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

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

#111
post #81
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fine to criticize a comment that looks like AI in a thread where someone complains about AI. The sentence has exactly same meaning if they'd use a single "-" as well. I don't know which browsers have s where double "--" is turned into emdash, but on the systems I'm familiar with one needs to go certain lengths before an emdash appears. Emdash does not magically appear, and it seems some people love playing with…

In a world where double quotes are incredibly overloaded in meaning, the multiple types of dashes (including hyphens and double hyphens) do seem excessive. But em dashes are widely used and are a pretty commonly prescribed style. I use em dashes in more formal writing and double hyphens in comments here just because it's incrementally easier.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not exactly. Recruiters often can guarantee an interview with the hiring manager while if you submitted your resume to the company directly, you'll just get lost in the sea of resumes so not much point going around them. I also always give them a PDF resume and I'm pretty sure they don't edit them as sometimes during a video interview the employer pulls up my resume as a screen share to go through it and it's always…

There are a lot of places that are more interested in rejecting people than they are in accepting people and the act of getting a headhunter involved a commitment device that helps get them out of the rejection mindset.

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

#113

My BASIC programming discord server gets weekly and sometimes daily "full stack developers" looking to sell their services to us. It's just spam.

I have seen the same thing in a local slack I frequent. Not weekly, but once a month or so.

It doesn't last long, but it sure is annoying. Sometimes they even join and then spam DM rather than post in a public channel.

It must pay off often enough to make it it worth it, but I can't imagine hiring someone I found through a spam message.

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

#114
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not if you're a valuable candidate. An example (I have intimate experience with) is the finance/hft space in NYC -- if you're employed at a competitive player in this space in trading/quant/engineering you will almost certainly be given a phone interview w/o question at every other competitor when you reach out. If you don't trust the 'contact us' forms on their website it's dead simple to search e.g. LinkedIn to fin…

There is a certain amount of job interviewing that people do to gather intelligence. I've went to numerous job interviews where I was trying to find out what was going on and not particularly interested in changing jobs. Companies sure do interview people for the same reason.

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

#115
The product need here is an LLM 'answering machine' that accepts emails, determines if the email is spam or a valid email or something in between. If It's in between it could say something like 'Hello, I am [user]s email filtering service. I think your email might be automatically generated, can you please tell me why [user] would need to see this? and make a judgement based on the response.

No spammer will manually reply to that, some AI spambots might, but it should be apparent to the LLM that's what is happening.

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

#117
post #16

As a general rule, if someone ever posts any kind of career troubles on any platform, the only correct responses should contain sympathy or a relevant career opportunity. Anything else is so callous. Hang in there Ilia, you're not the only one hurting, and don't apologize for venting. Most of us in the HN community are far more supportive.

[flagged]

You're right. It's obviously a mix. And I'm like you, I put it out there to see what will come up, but I won't starve tomorrow.

Still, the sentiment of: professionals should behave professionally, and this forum should be collegial and also recognize things are pretty tough out there for many people right now... that stands.

FWIW I lived through the .com crash and what is going on right now maybe isn't the same intensity of depth of job loss but the churn and intensity absolutely going on for longer and with far more ambiguity.

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

#118

Ordinary, non-elite jobseekers (at least in the US) NEED a job or they will be homeless. If you want somebody to stop asking for a job, give them a job.

I don’t understand how that follows. The poster in this thread is looking for a job. How are they supposed to give someone a job if they’re searching for one themselves?

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

#119
post #79
post #16

As a general rule, if someone ever posts any kind of career troubles on any platform, the only correct responses should contain sympathy or a relevant career opportunity. Anything else is so callous. Hang in there Ilia, you're not the only one hurting, and don't apologize for venting. Most of us in the HN community are far more supportive.

[flagged]

"Rule" here is more "rule of thumb" than "strict contract clause". It's like "don't insult someone's appearance"; just common courtesy not to treat someone posting contact info looking for a job as a sales mark.

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

#120
post #42

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

We all know the company is going to be Amazon lol.
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