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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

Craigslist charges for job posts in competitive markets; the posts disappear after thirty days.

I charge nothing for listings at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ and they are permanent.

Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring.

In the long run I want to cover every occupation in which one can find a job by applying through the employer's website.

I won't monetize it in any way. Or perhaps I could say I will monetize it by offering my consulting services through my website, as I always have. Providing free content on my site results in sales leads.

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> Among my objectives is to eliminate the corrupting influence of money from technical hiring.

You know most people make compensation part of their decision on who to work for / who to hire? You can get money out of any kind of hiring..

I don't regard that as corruption.

What I do regard as corruption, is when a recruiter convinces a manager that they can find qualified staff, then expect thirty grand in commissions by placing someone whose rigor mortis is not quite started,

> ...someone whose rigor mortis is not quite started

I'll bite. What the heck does this mean?

They are deceased, but not yet cold.

I am good at my work, I take pride in it but recruiters commonly solicit me for perm or contract work for which I am completely unqualified. For example I do osx device drivers and windows gui so on a damn near daily basis I am approached by recruiters who want to submit me for windows device driver work, even at microsoft.

Their applicant tracking systems other do not support exact phrase matching or the recruiters dont know what it is. Neither do they ever attempt to read my resume, not even when they do submit me.

Many of my "colleagues" were obvious imposters who found work through recruiters. The recruiters dont care, they get paid, see.

sigh This isn't a problem with recruiters [0]. This is a hiring problem. Hiring isn't very easy, and it seems that a huge number of companies don't know how to hire.

You have opinions and your HN profile indicates that you've been programming for a long time, but that doesn't appear to have any relevance to your opinions on hiring.

Oh, BTW, you have some mojibake in the Education section of your online resume.

[0] Numerically, most recruiters suck. This has nothing to do with hiring. :)

LOLCats.

Oddly that page has utf-8 encoding. The mojibake were em-dashes in the original OO document, I don't clearly recall but likely copied it to the clipboard, then to textwrangler for OS X than marked up the HTML.

textwrangler can do every text encoding but it is fiddly to actually get it right.

Get A Load of:

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/ya-kazakh/

Russian for "I Am A Cossack!", more or less I have a bad attitude and fear no one.

The mojibake would be trivial to fix but my position is that I should not have to, I leave it there in hopes someone at Apache or Mozilla will clue into it.

I've seen that very same character sequence whenever a Slashcode site is asked to handle Unicode out of the ASCII range. If I had to bet, I'd say that textwrangler fucked up your document somehow, whether through poor design or improper operation. It's strange that you'd think that someone from Apache or Mozilla would:

a) Be randomly reading your online resume.

b) Think that the mojibake contained within was the fault of some software that they maintained.

Additionally, I've had occasion to work with many, many people. I've found that -regardless of brilliance and competency- folks with bad attitudes almost always make bad coworkers. :)

Anyway. I hope you come to understand why your declarations about your side projects tend to mystify people, and why your strongly held stances tend to not gain traction with others. All the best, man.

Sorry I should have been more clear, I regard the mojibake in Ya Kazakh as a bug either in Apache or the web browsers.

People believe all sorts of things that are incorrect.

Carefully inspect -in a good text editor- the files that you have asked your web server to serve. I suspect that you will discover that what is being delivered to the browser is exactly what is in the files on disk. :)

Or, view source on your personal page. (Notice that the page is served up as UTF-8, so that what is served up will be what was on disk.) Here is a snippet of what's served up, verbatim:

  <p>EspaÃ±ol Mexicano, EspaÃ±ol Castellano: "MEE-gÉ™-LEET-oh".</p>

  <p>Por Favor?  EspaÃ±ol Americano Centrale?  EspaÃ±ol Americano del Sur? "mÉ™-LEET-oh".
  "G" Silencio!</p>

  <p>Ð¯ name is ÐœÑ–ÑˆÐ°.  Ð¯ ÐºÐ°Ð·Ð°Ñ…!</p>

Why would a job listing be permanent? Don't they ever get filled?

My links are all just like http://www.google.com/jobs/

When google has an opening they post it on their own site.

My index provides three items of value: a list of tech employer organized geographically, links to their jobs pages and link to their contact pages.

Its not always obvious what businesses are in one's city. Quite commonly jobs are posted on corporate sites but the jobs section of their own sites arent linked from anywhere. I often have to guess:

example.com/careers example.com/careers.htm example.com/about/jobs.aspx

Im working on a python program that will try out all the common locations.

Among the reasons that startup companies fail is that their websites are steaming piles.

> My links are all just like http://www.google.com/jobs/

So... you're entirely unlike CL jobs postings.

Yes.

Thats because I dont regard craigslist job postings as useful to anyone.

I built my first index just for santa cruz county, on north monterey bay, to assist my coworkers in bailing from live picture because kate mitchell got the bright idea to shorten her commute by moving our office to san jose.

Just before our announced IPO, there was a reverse seven to one stock split, Kate resigned, live picture declared bankrupcy.

Dont Piss Me Off.

See, but your statement is super misleading. You introduced your jobs site with a direct comparison that all but directly claims that your site serves the same function as CL:

"Craigslist charges for job posts in competitive markets; the posts disappear after thirty days.

I charge nothing for listings at http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/ and they are permanent."

Instead, your site is effectively a rolodex of companies who hire tech workers.

While this isn't useless, it's completely unlike CL. Frankly, I can see almost noone[0] spending money on a Rolodex entry. I would regard anyone who did spend money on such a thing with a huge amount of suspicion.

And, uh, I've gotten a couple of really good, solid job offers through CL jobs postings, so they were quite useful to me.

[0] "Almost", because people spend money on unreasonable things all the time.

Im notvsyre I follow your argument.

Yes I too have found good work through craigslist, but cl is far less effective than were the yellow pages in the phonebook.

Many companies never pay to advertise open positions, instead they post them on their own websites, then do not understand why no one applies.

I have received the greatest enthusiasm from residents of san luis obispo, california. there is lots of tech there but before my index no one knew how to find it.

If you can't follow my argument, then you need to ask questions of me so that I can better explain myself.

> ...cl is far less effective than were the yellow pages...

I find it hard to believe that -for all but the best of the best- cold-calling companies in the hopes that they have a job for you is more effective than contacting companies that have indicated their need to hire someone that possesses a skill set similar to yours.

Job hunting is hard enough. Cold calling every company that employs programmers seems like it is its own circle of Hell. Maybe you're just so good at what you do that people clear a space for you whenever you come knocking, regardless of their current staffing situation. For the rest of us, cold calling is a colossal waste of everyone's time.

> I have received the greatest enthusiasm from residents of san luis obispo, california. there is lots of tech there but before my index no one knew how to find it.

Uh. http://slo.craigslist.org/ ? Problem solved, since mid 2005 [0]. Job postings in that area are free of charge, too! :) ( To compare, your site has only been live since early 2014 [1].)

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050617021840/http://slo.craigs...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140319023933/http://www.warpli...

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