Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

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We were trying to recruit via LinkedIn for our startup but soon realized what a shitty business model LinkedIn has.

We had to pay around ~5,00EUR for each and every click on "Apply" to our job posting, which doesn't mean they even filled out the form.

And now, where LinkedIn is full of Indian scammers (not meant in a racist way, but it is definitely perceived that way) we had costs for a "Local Area" limited job posting for hundreds of people from India because they seem to use LinkedIn via proxy.

When we had costs of over 2800EUR for an ad that was displayed less than 8 days, where literally 100% of people were not even from Europe, we decided to fuck this shit and move on to other platforms.

LinkedIn is absolutely useless. Use University job sites, local meetups (during non COVID times, of course), or open source projects to identify devs that actually care about code.

Also, stackoverflow talents is useless. Their "special startup package" of getting access to the platform for 2500EUR is only for one user, limited per email and phone number, not allowed to login in parallel. Every job posting costs additional 400EUR even if nobody applies for it.

You get nothing, as over 90% of people we have actively talked to are not even looking for a job and never clicked that on any stackexchange platform.

I didn't realize how fucked recruiting is. Srsly, somebody needs to fix this.

> Srsly, somebody needs to fix this

I've lost count of the number of devs I've spoken to, over multiple decades, who are convinced recruitment is ripe for disruption. I'm sure everyone else has the same experience.

And yet, recruitment's still here, more or less unchanged. At this point I'm pretty sure recruitment has always been terrible, and will always be terrible. There's some perverse incentive buried deep in the process that can't be shaken out. Or something.

> And yet, recruitment's still here, more or less unchanged. At this point I'm pretty sure recruitment has always been terrible, and will always be terrible. There's some perverse incentive buried deep in the process that can't be shaken out. Or something.

It probably won’t be solved by tech folk as it’s a squishy people problem that’s hard to quantify (case in point: threads on HN bemoaning robotic HR processes att FAANG)

> it’s a squishy people problem that’s hard to quantify

And where incentives to game the process are just too high for everyone involved. Ref standard practices like CV inflation, lying about what the role will really be, hiding salary rates from both sides, manipulating entitlements, etc etc.

These problems are as old as humanity and I don't think you can really fix them with code.

Same problems with the private home rental market. If someone can figure out how to match good tenants with good landlords in a way that is hard to scam and respects privacy, they would make a lot of money.

It would be nice to have this with payments integrated or something, but the trust aspect is a lot harder to achieve. With a service like Uber/Lyft, you have riders and drivers building a reputation over time as they can make many rides over the course of their use, each one a rateable experience for both parties. For "BetterLandlord," the _ideal_ tenant is one that sticks with one landlord longer. More use of the platform intrinsically leads to a lower incentive to use it.

Though I guess you could earn "trust points" for making payments on time, and landlords for fixing maintenance issues submitted within the app in a reasonable amount of time, there's a lot of other factors that count for a "good" tenant or landlord.

This assumes there is a lot of good players, tenants and landlords and they are just waiting for a good app which will let them find each other finally. From my experience, this market is conflict driven, there is no such thing as good landlord and good tenant.

I'm a professional earning 1.5-2.5 the average national salary. I'm moving abroad to a new city and ready to pay 20-30% of my net salary on rent. I'm paying the rent and media regularly on time and the deposit on move in. I demand apartment in the price range 5-15 EUR/m^2 per month, in comfortable standard, and the full deposit back on move out.

What invalidates me as a good tenant?

Then given my requirements above, each time dealing with rental market in any even marginally desirable city in EU, it's like being hit by a train driving at full speed...

Sure it's better to rent short term to some banana youngsters from Germany, Scandinavia or other rich countries, who come over to get wasted and get free sex, then to wreck the place. Yet it's me - a person from post-Communist country, so perceived as poor, who have a bad reputation.

> Yet it's me - a person from post-Communist country, so perceived as poor, who have a bad reputation.

Honestly, I have had the same issues as a Frenchman in France, in Canada and in Belgium. I don't think it's really (or not only at least) tied to your country of origin being formerly communist or poor.

> What invalidates me as a good tenant?

Nothing, I believe you are a good tenant. But this competitive market with limited resources has "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. Landlords can choose and they want perfect.

> But this competitive market with limited resources has "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. Landlords can choose and they want perfect.

