison.

hey John, long time! Sorry that the post came off as thought leadership. We thought it'd be fun to build something like Cryptopals but for distributed systems. Building projects like this helps give awareness to Fly.io but I'd like to think it helps the community at large as well. DigitalOcean did a great job of this in the past as well.

This could be said about alllll the inbound marketing pieces that end up on HN. That being said, I appreciate what Fly is doing and enjoy seeing their content and problem solving.

This is rude for pretty obvious reasons.

I can assure you that YC (in the form of HN admins) isn't doing anything to promote these posts. Like it or not, they're just popular with the community.