Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#231

Post by csomar » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #195

Workaccount2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically small businesses tend to be the most egregious violators of labor laws and humanity in general. Mega-corp isn't typically evil, it just wins a lot by being incredibly advantaged in whatever it pursues. Teams of lawyers, armies of engineers, rows of consultants. Small businesses on the other hand tend to be the ones dumping oil in the river, firing employees that they don't want to back pay, bankrolling fam…

As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book. I get confused by other small business owners who complain about this because it’s all stuff you’d need to do anyway. I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP. This isn’t terribly complicated. I took courses on corporate accounting in college and I took the ERP training. Even if I didn’t have all of that, I’d still have to actually…

> As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.

You are an exception.

> I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP.

Not only this requires someone knowledgeable enough but it is also time/energy consuming. If you force this on every small business, you'll probably kill something like 95% of hair-dressers.

Honestly, I don't think this is a problem. If we are scrutinizing a bakery, I'd rather the scrutiny to be put on health/food concerns rather than employee hiring practices. That is assuming the bakery employs less than 6-7 people.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#232

Post by csomar » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #156

bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all want to be, though. All business want to be big-time like Amazon, but not all of them are so lucky. I don't understand the making of excuses for small businesses as though they are somehow morally better than large businesses. Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.

> Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor. Yeah, no. I’m no longer an entrepreneur - ran out of runway - but it was always my goal to have aggressive profit sharing as part of my company. Acceptable salaries - years of those salaries saved “in the bank” and profit-share the rest. I never wanted free labor. In fact, the reason I didn’t have employees is because I couldn’t afford…

So... I don't get the point here?

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#233

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

legacynl wrote: post #230

gruez wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho. Nobody is concerned about companies being sad, they're concerned about making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely. >when the only leeches i've seen in the business world were the companies that require labor to make money and then pay back a less than equitable amount to the people doing work. define "equitable".

> making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely. At some point you'd have to realize that continuing to give companies what they want out fear of them leaving, will only incentivize companies to be scummier and scummier. Second of all, how would you imagine companies opting out of a jurisdiction? Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummi…

>Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?

If non-scummy companies realize that even trying in that region will lead to lawsuits by malcontents and losers, they'll leave too. You're left only with the scummy ones, because they figure they'll have skipped town before the lawsuits come rolling in. And if your regulatory framework discourages that heavily enough to dissuade them, they'll stay away too.

When circumstances are hostile enough, no one wants a piece of it. Always lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#234

Post by nathan_douglas » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:38 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #184

bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all want to be, though. All business want to be big-time like Amazon, but not all of them are so lucky. I don't understand the making of excuses for small businesses as though they are somehow morally better than large businesses. Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.

Every business owner wants to minimize costs. Every employee wants to maximize their compensation. In other words, the Law of Supply & Demand.

I think you're leaving out a few "all things being equal" and other caveats. Compensation is not necessarily monetary (especially in the US), costs are more than just salary, etc.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#235

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #131

xp84 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they don't. This kind of mustachio-twirling caricature isn't a helpful mental model of how business works. Businesses are just large bunches of people, each trying to maximize various metrics given the incentives they interact with. None of those people, including the owner, is automatically pro-slavery, which is the other word for "wants free labor." Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize t…

You're arguing with me, but this statement... > Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible. ...is exactly in agreement with what I said above. The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures. E.g., If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements. I would also accept…

>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.

No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they won't get a good price or even a sale. They want good reviews from people who pay rent on time (or hell, even the people who are occasionally late but come through in the end), and they just want to be a trillion light years away from the hoarders, squatters, and apartment-destroyers.

Seen from the other side, you'd come to realize that almost all the horror stories you've heard are, at minimum, far more nuanced than you were led to believe, and that some large fraction were just fabricated entirely by people you'd never want living next door to you.

>My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. T

That's the thing though. There's this gigantic middle ground between nobility and villainy which is people just trying to get along and do what they're obligated to do, but you have leftists everywhere constantly slandering them because a German miscreant two centuries ago liked to mooch off his rich friends.

I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something. Only children want things for free (because they know no better), and it's what separates them from adults.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#236

Post by tptacek » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:07 PM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #226

tptacek wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that employers and prospective employees will disagree about what is and isn't "misinformation", and only a trial can resolve that question when the law gives a cause of action for it.

Sure, but the threat of having to spend money on a trial should incentivize employers to be factual and clear in their advertisements. Edge cases will get sorted out by trials at first, but then there will be case law that will discourage people from bringing questionable cases.

Again, this starts with a proposal to end "ghost jobs" and ends with... whatever problem it is you're trying to solve here. And doesn't fix the "ghost job" problem!

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#237

Post by gosub100 » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

Gormo wrote: post #223

gosub100 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was affirming money was speech?

No, that ruling was almost exactly the opposite. The FEC tried to argue, based on the "electioneering communication" provisions of the McCain-Feingold act, that expression of opinions that might benefit a candidate was equivalent to a monetary donation to that candidate, so their authority to regulate campaign donations included the power to suppress the publication of certain political speech. Basically, they were a…

Thank you for the explanation. I'll admit this was intellectual laziness on my part.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#238

Post by tptacek » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 4:06 PM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #235

bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing with me, but this statement... > Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible. ...is exactly in agreement with what I said above. The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures. E.g., If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements. I would also accept…

>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements. No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they…

I believe all of this but also want to say that in my life as a renter I never once had a landlord return a security deposit without me taking them to court. There's definitely some ruthlessness.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#239

Post by novok » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #211

WalterBright wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody going for a leetcode interview without doing prep work first is not a good candidate to start with. I coached a newly minted PhD engineer into spending 3 weeks studying leetcode prep materials before the interview, telling him that per-hour it would be the best investment of his career. Shockingly, he listened, studied for 3 weeks, and absolutely nailed it. And landed the big bucks job, too. > Their brains go…

Just for fun, I found among my dad's papers the written tests he had to pass before he could even sit in the cockpit of an F-86 Sabrejet. They were quite comprehensive and full of minutia. For damn sure the AF wasn't going to let anyone fly one of those monsters without proving they could study and learn everything about them by heart. No excuses about brain freeze is going to fly (pun intended). One day, he was flyi…

Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s

Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the thing it is measuring is wrong.

One of the best and smartest engineers I have ever hired had visible anxiety and objectively did not pass the interview but we pushed for it anyway and was hired as a jr engineer. He is a staff engineer now, leads various large company library projects and is the go to expert about various systems in the entire company and will probably become a sr staff engineer. He also probably hasn't changed jobs because he knows he's bad at interviews, which is incredibly sad.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#240

Post by gilbetron » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

Just HackerNews this. It's probably an actual vibe-code project to have a list of ghost jobs that are crowd-maintained that people can use to filter them out of job sites. Like RSS for ghost jobs.