GitHire Swamped After Promising 5 Hire-Worthy Programmers for $1k | Hacker News Reader

GitHire Swamped After Promising 5 Hire-Worthy Programmers for $1k

nytimes.com

42 pointstswicegood39 comments

GitHire is the sleaziest, scammiest spam setup I've come across in a long time. It shocks me that it's treated with legitimacy by the New York Times. Additionally, it saddens me to see so many people uncritically praising the idea as if it was anything other than a spam house.

GitHire does nothing more than scrape GitHub profiles and spam users with unsolicited junk mail -- regardless of the users's qualifications or desire to be recruited. It's spray-and-pray spam and companies wishing to keep their respect among developers would do well to avoid them. Any company willing just resort to spam is neither a company I'd want to work for nor a company I'd wish to be a customer of.

Really interesting PR hack in play here. At first glance the article is published at NYT.com and that fact will be milked endlessly. The really curious part is that the article is syndicated up from the SF-area nonprofit "Bay Citizen" [1].

Note to PR-hungry founders: Figure out which blogs are syndicated by the NYT and other big players and then pitch to them directly. They should be much more receptive audiences than first-party NYT staff.

[1] http://www.baycitizen.org/about/

"A version of this article appeared in print on February 3, 2012, on page A21A of the National edition with the headline: A New Resource for Hiring Programmers Has Become Entirely Too Successful."

Bottom of page. So NYT printed a syndicated article? That's interesting.

Yeah, and the publish date at the Bay Citizen site is 9p.m. Eastern yesterday. NYT print must've either snapped this up immediately or had advance notice that it was going out on the site.

Further digging shows that not every BayCitizen article makes the NYT, so I guess there's some editorial back and forth involved.

It's not really syndication. The New York Times has partnerships with The Bay Citizen and several other regional news nonprofits to publish articles in their regional editions on Fridays and Sundays. The articles go through The New York Times's editorial process, not a completely separate process like the Associated Press.

In theory, The New York Times won't lend its imprimatur to articles it doesn't deem worthy, so I don't see why the newsroom that the reporter sits in is an issue.

There's a pretty big effort jump between writing an article and approving it for editing, in addition to writing involving you intently think about the story for a significant amount of time. This means that any ethical, financial, pr - related concerns are applied longer for the writer. NYT writers are highly motivated and competitive people, and would worry about even the occasional negative piece. Bay Citizen writers aren't held to the same requirements, since they're aren't viewed in the same critical way. Editors, since they simply have to review the piece and what gets on the page is whatever is the best to choose from, are a lot more likely to approve a piece.

Editors, since they simply have to review the piece and what gets on the page is whatever is the best to choose from, are a lot more likely to approve a piece.

Your view of the role of an editor is incorrect. My observations of the newsroom I work in (as a developer) are quite different. My organization has a similar partnership with the New York Times, and some of our stories have made the front page of the national edition, not just the regional edition.

Your view of The New York Times's willingness to publish pieces that don't meet its standards are based on speculation.

I reported them as spam when I started receiving their emails.

I haven't been able to figure out exactly how githire.com's ranking "algorithm" works, but it's pretty clear that it's absolute crap. When I first saw the site, I thought it might be an interesting way to meet other software people in my area, but when I search for programmers it hardly seems to respect the location parameter at all. Some of the people it ranks extremely highly have maybe one or two repos, which aren't being watched at all.

To me, githire.com screams "least amount of effort possible to appear legitimate, without actually being a useful product."

They were practically begging my co-workers and I to interview. They were offering $10 Amazon gift cards for an interview, which was just insulting. It wasn't even the amount; it turned what could have been a good fit into a cheap business transaction.

Here's how I saw it: If I invited you to dinner, it would be considered a nice gesture. But what if I offered you $10 to come to my house for dinner? It changes everything.

I feel bad for the company, who we blamed for the "stunt". Turns out, the company had no knowledge they were doing that.

What would make me feel even worse is being offered a $10 Amazon gift card knowing that the recruiting firm was being paid upwards of $200.