The same applies to (online) dating and recruitment. The life fundaments of a perfectly average individual - housing, life partner, and employment are becoming out of reach for most. We've got a deadlock situation over here.

There's plenty of good tenants.

My dad is friends with a a couple of small time landlords and rents two houses himself.

They all have stories like this. I was desperate needed to rent the place and the against my better judgement rented to this this family with no nothing. Ten years later they move out and I do the walk through and the place is spotless.

Rent another place to two lawyers with spotless credit and references and 18 months later they ghost. Break the locks and go in and.. The roof leaked. For a long time. Moldy sheet rock. Holes in the walls and literal shit ground into the carpets.

Good luck with disruption.

Pretty much share that sense of despair and assessment of the industry. When Aline Lerner started doing things, I was really behind her, hoping she would succeed in changing the game. But I think you're right that it's just a lot harder than even the smartest people realise.

> full of Indian scammers (not meant in a racist way, but it is definitely perceived that way)

(I'm not Indian but) the non-racist way to say that is 'full of scammers', since the scammers' nationality has nothing to do with your distaste for their behaviour.

No, that's still not quite right. While it removes considerations of race from the comment, it also removes context since it makes it sound as if the scamming is equally distributed globally when everyone knows it isn't.

A) If you're going to throw out blanket statements about "Indian scammers" then you need to do a little better than "everyone knows".

B) Removing the context ("Indian") from OPs post does absolutely nothing to diminish your understanding of the problem (too many scammers dirtying the pool).

If all your scammers are from one geographical location halfway across the world, it is fine to refer to it and you shouldn't be shamed for naming it. Lest we police ourselves into ignorance.

And if all the immigrants you don't like are from the same place?

That’s completely different, because it’s based on your personal opinion/attitude towards certain people. On the other hand, calling scammers who they are is not subjective (unless you’re falsely accusing someone).

'Who they are' is scammers, it's not relevant that some of them are Indian.

My point is that it's the same because the 'personal opinion/attitude towards certain people' is that all of them are Indian.

It's as racist as saying 'I'm sick of these Poles taking our jobs'. The truthful existence of Polish economic migration doesn't make it not a racist attitude.

Only if you are having a conversation where the demographics of the scammers has relevance.

In the case of discussing LinkedIn, it doesn’t matter where the scammers are from. The adjective is redundant in this context.

In this thread, almost any other adjective would have allowed the main meaning of the sentence to continue uninterrupted (“filthy scammers”, “frustrating scammers”, “purple scammers”, “fearless scammers”). “Scammers” already includes a negative connotation. By adding a redundant adjective to an already pejorative noun, you run the risk of imparting some of that negativity onto the adjective as well. This easily leads to the perception of racism.

I don't agree with that. By giving the unique location you have indicated there is a big problem that is perhaps more solvable than it would have been otherwise, since there is a limited group of people, many who are presumably organized, in a specific location. That is something much easier for LinkedIn to deal with than a generalized trend to scam the site from around the world, presumably with a much greater variety of tactics and targets.

'Indian' in this case is the geography, not the demographic. They explained that, albeit with a lot of words. 'Scammers from India' would've taken care of the whole thing. Or if they wanted to gird their loins / show their work a bit more, maybe something like 'scammers with Indian IP addresses.'

I don’t know how my perception came to be like this during the recruitment time... and I’m very sorry for it. I know it’s a demographic perception and in no way I’m gonna extrapolate from that experience in future.

Also, there seems to be an Angular rickandmorty heroes-like tutorial somewhere available in the Indian speaking web, as literally all of the scammers had exactly the same codebase with various differing mistakes or variable names, but with identical structure in their github profile, and all uploaded it just a couple weeks ago.

(And they all claimed to have years of experience with it, of course)

Same experience here. Wanted to expand my business and posted a LinkedIn job ad. After a week I had spent 200€ and received a bunch of people outside of Stockholm, which I specified as the location. I also received a few job applications from school teachers, car salesmen and county clerks - for a senior dev position.

> I also received a few job applications from school teachers, car salesmen and county clerks - for a senior dev position.

That's not a LinkedIn problem, it's a "I've posted an attractive job ad" problem.

If LinkedIn charges per application regardless of job fit, it's LinkedIn problem.

Sounds like a great opportunity to build a website for job seekers and companies with a more rational business model.

I used honeypot.io before, which was a nice experience for someone seeking jobs.

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