Ask HN: What's going on with the Smarking hiring announcements?

2 points

5 years ago

I've been on HN for a few years now and I've seen countless ads for Smarking hiring people. Is this a real company hiring dozens and dozens of people? I can't figure out what's going on but it seems fishy.

I did some digging and they've posted at least once every month or two on HN for 6 years. A few links:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=smarking.org

- https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=smarking.com

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095279

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26851723

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081361

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26529774

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23249170

There are many many more links but this is just a few. It's more difficult to find the ones where they link to lever.co instead of their own site.

I have nothing against Smarking in any way. I'm just curious why I keep seeing adds for a company that's 7 years old and has only publicly raised $3M (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/smarking). All I could find on revenue is that they're somewhere between $1.2M and $2M a year (https://getlatka.com/companies/smarking & https://www.zoominfo.com/c/smarking/363422106).

This seems like a pretty tiny and old company to be hiring so much. Maybe I'm totally missing how this is a secret unicorn but it just seems off to me.

Please let me know what's going on. I'm just curious why I've seen their ads all the time for years.

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