Joel Spolsky on motivating factors:

> But when you offer people money to do things that they wanted to do, anyway, they suffer from something called the Overjustification Effect. "I must be writing bug-free code because I like the money I get for it," they think, and the extrinsic motivation displaces the intrinsic motivation. Since extrinsic motivation is a much weaker effect, the net result is that you’ve actually reduced their desire to do a good job. When you stop paying the bonus, or when they decide they don’t care that much about the money, they no longer think that they care about bug free code.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html

I think the awesome book Predictably Irrational does a better job of explaining it:

> What’s going on here? Why does an offer for direct payment put such a damper on the party? As Margaret Clark, Judson Mills, and Alan Fiske suggested a long time ago, the answer is that we live simultaneously in two different worlds- one where social norms prevail, and the other where market norms make the rules. The social norms include the friendly requests that people make of one another. Could you help me move this couch? Could you help me change this tire? Social norms are wrapped up in our social nature and our need for community. They are usually warm and fuzzy. Instant paybacks are not required: you may help move your neighbor’s couch, but this doesn’t mean he has to come right over and move yours. It’s like opening a door for someone: it provides pleasure for both of you, and reciprocity is not immediately required.

> The second world, the one governed by market norms, is very different. There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about it. The exchanges are sharp- edged: wages, prices, rents, interest, and costs- and- benefits. Such market relationships are not necessarily evil or mean-in fact, they also include self- reliance, inventiveness, and individualism-but they do imply comparable benefits and prompt payments. When you are in the domain of market norms, you get what you pay for-that’s just the way it is.

Once you mentioned it, I realized I knew this was in Predictably Irrational. I've never read it, but I have heard it mentioned in this context.

I first heard of this through Joel, so I quickly found a citation from his blog. I know he's mentioned it repeatedly on the SO/SX podcasts as well, so it's likely the association was solidified there.

That said, your quote doesn't make the point I was trying to highlight. Specifically, I was trying to show that moving from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation is not only damaging, but also hard to reverse as well.

Thanks for the quote though. I've renewed my mental note to someday maybe finally get around to reading the book.

These guys are spammers, there is no way around it.

http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githirecom-is-spammer.html

Here is my post about an HN post that they deleted after people started ripping into them:

http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githire-spam-again.html

Please make them go away. Mark all emails from them as spam. Do not buy their services. Do not respond to their emails.

I was not even aware that they create profiles from my public data on Github, and the only way it seems to remove my profile is to log in using OAuth on Github.

That just seems even more sleazy.

Yea, I'm starting to get upset at Github for allowing them to continue. I've emailed support@github.com multiple times about this. One email said that they would take care of these guys and then all further support emails have been ignored.

Sadly, they are giving Github a bad name now too as it appears to me that they are supporting these guys by allowing them to continue.

Seems like hype. This page http://githire.com/job_board shows only 19 job requests and only 3 intros made so far. Also if these intros are made by programmatically scraping emails on github, then they could be in some trouble for violating spam laws.

I would hope that, at minimum, they're respecting the hirable? flag on profiles. Their about page is full of marketing speak, but short on actual details. (I understand that they don't want to give away their "secret sauce," but is there really that much to it?)

Edit: Also, their algorithm seems pretty off - a search around me returns some candidates in the "top 10%" group who only have one repo and it's a fork of someone else's with a small bugfix. (Nothing wrong with that - I appreciate those who take the time to submit patches. But surely a single fix of a couple of lines shouldn't rocket someone into the top 10% of GitHub.)

They do not (or at least, did not) respect that flag nor do they (or did they previously, at least) respect an explicit opt-out of their service. Great that they're successful, but for a while there they were well on their way to pissing off the developers they so desperately need to actually make money.

Shameless plug: our startup, Skills (http://skillsapp.com) is attacking the resume problem from a different angle. On one hand we don't do candidate sourcing (yet), on the other hand we don't spam potential hires.

The way our service works:

1. You create a position. Right now we offer two kinds: Django and Frontend

2. You get a link from us. Paste that link in your job board adverts, or anywhere you'd otherwise say "send your resumes to…"

3. Candidates apply through the link, we crunch their data and produce a clean, concise report that helps you decide whether they're worth talking to, without wading through the resume keywordfest.

You can see a sample brief here: http://skillsapp.com/sample/brief/

Check us out, we're also just launched, and we're hungry for feedback.

Sounds like businesses can smell a deal a mile away.

