If job ads were threads, each thread would be a generic referendum on the company. Worse, it would be the same referendum over and over.
Job ads are boring, so there would be nothing to discuss other than how one feels about the company. That's boring except to the people with strong feelings, and those tend to be negative on the internet, so the threads would fill up with negative generic comments.
I believe that the hivemind resents boring things, such as submissions where the only new information is "X is hiring", so it gets cranky and fills the vacuum with indignation, basically as the only way to amuse itself in the absence of anything interesting to discuss. It doesn't want to, it just doesn't know any better way to have fun in a vacuum.
In practice, what this would look like in a job thread is "I applied in 2015 and never heard back", plus—if there has ever been a negative story X about the company—every variation of X, X, X, repeated increasingly snarkily.
Building a business is a long slog. One needs to hire more often than one has scintillating new information for the community to have fun discussing. Therefore, each successive job ad would be even more boring than the previous one, leading to monotonically increasing resentment. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity.
Launch posts don't suffer from this dynamic because by definition, the startup is new, so there's something new to discuss.
"I applied to this place and they never got back to me"
"Thanks, I applied"
"Please add salary/remoteness/interview process to your job ad"
"You have a typo in your text/email address/website URL"
I think it's a little redundant making a distinction between "useful" and "interesting" because either way the comment has value. However I do agree with the points you made in your other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319) and that the examples given of useful/interesting comments by the GP doesn't offer a high enough value to justify the inevitable negative and other low value comments. Which I think is the real crux of the matter. Much like why political discussions are generally banned on here, the signal to noise ratio just isn't worth the few valuable comments a submission might receive.
> The distinction between "has value for the submitter of the job ad" and "has value for the entire community" is an important one.
I disagree. For example if there is a typo in a URL could take a while for the poster to update it and they might not even be able to edit their submission if it's not identified in time. So if a community member says "link to xyz.com should by xyz.org" that would help other community members who wouldn't know what the correct URL was meant to be. That kind of comment has real value to everyone and not just the submitter.
> Comments that only meet the former test can just be sent directly to the submitter by email or whatever.
Lets be clear (because I've already stated this twice and it still seems to be overlooked) I'm not advocating that comments should be enabled. I agree with the point that those kind of comments are better off sent out-of-band because they don't offer enough value to justify the inevitable low value comments that would also follow. The only point I was making was that the distinction between useful and interesting shouldn't be overstated because they are typically (though obviously not always) linked.
I didn't. I couldn't even if I wanted to, as I always create a new account once downvotes are unlocked as I don't like the temptation of destroying discussions for topics I don't agree with.
looking for a job is a heavily time consuming process, and going to a new job is a risky process. I'm too well-situated to take that time or risk on any thing that seems off. I would have to be desperate to change that calculation.
If a company does not reply I assume there are potential reasons:
1. company is disorganized, just as a company would penalize me for seeming disorganized I will certainly do the same with a potential employer. The point of a company is in some ways to be more organized than individual humans; it is, after all, an organization. If it can't or won't be organized I won't have anything to do with them.
2. Company is rude. Treating someone badly when you have no power over them is a warning sign never to let the company have power over you.
3. Company does not have good tools setup to automate responses to people whose applications it has decided not to go further with - which is a subset of company is disorganized.
So I guess there is a mismatch between our goals and needs in the requirement process.
Thanks for applying to $COMPANY.
We will get back to you by $(TODAY + 7) if we want to start a conversation.
Sincerely,
A. Robot
"We saw you post, would you like to join our platform ..?"
Lots of upwork knockoffs; I've started sending them GDPR Subject Access Requests to see what the companies have scraped and held about me. Next step is obviously data-deletion requests. Fun.