Honestly, I don't know yet. Our timeline is "when it's working really well for software engineers", so it's hard to judge.

"Really well" strikes me as a remarkably high standard.

If the focus is primarily on early employees, then I can see how that makes sense.

For later stage startups, wouldn't YC be concerned with encouraging or supporting monocultures, or otherwise tipping the scales in favor of more software expertise, even if the company is more hardware (or ops or biotech or whatever) heavy?

That's an interesting point. At the moment, I wouldn't give ourselves enough credit to think we can meaningfully tip the scales in that way, but I could see how that could happen down the road.

Out of curiosity, what role would you be looking for?

> I wouldn't give ourselves enough credit to think we can meaningfully tip the scales in that way

I would hope that would be the whole point of such a project! (To reduce hiring friction enough to be able to tip the scales, not actually tip them)

> what role would you be looking for?

Personally, my specialty is ops (fka sysadmin). I rarely see a startup truly needing a dedicated someone-like-me until well after they've hired all their early employees.

Actually, I think you should give Work at a Startup a try now. We have a category for ops already, as it was close to enough software engineering that we thought we'd get some amount of overlap in interest. It doesn't have quite as much activity as the core software engineering roles, but still some. Feel free to email me (in my profile) and let me know how it goes if you try it.

The first thing it still asks is:

>Are you looking for a software engineering position?

Answering "No" hides the "Continue" button. If you hadn't told me otherwise here, I would have had no idea you were including Ops.

I'll try "Yes" and provide more detailed feedback in e-mail.