I thought normal recruiter practice was some percentages (10%, 20%?) of a hire's first year pay. So, like $10,000 to $20,000.

If you can get an interview with a potential employee for one tenth of that... and you know these people are famous in some nerd circles (buying your company more geek cred)... it's a deal.

On the other hand, if it looks too good to be true then it probably is. See other comments.

Oh, I have no doubt. Many things are funny about Githire, including just how many coders are in the top 10-20% of Github users (including those with one repo and no activity).

Seriously how badly are they using the gitHub API, or scraping. Because if I find my profile. (I'm not listed in my area "Edinburgh", even though people with a lower score are.) and on my profile the projects are so severely out of date it's embarrassing.

Update: In my opinion, even though its not for "Hiring", http://coderwall.com does a way better job. Perhaps they should up their game and do what gitHire is doing - but properly.

The quote at the end made my hair stand on end:

"Top programmers are like a race car. Once you get them you don't want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can."

yay im a commodity

gotta catch'em all zuck

even worse, you're treated as such by a large number of people who don't seem to understand how to properly invest in that type of commodity

Their stated reason for top programmers being like racecars is rather generic.

%s/racecar/chocalates|women|gold bricks|etc/g.

A snippet:

“Top programmers are like a race car,” he said. “Once you get them you don’t want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can.”

It is a little off topic, but I think comments like this give me an idea of what it feels like to be objectified, like a woman might be in American media. I'm only now realizing that's why the "rock star" or "race car" label makes me feel so shitty. From Wikipedia:

"Some feminists and psychologists argue that such objectification can lead to negative psychological effects including depression and hopelessness, and can give women negative self-images because of the belief that their intelligence and competence are currently not being, or will never be, acknowledged by society."

Now, I know this is only my career and not my body, but in spite of myself I get intimidated by all these C-suites looking for such hyperbolically able and single-minded individuals I start worrying about if I can cut it. If I will be recognized for anything except my ability to program.

I'm not comparing this problem to objectification of women in scope, and I'm not saying this is all-consuming my life or anything. It is far from that, but something about the "race car" statement brought this into focus for me. I don't want to be collected like race cars or Pokemon by some dipshit.

This was not intended to troll, I just wanted to share my realisation about being compared to expensive/flashy stuff.

This article is in the print edition of the New York Times with the headline "A New Resource for Hiring Programmers Has Become Entirely Too Successful."

GitHire must have some good PR.

It may be all they have.

And this is surprising how? Great to hear they are being successful though. $200/lead is probably an order of magnitude too low though.

Did they get permission from Github to scrape their website for the content they have put up?

From the terms of service:

4. You must not modify, adapt or hack the Service or modify another website so as to falsely imply that it is associated with the Service, GitHub, or any other GitHub service.

5. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, or access to the Service without the express written permission by GitHub.

Although I guess if the GitHire guys never used Github they aren't bound to those terms.

They are in clear violation of those terms. Github is knowingly allowing them to continue to use their services.

The NYTimes and the WashPost are probably gearing up to get Congress to raise the guest worker quotas again, after the election. They need a lot of "supply and demand and capital mobility don't work anymore" stories. Just raise wages and labor adjust to the incentives. Most of this new stuff is not a labor supply problem, it's a vision and management problem. "If I could just hire the best engineers for real cheap , then ...". yeah yeah right.

I have no idea why companies that suddenly become wildly successful without press, start to go out and make themselves public, hence waking up every smart guy in the game. Keep a low profile and milk it, maan.

Perceived legitimacy. In the recruiting game, you need a leg up on the next 200 mindless email drones. Saying "We're so good the NY Times covered us!" goes a long way towards considering both sides of the transaction that you're worth the time.

Here is what I do not get:

1. Recruiters expect me to spend my free-time at their disposal to use my dev contacts for them? My dev contacts remain my dev contacts because they know that if I ever turn over a contact to a 3rd party I do some review of the opportunity to see if its a scam or recruiter bs first and only turn over contacts to that 3rd party if they are a founder, cop-founder, or the actual ,manager the person will work under.

2. To me relationships are formed over a good meal and a good drink, no offense to you HN'ers but that is what it comes down to. If someone wants to recruit me than consider taking me out for a meal. Its not necessarily the cost of the meal, its the fact that you took sometime to spend on forming a relationship with me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com