Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#261

Post by xp84 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:36 AM 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…

> calculated that he could make the strip. And he did, with a few feet to spare.

Stories like that give me goosebumps. Your dad has (had? if so, I'm sorry) just absolute balls of steel. Not to mention an incredible mind. Thank you for sharing.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#262

Post by xp84 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 5:43 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #238

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Interesting, but on the other side of the coin I can tell you that in 10 years of renting I've only foregone small fractions of my deposits and always by choice (pre-departure inspection tells you what they'd charge for anything amiss, and you can choose to clean/fix/etc. or pay them out of your deposit). If you don't get a pre-departure inspection you're definitely set up for ambiguity and shadiness.

In one apartment, I even spilled some bleach in a closet, and sneakily replaced the piece of carpet from the scraps I found when they were recarpeting a nearby unit. They didn't notice or care.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#263

Post by DelightOne » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 6:58 PM UTC

Braxton1980 wrote: post #243

DelightOne wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making people able to sue for anyone feeling bad about not having gotten the job is a path you should not take. We have something similar in Germany and its horrible for companies. Leeches bleeding you dry.

Isn't Germany the largest economy in the EU and one of the most productive workforces in the world?

Its death by a thousand cuts.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#264

Post by TheNewsIsHere » Wed, Sep 03, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #231

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree with you whole heartedly that scrutiny on a business should focus on the offerings of the business.

As for whether I’m an exception — maybe. Subjectively I think I am because I perceive myself to be putting more into the “business of business” than most other business owners I know, but I also have a bit more time. The services my business provides benefits from heavily cross linking service, sales, and event/auditable data. It fits cleanly into out of box sales processes that business software assumes. When we adopted our ERP we just changed our processes instead of butchering the software. What we actually offer is, to a large extent, set-it-and-check-on-it.

I would think that is a great luxury in a way. I don’t have to do back breaking labor to make a delicious batch of croissants for the masses every day. I’d rather the croissants be tasty than the bakery’s books be perfect. As long as they’re doing what they need to stay in business.

I did have something specific in mind when I made my comment about “how hard can it be?” I think I was painting with too broad a brush. When I typed that I was recalling the FinCEN BOI filings. All of two or three pages of an online wizard asking for all the same information most secretaries of state require, and such a disproportionate outrage about even having to do it. From peers in the business community I heard a lot of “this is too complicated!” Having read the FinCEN documentation on BOI, it definitely sounded way more complicated than it ever was to complete.