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Comment by guywithabike | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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."

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

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