Not sure this throwaway HN account is responsible for your obnoxious un-fan-mail; though I'd be reasonably interested to hear if any of them mentioned links in HN comments specifically.
Alas, writing a blog post about how nobody will hire you and give interview feedback is a sure-fire way to get an abundance of unwanted interview critique for an interview you never did. If I ever find myself with an over-abundance of faith in humanity, I might just do this with a fake name, email and CV and see what gems of human garbage get thrown at me.
On the upside, I'd like to take this opportunity to say that #3, #4 and #5 are absolutely on the money, and all boil down to ease (or, depending on your bias, laziness). It's not easy telling someone their faults - unless it's in an anonymous email to a random stranger on the internet, clearly - and it's far easier for a recruiter to throw cvs / job opportunities everywhere and see what sticks, than to actually be careful and methodical.
You mentioned it's a lot like dating; essentially, many recruiters are the equivalent of those dating gurus who show you how to become an alpha and promote a mixture of negging and other horrible practices; it works based on percentages, not based on content. If 1% of potential partners have low enough self esteem, and you attack 1000 people, you're almost guaranteed to find someone. Lose your soul, find a bed-buddy. To some people, that seems like a good tradeoff. If you spam enough people about your opportunity - often at no cost to yourself - you're bound to get one hit, often at significant profit.
I'm afraid this is never going to change; hedging a critical message so that it doesn't hurt someone's feelings is hard, especially when there is no incentive; letting someone know your budget for their role and missing out on an unreasonable bargain is hard, especially when there is no incentive; and putting real work into recruitment when email spam is just soooo easy is hard, no incentive.
Our only option is to be the change. I'm lucky that I work for a company that values giving recruitment feedback; when people I know well broadcast job opportunities I encourage them to publish a ballpark salary; and when I find a good recruiter I broadcast them far and wide and review them positively on LinkedIn. It might not change the world, but it might help a few.
Thanks for the note. I agree that incentives are difficult. However, I believe the incentives are better in this industry than almost any other one.
Programmers switch jobs frequently, and the startup world especially is still a small place. Word gets around about your company culture, the way you hire, the way you fire, what you pay, etc.
Programmers have hiring power. Especially senior ones with a lot of demonstrated experience. That doesn't mean you deserve to /be hired/, that's not what I was trying to say. It does mean you will /get hired somewhere/, so if you are not under immediate financial pressure you can afford to both be more selective and push back against crappy hiring practices more than other professionals/industries.
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Re: the emails, I can't prove causation, I only know that the moment someone decided to point towards a /person/ that it went from comments /here/, to bizarre anonymous emails attacking me for being an overly-sensitive whiner that probably can't code and that's why I didn't get hired. Which is fine, we all know the internet is a shitty place these days, but it just seems like such a /strange/ reaction to me.
Agree or disagree with the idea that employers should offer prospective employees money for take-homes, or more feedback, or even whether you should tell a jerk to go shove it.
But what is the emotional urge to somehow align current hiring practices in the tech industry with some kind-of, let's be honest, masculinity and toughness and if someone critiques them, they must be #1) a bad programmer, #2) a wimp, and #3) dumb.
I truly don't understand, but honestly, I don't want to put that much effort into it. These days it's easier to block than to empathize, on all sides, and that's a little sad.
I just found the first resume that google returned that was clearly yours. Not that you have to care about random google searches, but you might want to consider taking down your old resume.
What do you mean "not including current job"? This resume clearly says 2014-present.
Do feel free to ignore me, I'm not really trying to force you to explain yourself here if you don't want to.
meaning I just went through a long job search and am now spending all my time learning the ropes of new systems and haven't updated any resume anywhere, because I don't need to send it to anyone for a while I hope.
I have like 19 more projects I'd love to get on the site as well. Cobbler's kids and their shoes and all.
I'd love to ignore you, but when you dox someone with a throwaway green account, presumably to throw some shade on them not being a "true programmer" and they get a bunch of obnoxious emails first thing in the morning, I kinda gotta deal with it.
I've posted all my contact info in various HN hiring threads, so I'm not exactly anonymous here, but making an account to post old resumes just to make some sort of point about my experience or lack thereof was kinda bad form in my opinion, and maybe you should look into your own motivations for doing so for someone that just wanted to vent about how grueling the hiring process can be in tech.
