A recruiter sent me a message in code. I fixed it | Hacker News Reader

A recruiter sent me a message in code. I fixed it

github.com

48 pointsriebschlager59 comments

This feels to me like when you're a teenager and your parents try to be cool around your friends but it only makes you more embarrassed and want nothing to do with them.

There's a great German word for this exact feeling: fremdschämen.

Is that pronounced "friend shaming"?

Fremd actually means foreign, referring to the external source of the shame (schämen).

ˈfʀɛmtˌʃɛːmən, or if you will: "FREMT-shay-men". (You need to gurgle a bit, or at least hint at gurgling, when doing the 'R', now).

However you pronounce it -- I find it hard to have any kind of empathy at all for recruiters (internal or external), and hence, can't quite imagine myself "feeling a sense of shame for them in their place" (per the generic translation).

I don't see an 'R' in there?

When I was a recruiter learning to code, I posted a personal's ad written in SQL on Craigslist. Ended up going out on a date with a DBA :) She was a falconer, and we took her hawk out to hunt crows.

Strong story.

Wow. It is hard to do that in a way that doesn't come off like... this thing.

In grad school I took a class on creativity from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi[1]. He described a creative idea as something that stands apart from other ideas in the same basket.

Think of a large pile of plain ol' red bricks. Now show that pile ask 100 people who know nothing about bricks the question "what can yo do with this pile of bricks?" If 99 people say "build a worker computer by <brick-to-computer-process>", and 1 person says "build a house", then "build a house" is the most creative answer in that sample.

Writing a SQL ad that was basically just a simple query using SELECT, FROM, WHERE. If 100 SQL writers wrote an ad, I don't think mine would have been all that creative, using the definition mentioned above. But as the only SQL-flavored ad in the personals section, it stood out as creative :)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-...

Yes. However, there is a difference between creative and good: Most recruiter emails don't look like what OP got. But that doesn't make that one good.

Yours seems to have been good.

Clearly you shared some common interests. Was there a second date?

No, we were pretty different. But I did introduce her to my former boss. Don't know if they hit it off or not.

Heckin wow

What did those crows ever do to you.

Probably not willingly sacrifice themselves to the falcon I would guess.

jokes on the coder, that's actually written in recscript, a little known scripting language with a sort of C like syntax targeting Microsoft's old ActiveScripting framework.

The Document object is one of the 7 special objects available in the language (others: Resource [every other special object is an instance of Resource], Sheet, Calendar, Sound, Presentation, Database, Browser). Since there isn't any use of the Create Document statement before usage I'm guessing this is after version 2.14 of the language in which Create was dropped as unnecessary (a bit of syntactical sugar).

Anyway Document instantiates a Microsoft Word object and saves it to recscript Documents folder automatically, all text inside of it is indexed, so you can also do stuff like Resources.find("you’fe killing me! Contact me because I desire this");

By the way the recscript code editor which provided an advanced code execution environment to develop in (something like JsFiddle only years prior) also supported open and close parenthesis.

IIRC the open and close parenthesis had special semantic meaning in the language.

Wow, really? I wasn't able to find any reference to this online.

...Poe's Law strikes again.

Spelling mistake on line 43 of the revised code: 'and' should be 'an'. That's just sloppy.

I am working with a french developer right now (English second language) who is really good, but peppers his code with minor grammatical or spelling errors. He is slowly driving me insane and doesn't know it :D

Fixed!

Man. Having my code looked at by HN (even if it's a joke) feels like one of those dreams where you show up to school in your underwear.

I'm barely a developer, and I'm in highschool.

I'm so used to getting told I'm an idiot that I don't even react anymore.

The secret is that we are all idiots. Some just refuse to recognize it and act like jerks because of it. None of us actually "know" most of what we know.

It's unprofessional to start calling names. It's generally uncouth to even start the argument unless you have really strong evidence and can back off when that proves insufficient. Don't be bothered when they don't have the evidence to back it up, but when they do have the evidence fix whatever caused them say it and keep some evidence.

Exactly.

My rule is that if someone calls me out on being wrong, I'll argue, and do my best to support my point. If they provide a better argument, than I'll concede.

