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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

The issue I have with this is that humans are not resources like businesses want to think they are. They are living beings with, gasp, memory. If I applied to a job I thought I was a great fit for, got a call with an initial recruiter, only to be ghosted - I'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later. By then I'd have already found a new gig with something tangible and have already ramped up on it, I'm no longer in the pool.

Likewise for folks who are employed but looking. They'll keep searching until they land their exit. Again, by then it's too late and they are no longer in the pool.

If you go fishing when the fish aren't biting, you won't catch anything.

If you go fishing when they are, you'll catch as much as you can carry.

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I've been actively punishing companies that waste my time. Oh, two rounds of interviews only to learn it was an internal hire completed before I ever applied? Enjoy having every one of your listings have thousands of applications a day for the next six months, all just real enough to be plausible. The system is actively being weaponized against people looking for work to keep a power imbalance, might as well be a two way street.

But then where do you go to cut through the noise? Recruiters and talent agencies? Do we need to establish a union of “real people coders”? How does this not escalate into more fakeness?

I’m with you on the don’t waste my time angle but not quite with you on the flood them with fake applications front.

Some dingus did this to our application portal. Our legal team since him and his ISP a real nasty cease and desist letter.

> I'm going to remember that when they call 6-12mo later.

You might, but if you have a big enough pool of these people, there's a good probability that one of those people will be desperate enough to pick up that call. It's the same numbers game that causes the same market power asymmetry across all of labor.

I'm not sure that going for the candidates who are desperate enough is the winning strategy.

For the HR it is another KPI filled

Eh depends on how dirty they did you. I have a few that I will never forget.

> one of those people will be desperate enough

It's the prisoner's dilemma - if we all did it, we could effect real change. If somebody else defects, you're just hurting yourself.

Even better is when you implement a gossip protocol[1] and ensure that not only did they burn the bridge with you, but with 1000 other people in your network / degrees of separation.

[1]: bad joke, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol

This is something unions and guilds were great at. They could easily collect data on how companies treated their members and communicate that effectively to all members in that industry. It left companies terrified of screwing over the workers because it killed off a massive segment of the labor pool they could draw from, especially the segment which contained the most skilled workers.

"But computer people don't need need stinkin unions"

Can't believe someone hadn't replied that seriously to your post yet, moments before their job was outsourced.

I have no doubt there are some people here who have skills so hard to find that it can overcome in inherent power asymmetry between employers and workers, but that isn't true for most workers, or even most tech workers.

However much we want to cling to the mythos left over from the days when just knowing HTML and a bit of JS meant you were a rock star coder guaranteed a life of endless riches, that's just not the world we live in and no amount of 10xing harder is going to stop companies from suppressing our wages and benefits while they increasingly outsource and wait for the AI that will absolutely replace most of us entirely or turn us into little more than QA for AI output.

I hate the term 10x for this very reason. You’re going to put 10 times the amount of effort vs what they pay you only to be let go in the next round of layoffs while the CEO gets a bigger bonus.

I think that's a deep misunderstanding of "the 10× programmer". They produce 10× of the useful output, but they don't necessarily work that much harder.

You know, I haven’t really had companies really circle back and try again aside from the usual MANGA suspects who usually do not ghost.

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