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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#121

Post by Gualdrapo »

I'll always be grateful to HN because I got my previous job thanks to it and it was the best thing ever, but the spam thing here is absolutely true. I've getting many of ones that send a calendly link for a "collaboration partnership" with a really bogus description and from email addresses that reek to spam farms. They will send you a following email with a "Hello?" a couple hours of so after sending the first one.

The previous month also got a couple from "Mark M, the founder of kinect.io" about a "quick thought about your resume" that just sounded like they will get you into a pyramid scheme or something.

Mourning my dog, unemployed, and all I get is spam/scam emails when trying to get a job, is not nice at all.

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

#122

Post by codeforafrica »

ibejoeb wrote: post #80
codeforafrica wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have the technology to scrape your profile page too.

Of course we do. but it's not happening. Not yet anyways. Or not at scale. It's like the joke with the bear. I don't need to outrun the bear, I only need to outrun you.

But I didn't post this to gloat, just to point out that spammers are lazy. Of course if everyone moves their email into the profile then this will change, but even if everyone reading this thread does it, most others won't, so I trust that this will still work for some time.

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

#123

Post by ghaff »

mikepurvis wrote: post #102
bflesch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On MacOS it's Shift + Option + Hyphen. On mobile it's long-press the hyphen on the keyboard. On Windows I use https://cemrajc.github.io/em-n-en/ so that ==- is turned into it system-wide. On recent Ubuntu versions, you can set up Compose Key, for example with Caps Lock: https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-get-em-dash-ubuntu-lin... I've long been an em-dash user and enjoyer and hope that using it stops becoming such…

Honestly, the whole, ooh em-dash means it must be AI meme makes me want to use them like I always have more.

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

#124

Post by rvba »

codeforafrica wrote: post #69
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.

The people scraping were too dumb to do it so far, but you just reminded them to start doing it.

Alrhough technically HN could detect bots opening tons of profiles and feed them wrong data.

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

#127

Post by tamimio »

> been unemployed for 6 months

Slightly unrelated, but years ago I went in similar situation, and at around the same months I was in the same mindset, anxious and frustrated, but months after that while still unemployed, something snapped in my brain and I just stopped caring, kinda fuck it all, despite start getting offers and employers are reaching out, I used to ignore some and replying late to others, and when I got the offers I was being too critical about them.. eventually things went back to normal but I have no idea what was that, the confidence and the risk taking were off the charts!

Just hang in there, it will get better, that’s how life works, like a sinusoidal wave, ups and downs.

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

#128

Post by ryandrake »

By some stroke of super-luck, my entry in the "recruiter spam E-mail list" has my first name wrong! So it's super easy to tell which unsolicited "opportunities" are fake. They all start with "Hi, [incorrect name], I am reaching out because..." And yes, for the last 2 years or so, 100% of these unsolicited E-mails include my fake name.

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

#129

Post by franky47 »

I once made the mistake to reply one of those threads with a public email address, it's now an incubator for AI-generated spam. And not just slop text: now we're getting full vibe-coded HTML UI..

Example: https://bsky.app/profile/francoisbest.com/post/3mhq6znfcxk2d

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

#130

Post by runjake »

Those people don't think they're spamming. They're caught up in their own hype and think they're offering the opportunity of a lifetime -- even though they don't know what they want, exactly.

A good general tip is that every email should begin with a "bottom line, up front" (BLUF).

Tell people what you want, need, or recommend first. Then provide supporting details.

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