IMO, the best way to deal with these, if using gMail, is not marking them as spam. Instead, I drag them into the Promotions tab, answer "yes" to classify all emails from the subject as such, and that's it. Promotions == Trash.

I don't open/read such emails (I scan the first few words shown in the Inbox line, then dispense), so good luck trying to cold contact me for legitimate purposes.

On mobile it's long-press the hyphen on the keyboard.

On Windows I use https://cemrajc.github.io/em-n-en/ so that ==- is turned into it system-wide.

On recent Ubuntu versions, you can set up Compose Key, for example with Caps Lock: https://www.danielkossmann.com/how-to-get-em-dash-ubuntu-lin...

I've long been an em-dash user and enjoyer and hope that using it stops becoming such a signal for AI text.

Setting an em-dash used for parentheticals closed (with no space)—or sometimes with thin spaces—is the common American literary/academic style (Chicago Manual, APA, and MLA all prefer closed); setting it open—with full word spaces—is the common American practice in journalism (reflected in the AP style guide). Not using em-dash at all for that use, but instead using an en-dash set open is the common British practice.

I used to love Linux's compose keys, though, where I could just press `<win>--.` to get an en dash and `<win>---` to get an em. Most of the compose combinations were guessable, like `<win>a'` for á, `<win>co` for ©.

MacOS has a great keyboard locale switcher, but the lack of real compose keys limits things. Most characters you can press and hold and get some accented versions, but it's very slow if you're typing in French or something in the EN layout. It also has a built-in character picker, which is really nice but even more slow.

When I go to print, I use hairspace, but it’s not worth the trouble in comments.

The GP’s post history suggests they have some touch with typography.

Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line

I love picking apart a recruiter's emails, in a handful of cases I see the advert and I'm like "Oh yeah I used to work there". Go and React in a telecom company in NL near where I live? Yeah I set that up. No I don't want to go back, not unless they hire an actual team.

Those recruiter spams generally just copy and paste the companies own JD so the LLM can usually figure out the source company.

They'll send over the company name right away.

Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly.

IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-salesman. Their goal is to get as many people as possible to use them to change jobs so they get bonuses. They provide little-to-no value add in the actual process and will actively try to shovel you toward shitty companies and dead-end roles, despite how well they dress them up.

You are ~20-50%~ cheaper (typical is 30% IIRC) in the first year of your employment if you are a direct hire instead of going through a recruiter, from a hiring manager's perspective. If you switch jobs often this compounds to make your offer chances lower as well if you're going through a head hunter (I've been part of these discussions from hiring side).

It's simply not worth it for either the employer and interviewee to go around the recruiter because they act as a filter for both sides initially.

This happens, but it's unusual. It's normally only really something you'd bother with as a recruiter if you were doing CV marketing, that is, reaching out to people who aren't your clients saying "this is the kind of person I could get you!". They're not really meant to do it, but recruitment regulations aren't strongly enforced in most of the Anglosphere.

To fill a role with one of your clients, they've signed T&Cs that mean they can't really cut you out, and assuming they don't hate you they also don't want to lose you as a recruiter. Fucking candidates absolutely will try and occasionally cut you out of the process -- usually out of incorrectly thinking it will help them land the job because the employer won't have to pay a commission.

There are many shitty recruiters, but finding a good one will absolutely help you find good roles, and can do all sorts of useful things like make sure you're asking for enough money, get feedback that you wouldn't directly get as a candidate, harass the hiring manager about your application on your behalf, and engage in a dialogue with the hiring manager about your application that virtually no hiring manager would be willing to do directly with you.

When you have success with recruiters, connect and keep in touch with them. A career is long, and its good to have options, as you never know when you'll need them. Optimize for optionality in this context.

But they indeed were comfortable revealing the hiring company early in the process due to that trust level…

Recruiters say things like "autonomous robotics systems"

For what? Weapons? Hell no. Doing dangerous industrial jobs humans shouldn't be doing? Hell yes.

An example (I have intimate experience with) is the finance/hft space in NYC -- if you're employed at a competitive player in this space in trading/quant/engineering you will almost certainly be given a phone interview w/o question at every other competitor when you reach out.

If you don't trust the 'contact us' forms on their website it's dead simple to search e.g. LinkedIn to find their own in-house recruiters and reach out directly.

Again, if you're a new grad? Definitely higher chance of your contact going right into the trash. But the target hires are still getting called back within a day.

I remember the annual cycle back in the day. During quieter times of the year, I'd suddenly get a tonne of calls from various recruiters with a job (no company name) ... almost as if they'd been told, "ok, no one's hiring or placing right now, no point you sitting there on your arse while I pay you. So pick up the phone and get some qualified leads"

Hang in there Ilia, you're not the only one hurting, and don't apologize for venting. Most of us in the HN community are far more supportive.

Wait, is everyone who posts on who wants to be hired a sad down-and-out unemployed waif at the end of their rope? I'm replying generally to a variety of comments in here that are painting quite an image of that forum, and honestly I think it does a huge disservice to its participants. It makes it out to be unhireable charity cases.

I have been lucky to find employment at will, and when I don't want to work in a traditional job for someone I can keep myself occupied through consulting, aside from "side" income from projects. Yet I've posted in "who wants to be hired" before, seeing if there are some really interesting projects in niche or burgeoning realms, and I've actually found some great people who I've kept connections with, and some fun engagements. I didn't know it was a "career troubles" venue.

