Thanks, but I have accepted another offer | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, but I have accepted another offer

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37 pointsbigfatmonkey56 comments

This reads and looks like it was written by a teenager. Quite ironic that it is preaching professionalism.

Edit: I did not mean this as "only girls are unprofessional" so I removed that part. Teenage boys are equally as unprofessional, but I don't think they express it in the exact same way. If this was filled with dick jokes and the like I would have written "teenage boy".

Did you get this far? This explains a bit:

"Trust me I know this already. I’m like barely 22."

The second sentence there feels like it's missing a set of commas for, like, emphasis.

Sorry, what about being a girl conveys unprofessionalism?

"teenage" girls aren't the height of professionalism, I think was the thrust there. The use of the word "like" frequently denotes this. Nothing wrong with girls, period. But teenagers aren't looked up to as the paragons of professionalism.

Are teenage boys the height of professionalism? I think the gender comment is unnecessary, irrelevant, and harmful.

Oh, come off it already. It is clear what he meant, you are just trying really hard to be offended by something.

This was so unprofessional, it's like it was written by a black teenager!

...is that better?

Or is it more obvious now that the original comment was an insult to girls?

No, it was unnecessarily sexist and demeaning.

Yes it was clear the poster was being derogatory to girls. It's also clear you are trying to normalize and justify such behavior. Both are unnecessary.

There are negative traits about both teenage boys and teenage girls. The writing style more closely matches teenage girls in this instance, so that's why the connection was made. Sexism exists in tech but this is not it.

Clearly the poster was talking about the excessive use of `like` which he deems as the typical vocabulary of a teenage girl which is what you're attempting to be upset by. It had nothing to do with teenage boys being significantly more professional than teenage girls, or anything of the sort.

You're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Not to mention the wacky animated GIFs every other paragraph.

Well, those are all content marketing techniques, GIFs and casual language speak to the author's target demographic I suppose.

This is a fair comment and I don't think it ought to be downvoted. It should have been "teenager" - that's not a criticism of the original commenter - but I think something worth correcting.

While we're encouraging edits within HN's 1 hour edit window, in your shoes I'd have de-escalated the last word:

> something worth [improving].

fair enough

The animated gifs are a nice touch saying "I have no idea what Im talking about but have feelings too"

As another commenter pointed out, this off-hand comment is harmful to girls. In my own experience growing up, girls were just as "professional" (if that can apply to teenagers) as boys. They were serious, thoughtful, ambitious, and worked hard in school. Now I'm older and my friends have kids, and their girls are going to Maker Faires, studying hard, etc.

We should not accept the meme of a "teenage girl" being a silly thing that doesn't know how to behave right, because it's just not true.

Your comment reads like it was written by the kind of person who'd blow off a meeting with a potential designer hire 4 times.

I'm pretty sure teenage girls can make more professional posts than this. (Also, thanks for the sexism?)

This sort of attitude sexist attitude towards women is exactly why our industry is in such state.

You are basically echoing the idea that women = unprofessional at such a young age.

We certainly do not want our teen girls to grow up believing that they are viewed as unprofessional in our industry.

Reading this, all I could think was "Welcome to job searching." Companies that pull some of these things are places you don't want to work for. Contact emails you and then ignores your replies without reason? Run away. Have a meeting scheduled and they don't show? Run away. Get interviewed but then get told you don't have enough experience? Run away.

Finding a job isn't just about getting paid the most money. You need to be in a job where you value the work and the people you work with. Because if I'm the one hiring for the role, if I detect that your only interest is in getting paid, I'm going to run away.

I value talented people but sometimes during the hiring process I find myself thinking:

1. You're spoiled

2. You're overpriced

3. Your lack of humility is going to burn us one day

Technical folk and designers hold the whip hand right now, but that's no reason to abuse it.

From the other side of the table, employers usually hold all the cards. I don't care about your mission, your values, just show me the money. This is a transaction, not an interview for me to be a part of your family.

I will be polite, but if you offer a dollar less in total compensation than the other person, I will accept the other offer and thank you for your time. Have to make hay while the sun is shining, and the music could stop at any time. Don't say someone is overpaid when the issue is you don't want to pay market rate; you're bringing emotion into a business transaction. Can't hire someone for a role? You're not paying enough or you're not willing to train someone to be as niche as you need.

Source: Infosec, ~2-3 contacts a week from recruiters.

EDIT: To those who are replying that I'm detached, not who you'd hire, etc, that's perfectly fine. Hire someone who undervalues their time and values your team or your working environment over getting paid what they're worth. I work hard to save up faster for financial independence; I want to spend my time working on what I want, not what someone else wants me to work on. Life is short.

Sure and I don't expect people to be foolish. Or to buy into any BS.

However I do think politeness and an interest in long term mutual benefit is better.

The world you describe suggests a zero sum approach in which, indeed, the music must one day stop.

It isn't labor's decision whether this is a zero-sum game or not, though.

It could be that people offering less simply don't value your skills as much. I've certainly seen people who think they are senior but in tests come out only intermediate. That someone else will buy into their senior claim doesn't mean the companies that do a better job judging skill level don't pay market rate. You seem to be implying that there is no such thing as being overpaid, which is pretty nonsensical.

