Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 291 posts

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#61

Post by tayo42 »

noitpmeder wrote: post #52
dheera wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of all the recruiters who reach out to me saying they're working on filling some engineer position but never say the company name, and when asked, they want to have a call. Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line

They can't, otherwise a significant fraction of the people they reach out to would just skip the head hunter and contact the company directly. Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly. IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-sal…

That makes no sense becasue contacting the company directly is usually just a communication blackhole

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#62

Post by celdon25 »

dheera wrote: post #42
andrewzeno wrote: post #24

My email is filled with junk from cybersecurity "experts" telling me that my open source project is "very compromised" and that they will gladly reveal to me what the issue is, if I commit to paying them a bug bounty. I get at least a few every week. I hate them, but I feel like we are well past the point where in any place where there is money to be made, the majority of cold outreach will be from semi-personalized…

Reminds me of all the recruiters who reach out to me saying they're working on filling some engineer position but never say the company name, and when asked, they want to have a call. Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line

That stopped being super frustrating for me about a year ago. Wishing it were the other way though…

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#63

Post by stronglikedan »

> I am naturally an extremely optimistic person, but boy is energy on the low by now.

That's what they are relying on, and that's why they will never stop. You're asking sociopaths to be empathetic at the one time when their sociopathy pays off big - when people are desperate.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#64

Post by Tade0 »

gedy wrote: post #23
Zak wrote: post #3

I got one of those too, from "Alya", which seems to be an LLM-based tool the creator describes as his daughter. Beyond the usual rudeness of spam, that's a little creepy.

You should call these folks/companies out by name, they aren't respecting you, your time, or situation.

I don't think they're actual companies. One of the more recent emails I received contains this bit:

"If you're already employed, I can also support you in taking on additional contract work. I'll guide you through the entire interview process to help you succeed and get hired. In this partnership, your main role would be attending client meetings, while I handle all development and written communication. We would then split the income, with you receiving 40% of the project earnings."

Guy introduced himself as a "senior full-stack developer with over nine years of experience in web, mobile, and iOS development".

Oddly specific number.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#65

Post by goolz »

trinix912 wrote: post #51
Esophagus4 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that happen?? I’ve always been curious how those things go down

They say they're a software developer from a poor country looking for someone willing to leave their laptop on overnight for a 50% split of the paycheck. I got one a long time ago, they even mentioned they need help because their can't do the work from an IP of their country. Needless to say I just trashed the email and only figured out it was one of those after reading about the NK employee scandal on here.

Yep! They are rampant on Upwork. You could probably find a cell of them in a day if you wanted, just go looking for jobs with the 'crypto' tag, haha. They have offered me serious sums of money to "simply install RDP and give us access to your network". I imagine people desperate enough take them up on it too.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#66

Post by noitpmeder »

zamadatix wrote: post #59
bflesch wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No space em dash = a real person who has been bulldozed by LLMs using it with spaces.

I've had to configure a few editors to stop turning my natural '--' into endashes...

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#67

Post by Macha »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #38
pluc wrote: post #26

Have you gotten the "hey, wanna be a North Korean proxy?" offer yet?

Does that happen?? I’ve always been curious how those things go down

Usually not so bluntly in the first email but I’ve seen a few emails in my spam that seem likely to have been leading that direction.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#68

Post by mrkstu »

noitpmeder wrote: post #52
dheera wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of all the recruiters who reach out to me saying they're working on filling some engineer position but never say the company name, and when asked, they want to have a call. Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line

They can't, otherwise a significant fraction of the people they reach out to would just skip the head hunter and contact the company directly. Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly. IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-sal…

Depends- my current position was via a staffing firm that was engaged directly by my new company to fill the position, since they had an existing trust relationship.

But they indeed were comfortable revealing the hiring company early in the process due to that trust level…

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#69

Post by codeforafrica »

ibejoeb wrote: post #10

I just started getting a barrage of these last month. They're just scraping those threads. I don't think there's much to do about it. These aren't "real" hn folks that actually participate here.

That's because you all share your email addresses directly in your posts. I put my email address in my profile, and anyone genuinely interested is just one click away from getting my address from there or from my website which i also link to. Aside from a handful of exceptions I get no spam whatsoever, despite posting for years and not obscuring my address at all. And what I do get is most likely hand-written.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#70

Post by ghaff »

bflesch wrote: post #54
chrismorgan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it helps or not—the typical contact like this hasn’t been a human for decades now. What I’m seeing these days is materially almost identical to what went out ten years ago. Basic form letter with a cover sentence or paragraph of either no relevance, or a tenuous but normally ill-researched claim at relevance.

[flagged]

I'd probably use either a semicolon or a period there. But this demonization of a perfectly reasonable English punctuation mark absolutely has to stop.
Post reply on HN