June 12, 2026
Scam jam on the jobs board
Ask HN: Why is there some sort of a scam website being advertised on HN?
Users say a sketchy job ad slipped onto Hacker News — and now they want answers
TLDR: A suspicious job listing on Hacker News sparked backlash after users linked it to BloomTech and questioned why it was allowed on the site at all. Commenters were split between explaining it was a jobs post, not a paid ad, and demanding a public explanation for how something so sketchy got through.
A routine scroll through Hacker News — the startup and coding crowd’s favorite message board — turned into a mini scandal when users started asking why a deeply suspicious-looking job listing was being promoted there at all. The original poster said they’d reported it before and remembered eye-popping claims like 80 to 100-hour work weeks, which instantly set off alarm bells. That alone would be enough to get people muttering, but the real fuel came from the feeling that this company might have friends in powerful places, making the whole thing look less like an accident and more like a very awkward insiders-only mess.
And wow, the comments did not hold back. One user flatly declared, “It’s definitely a scam,” while another quickly jumped in to clarify that this wasn’t a normal ad at all, but a job post, which only added to the confusion: if it’s not an ad, why did it feel like one? Others connected the company to BloomTech, a coding bootcamp with a rough reputation, and that sent the thread into full “we’ve seen this movie before” mode. The mood was part outrage, part detective squad, with commenters digging up old posts, cross-referencing names, and basically doing receipts-driven internet sleuthing in real time.
The harshest take? That this whole episode deserves a “post mortem” — internet-speak for a public explanation of how this got approved in the first place. In other words: the community isn’t just mad at the listing. They want the site itself to explain how the door got opened.
Key Points
- •The post questions why a suspicious or dubious company website was being promoted on Hacker News.
- •The author says they had previously reported the issue.
- •The author recalls a listing that included the phrase “80–100 hrs / week of production building.”
- •The post references a quote attributed to Paul Graham on X: “...I've never seen a company with such dedicated haters. ...”
- •The author says they are willing to hear an argument that could change their mind but says the situation does not look good on the surface.