Thanks HN for 15 years of support and helping me find my life's work

There's no rule against being surprised, and especially not against _ever_ being surprised. They are asking people not to express surprise, real or not, when responding to a question, as a courtesy to the person asking. Like: Keep your surprise in check in situations when it's not helping.

I don't think that's too much to ask, just like it's generally considered preferable to not chew with your mouth open when in company, or talk to people with food in your mouth.

They even acknowledge that they expect these rules to not be followed all the time.

I'm surprised that you read it as a general prohibition of being surprised. ;)

Edit: Sorry, wrote my reply before I saw your substantial edits where you clarify your position and distinguish between "positive" and "negative" surprise. I agree there's a better way express surprise. The rule clearly wants people to avoid putting other people down by creating a feeling of "wow, how can you not know this". That's the spirit of the rule, and I guess it could be expressed better. I don't think they'd have a problem if someone managed to turn the surprise into a positive, but to do that, it's good to be mindful that it's often perceived negatively.

> In the end, IT DEPENDS. But there's apparently no room for such nuance at Recurse...

"One thing that often surprises people about the social rules is that we expect people to break them from time to time."

Sounds like there's plenty of room for nuance. They're guidelines. That you spent several paragraphs considering and articulating the difference between a positive social interaction and a negative one means the guideline is probably a good one, even if they didn't bother to write several paragraphs of nuance for each point themselves (which is perfectly reasonable, because brevity has its own value).

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Rate-limit edit:

> That they haven't done so in 15+ years suggests that they think the rule is well-written.

Or it suggests they know more about what social problems actually arise in their community. Your 'vastly better' suggestion of "Don't be a dick" is so vague as to be a completely meaningless guideline, and someone reading that could easily end up doing the condescending surprise act without thinking they're a dick. The purpose of the rule is to call attention to a specific behavior they likely see often to make you think twice about it.

Sorry for the ninja edits. Writing from phone and didn't think there'd be people replying right away.

Seems like we're in agreement. But I reiterate that it's not a good rule if it should be regularly broken, for the good.

Thus, for a project that's been around for seemingly a very long time, it's hard to imagine that they haven't had ample time and feedback to vastly improve the wording of it all. Thus, they seem to be content that it expresses exactly what they want it to.

Not OP, but I was an early employee at a startup that pivoted into this market. The short answer is that you need to do what large-scale enterprise customers want you to do (because that's where the money is). To do that, you need a predictable pipeline that delivers X applications for Y money. One way to achieve that is to get into managing traffic from the big job boards. What we did in the early days was figure out how we can optimize client's sourcing budget to get the most applicants.

We tried "Tinder for jobs" or some bs like that and just couldn't build business around that. Because in the end of the day, you'll end up building a platform that has to compete with Indeed and other established players.

Beats me what it's become, but OkCupid at the outset and probably still by 2010 was about estimating compatibility based on the results of quizzes taken by both parties. To improve results beyond OkCupid's built-in romantic personality types, you could submit your own quizzes or general questions, with results expected to get better the more questions in common both parties had answered. I don't completely remember, but I think you could even specify your own answer and an ideal match's answer separately.

To me, the problems here are reasonably obvious. It works well enough provided the applicant pools are sufficiently small and both parties are honest. Even then, the point of OkCupid or any other dating service is just to get people to meet. Whether they end up in any kind of multi-year contractual relationship akin to getting a job is going to be extremely rare. You'd have to ask them if they even tracked it, but 1 marriage in 10,000 90%+ matches wouldn't surprise me as even an upper bound. Jobs aren't quite as serious as marriage, but still more serious than agreeing to meet for drinks.

It's hard to see how you'd improve on the existing system of posting requisitions and applications. monster.com, indeed.com, whatever else has ever existed are seemingly already a dating service for jobs. Making it specifically "OkCupid for jobs" implies you have some kind of questionnaire-based compatibility estimator that is based on at least as much research as romantic compatibility, and I don't think that kind of research exists, and that the parties be at least as honest as those on OkCupid, which I also don't think will happen. I know the popular imagination is everyone lies on a dating service, but I don't think that's true. They exaggerate, but people will place in their search filters that they really do prefer a particular race, age range, socio-economic status, things that employers aren't legally allowed to admit to. That's aside from the principal/agent split in job requisitions that doesn't exist in dating. At least messaging someone on a dating service you can be reasonably well-assured the person who is claiming to know what they want is the person you'll be matching with. For a job, the requisitions are generic, not matched to a specific team or manager, so compatibility is even more spotty. A job seeker may be perfectly compatible with most teams in an organization, but still not appear to be with the organization itself, which usually expects to be able to move candidates between teams. Imagine a dating service where instead of having to convince a girl to go to prom with you, you have to instead match against her parents first, who have six daughters, might pair you with any of them, and base their own evaluations on a mix of what they believe is required and a stereotype of what they think teenage girls like.

The problems aren't as alike as they superficially appear.