> It could be that people offering less simply don't value your skills as much.

Entirely possible. Luckily, someone's inability to properly value an employee's skills doesn't prohibit said employee from finding an employer who will pay the market clearing price for their time. Value is determined by the market, not an individual hiring manager.

> You seem to be implying that there is no such thing as being overpaid, which is pretty nonsensical.

There isn't such a thing. Someone is getting paid what they were able to negotiate between two willing parties.

But that is what is called "professional detachment".

The kind of thing that allows your lawyer or psychoanalyst (or your surgeon) to be not influenced in doing their work for (or on) you.

But you don't hire them, you pay them as consultants, and only when you actually need their professional services.

It is probably a good thing (for you) that you are so valued on the market that you can go for the highest bid on a virtual employment auction, and it is fair enough, still if someone is building a company I believe it is their right to limit the amount available for your wage to a given budget and looking for people that may bring with them (besides their professionality) something else to the company (be it enthusiams, good team playing, whatever).

In my experience (not connected to IT or related to it) it happened to me more than once to need to fire someone (or not hire him/her) not because they weren't good at their work (actually in some cases they were very good at it) but simply because they asked for a crazy amount of money or they had (or would have) made other people less productive, one way or the other.

> I will be polite, but if you offer a dollar less in total compensation than the other person, I will accept the other offer and thank you for your time.

Many people take into consideration much more factors, than just money, i.e. it is common to work on crappy project in hostile environment with no flexibility for excellent money, and - on the contrary - work for a little less but on fun projects, in friendly environment, with great perks, flexibility, etc.

Anyway, I hire lots of IT-related people and would most probably not want to have in one of my teams person of such attitude. (To be honest, I "inherited" one of such employees and he's really negative, materialistic and 24/7 complaining person. Not pleasant to work with at all, and he demotivates others with his attitude.)

But you don't, and can't, truly know any those other factors until you've worked some where for N weeks/months/years. Every company, when hiring, tries to put it's best face forward.

How will you know if the VP of Engineering is a borderline raving lunatic who treats his staff like garbage until you've had the opportunity to witness their behavior first hand? How will you know if your manager likes to micromanage their reports, making your day job a living hell, until you actually work underneath of them? How do you know beforehand if there are toxic individuals, that may be your co-workers or others that you need to work closely with, who create negative work and a poor working environment? How will you know beforehand if any of these things will be addressed if they are present? What about places with ridiculous office politics and bureaucracy? For instance, it can take years to find out nepotism runs rampant through different layers or departments in a company.

The best you can do is word of mouth and things like GlassDoor. But, word of mouth requires access to people who have worked or currently work at that place, and you have to take those things with a grain of salt, especially coming from former employees. Even if you do have access to these things, it's been my experience that these things only get you approximately close to some truth.

It's a very big gamble and, having lived through some of the above scenarios, I completely understand why people optimize this problem for the highest pay.

This is all a funny (i.e., sad) thing to have happened: the usual suspects have created a mythology that labor is a "marketplace" that optimizes according to naturalistic laws of supply and demand, which turns into a canard to attack employees. Now that employers are getting what they wish for (from high-end or niche employees, the only ones with any individual power), they really wish it was only an impersonal marketplace for them.

I guess the bigger point is that, when an abstraction gets old and popular enough, it becomes first-class and its specifics get obscured by time. So employment isn't a marketplace anymore, because won't somebody think of the employers! but we just keep the aspects of employees being cogs in the business and call it "culture." Which, of course, the dissenting replies have shown in spades: ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company!

Spoiled and overpriced sounds like you don't value them. Is this a reaction to their attitude in the interview or does it start at the resume or email communications?

Face to face. I'm talking about people who don't feel the need to in anyway justify why they're there. The discussion is basically a critical assessment of us combined with a mortal combat approach to salary discussions.

Let's be honest: the corporations that hire us will drop us as soon as it becomes convenient to the bottom line, and as likely as not without a severance package.

You owe it to yourself to get the best possible compensation package, because no one else will do it for you.

That happens to all workers, but because technical workers are in short supply, that's why they tend to be spoiled and overpriced. Everyone else learns humility.

It starts early at the resume/email communications. I expect to see in communications that a candidate can present themselves in a mature, professional manner. That's something you tend to learn with experience, though it also feels like common sense.

Oh my god. Give me a break.

Are you a recruiter then? What specifically is your role in the hiring process?

Two of the points were detailing completely unprofessional and all too common practices from recruiters and - ghosting and not keeping appointments(flaking.)

I would be curious to hear how a candidate expressing frustration at those disrespectful practices might cause you to think that they are "spoiled", "overpaid" or "lack humility."

No. I am the person who hires IT people at my organisation.

Edit: I am also a programmer

How is that not a recruiter then?

Can you answer the other part of my question?

Speaking as an engineer regularly hiring engineers, it depends on the hiring company.

Assuming that one is interviewing for a benevolent and altruistic employer - who values and rewards positive, talented employees - one could afford to be accommodating during the hiring process.