Because if you can't admit you're wrong, you'll never learn anything.

I think the nested while loops are trying to capture the logic that they won't leave you alone without trying at least twice.

Sadly the do-while loop structure is largely lost on modern developers.

Tried fixing it so it would run, and the hardest bit was recognizing that the double-quotes weren't actually double-quotes, but rather these two characters: “ ”

Smartquotes... some word processors do that automatically.

http://smartquotesjs.com

More annoyingly, Skype does it. Nothing is worse than when I just want to send a small snippet of code to a colleague and Skype changes all my quotes.

Do something like this in skype: {code} printf("Hello World!"); {code}

I may have asked this here before, or perhaps elsewhere... but why do these characters exist? "Smart" quotes end up breaking things for me so frequently, I've never actually wanted them in any case I can think of. Same goes for en/em dashes. I literally spent a day and a half trying to track down an issue less than a month ago, only to realize as I got to the point of inspecting bytes that I wasn't looking at a regular dash (and incidentally that the SDK I was interacting with doesn't support extended characters).

I don't agree with the premise, but here it is: http://smartquotesjs.com/

shudder

Non-‘smart’ quotes (aka typewriter quotes) exist only because space on typewriter keyboards was limited. If we should get rid of any double-quotes then it would be " which has no semantic meaning (unlike “ and ” which open and close a quotation, and ″ which among other things is the unit mark for inches).

" has semantic meaning in code, whereas “ and ” have semantic meaning in text. If you're a coder, you want " and only ". You especially don't want "helpful" software that thinks you should want text quotes, and tries to fix them for you.

Example in a similar vein, was trying to split Chinese characters by ',', but they were separated by '，'.

They exist to mess with people that copy/paste code from the internet.

Or from any "smart" editor like Outlook.

More accurate title would be "I code reviewed it"... I don't see a working fixed script anywhere.

Edit: I stand corrected. For some reason I thought that was the only file in the repo. It's been a long week but I have no excuse.

There's more than just a readme in the repo:

https://github.com/riebschlager/linkedin-recruiter-email/blo...

It's there. Look at "recruiter-email.js" in the repo.

"Clever" messages in code were clever back in... actually they never were.

That might be part of the use case, though: removes non-techy people from the use of code, and removes techy-people-who-dont-need-me because it's a lame attempt to be clever, helping to narrow the recruiter's net to people more willing to work with them.

Sheesh. If you've got it, don't be afraid to show it. But do so cleanly. Not with something like this

And if you don't have it, than don't bother trying: you're trying to hire those who do: doing this doesn't make you look smart.

Also, use \<newline> to keep your code at 80 columns. I actually don't care if it's exactly 80, but excessively long lines are a pain to read.

You would think someone that works at LinkedIn, a company that likely employees hundreds (thousand(s)?), of engineers would have this proof read before sending it off to potential applicants. This is a real turn off.

To be clear, this was a recruiter ON LinkedIn, not a recruiter FROM LinkedIn.

OH! Haha my mistake, that wording is naturally ambiguous.

It could be the code was sloppy on purpose to illicit a response from you.

That's a good point. Maybe this was a test. Maybe he'll write me another message saying, "Well done, you passed. You may now have this entry-level developer position that is completely wrong for you and matches none of your skills or interests."

When does someone make RecruiterEmail EnterpriseEdition?

Google docs will capitalize keywords in your code if you don't disable it. I haven't tried it, but I imagine they ruin your indentation too.

If any one wants a bunch of emails from curious HNers the domain the script addresses the email to is unclaimed.

supertechcoderhirepeople.com

Didn't he miss a closing brace with the While-While-If structure and only ending with two closing braces?

Yes, I noticed that too.

Just curious, but why does capital "If" make you think of Python?

Hmm. I said the snake case made me think of Python. The capital "If" just made me think "Microsoft Outlook really insists that you capitalize things."

Edit: Oh! I just re-read that sentence. Yeah, I can see why you thought that. I'll fix it. :)

I believe `If` is Visual Basic syntax. ;)

They better recruit him

What a shit piece of code. Recruiters should stop trying to be cool

"How do you do my fellow developer"

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