Given those don't exist I would expect tech folk and designers to rinse employers for every penny as that is the treatment they will get when the table turns again.

At the higher end of the market (i.e you can get hired at the majors in a senior role or equivalent at a smaller company), I generally see three types of people:

I see people that truly understand their market value, have data backing it up, they are professional (I always tell people how I appreciate the time / offer, and I'm polite to recruiters), demanding about information (I have little tolerance for ambiguity in compensation, define everything, this is how I pay the mortgage and save for retirement / my kids college).

Some managers think that is spoiled (not that you are necessarily saying that), but this is a business transaction, I ask for market and turn it down if it's not that, or if the compensation is ambiguous.

Then I see those that don't know their value and just sort of take whatever because they don't like interviewing / negotiating. I don't see many of those at the high end.

The third group are who you are talking about, total babies. They complain about recruiters, or how much everyone wants them, place crazy demands on companies (I worked with a guy who literally had a rider like Van Halen in his LinkedIn profile, he ended up being a total prima donna who got fired because everyone hated him). Most people in this third group think they are in the first, and they aren't worth recruiting, even if they are strong technically.

Sometimes people believe this means startups / small companies can't compete, but the issue is, startups / small companies really aren't offering any sort of market comp, they don't give enough equity to employees to make the risk worth your while. You don't necessarily need to pay me what AmaGoogFaceSoft do, but you need to give me a significant chunk of equity and give me enough visibility into how that is cut up (preferences etc.) in the company for me to value it, otherwise its worth 0, even if I believe that the company will be successful. If you can't trust me enough with that sort of transparency, then it's not gonna work out. With a huge public company, I know what my stock is worth roughly.

There is probably a 2bis category of people who know their value but do not like to interview and negotiate. They will take or not what is given to them but it is a one shot proposition.

I usually tell companies that I really do not like to negotiate compensation because this is logistics to me and is not worth the effort. Either a company is good and gives the right pay or I pass. I tell this early enough so that there is no expectation of haggling. So far it worked.

The hiring process deck is thoroughly stacked against the job seeker, allowing companies to get away with all kinds of abuse, flakiness and lack of follow-up/courtesy. The trick as a candidate is to simply not take anything personally, and not get focused on That One Employer. Someone else mentioned "professional detachment" and that's really important as it's an employer's market (and it usually is).

Just a rough napkin-estimate, but I'd guess that out of the recruiters that URGENTLY REACH OUT WITH A GREAT OPPORTUNITY PLEASE RESPOND, 75% won't even get back to you after your polite "Thanks for getting in touch, I'm interested!" response.

Of those that get back to you and do a brief phone chat, you will never hear back from 75% of them about going forward with a phone screen with the company.

After the phone screen(s) with the company, 75% won't get back to you about going on-site for the "whiteboard hazing" interviews.

Of those, 75% will ghost you. So you should expect around a 0.4% hit rate.

This is bad advice for designers, sound very spoiled and prepotent. I don't think good experienced designers would be swayed by this, but beginners might read into this.

Focus on your skills and what you want to do, and you will be fine. Stay away from 'priests' like this, they will not help you, you are only there to admire them.

One skill that I would always value in designer is that he can produce in medium we are using ie. html. Photoshop is bad starting point and this alone will put you above others (in my humble opinion).

Is the "spoiled" part because of the presentation or the content? My read of the content is that it seems routine (for at least this person) to have hiring staff at companies routinely ignore follow-up emails, miss meetings, and engage in the designer equivalent of data structures and algorithms pedantry/hazing in the software side. I'm not sure wanting hiring people to have sufficient respect for the author's time and education to not do those things is "spoiled."

Like, you know, like, presentation :).

I agree that people miss appointments etc, but this is again distraction from bigger picture, where you would focus on your skills and what you really want to do. And especially how you want to do it, process is also important.

Reading this, it seems like one of (at least) two things might be true:

1) The article is written for other members of the author's group, but wasn't really meant for broad consumption. Yes, it's online, in public, etc, but either the author wasn't thinking about that and/or ignored it. I say this because it feels like something one would say when complaining to friends at a pub after hours. It's got this "we've all been here, don't you just hate it?" sorta vibe to it.

2) The article is written to be click-bait/incendiary on purpose. A while back (a year or two?) someone else wrote something similar and it blew up big. More than anything it gave people something to shake their fist at. It gave older people an excuse to look down on "the kids today", younger folk could shake their fist at the poor treatment they receive from older people. I wonder if this author is also trying to go viral in a similar sort of way. I feel like it takes a particular skill to write these sorts of things - it's gotta be believable that a 22 year old would write this, but also push enough of the older generation's buttons that it'll inflame them, too.

3) Obviously, there's other possibilities that I hadn't thought of that might be true :)

I question the design sensibilities of any designer who makes such liberal use of animated gifs.

I hate this thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15094804

the last time this was posted

None of the points he makes are invalid per se, but the language and tone of the piece makes him come across as whiny at best, spoiled and entitled at worst.

What was wrong with the language and tone? Apart from it being informal and casual?

It's Medium, not an industry whitepaper. There's no expectation of Serious Business Writing™ here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com