And I understand that someone is on edge and got their hopes up, but I mean, spam is just a reality of the internet, especially if you post your contact info online. Mark it as spam and let the flag of shame eventually sink the sender.

Still, the sentiment of: professionals should behave professionally, and this forum should be collegial and also recognize things are pretty tough out there for many people right now... that stands.

FWIW I lived through the .com crash and what is going on right now maybe isn't the same intensity of depth of job loss but the churn and intensity absolutely going on for longer and with far more ambiguity.

(But honestly I don't think I'm going to bother posting anymore since I haven't gotten a single non-spam lead at all from those threads.)

A good general tip is that every email should begin with a "bottom line, up front" (BLUF).

Tell people what you want, need, or recommend first. Then provide supporting details.

Beyond the usual rudeness of spam, that's a little creepy.

In addition to all the creepiness, the email had a link to stripe to pay them $500? I wonder if the email is hiding a prompt injection somewhere to trick a bot into paying?

"If you're already employed, I can also support you in taking on additional contract work. I'll guide you through the entire interview process to help you succeed and get hired. In this partnership, your main role would be attending client meetings, while I handle all development and written communication. We would then split the income, with you receiving 40% of the project earnings."

Guy introduced himself as a "senior full-stack developer with over nine years of experience in web, mobile, and iOS development".

Oddly specific number.

For one, the choice of child, is already creepy even if you refer to a pet as a child, but a software system as a substitute for childbearing, it reminds me of the claw cult, you can call it a company, a system, a project.

And calling it a daughter, man I don't even want to get into it.

On the other hand, I feel like the obsession with childbearing (constant fear about birth rates, pressure on women to become mothers, etc.) to be a lot more creepy than someone having wholesome protective love for their pets.

I fully agree with you about the creepiness of software "children", but I can't really relate to the pet part. It's honestly weird to me when people just kind of think of their pets as like, non-human roommates or something, when there's clearly one entity that has a responsibility to care for the other one since they're dependent on them for food, water, and shelter.

To be fair, I think all species are obsessed with producing offspring, regardless of culture.

>" Following your example, I might send the list an announcement whenever a new GNU program is written. That happens less often than babies are born, it does the world a lot more good, it reflects more conscious creativity and hard work, and some of the readers might actually find the information useful. Even so, I think most of the readers would consider this outside the scope and purpose of the list. Clearly that goes double for babies." -Richard M Stallman

I have a cat named Emacs -- I wonder how Doctor would analyze that?

The previous month also got a couple from "Mark M, the founder of kinect.io" about a "quick thought about your resume" that just sounded like they will get you into a pyramid scheme or something.

Mourning my dog, unemployed, and all I get is spam/scam emails when trying to get a job, is not nice at all.

But I didn't post this to gloat, just to point out that spammers are lazy. Of course if everyone moves their email into the profile then this will change, but even if everyone reading this thread does it, most others won't, so I trust that this will still work for some time.

Alrhough technically HN could detect bots opening tons of profiles and feed them wrong data.

Find offline channels to connect with potential employers in person is your best bet, IMO. Good luck job search!

Nicolas Maduro can be described as "forced immigrant".

I'll need to figure out a filter for these.

If you are coming to me as AI, I will ban/mark spam you. Period.

I guess we can officially add a third entry and, keeping the alphabetical order, make it: "death, spam and taxes"

I used to have in my profile "contact me at $USERNAME@example.com" and I started getting emails from AI companies selling their slop, to address username@example.com

"Internet is not dead yet, it just smells funny"

This happens when governments stop regulating, enforcing the laws, start colluding and corruption investigations are not even on any agenda.

Laughed way too hard

Example: https://bsky.app/profile/francoisbest.com/post/3mhq6znfcxk2d

Imagine you're a reasonably talented developer and just can't seem to break into a good job. You've been working delivery or something to make ends meet, and somebody finally offers a tech job. It isn't much, but your kids are hungry. You'll take it.

You show up, and it's everything the cynics here could have told you. Spamming people for money is the least of your worries. Whatever, at least you're actually programming, and maybe this is your chance to break into one of those mythical "good" jobs people keep talking about -- a stepping stone.

In an effort to impress, you figure out how to leveraging the HN who's hiring thread. It takes a bit of convincing for management to give you the time, but you're eager to prove yourself, and that enthusiasm is a bit infectious. Somebody signs off on the project.

It's a total flop though. You get zero conversions, nothing, nada. You've been spending the last week frantically debugging, getting more and more desperate as you realize what this means for your career prospects in a cutthroat environment like the one you're trying to appease.

As luck would have it, you stumble across this post today. Then the weight of your fuckup dawns on you. You spammed the "who wants to be hired" thread instead. Not fully yet recovered from the shock, you hear your boss call you over. "Do you have a minute to talk about something important?" There's a glint of orange on their desktop, and a pit sinks through the bottom of your stomach.

i have no decision power in the company i work for, plus I don't know where this guy took my number

Targeting the desperate is profitable.

The worst part of hustle culture is that what I believe to be 99% of the noise is:

* Stupid things that will never succeed

* From ignorant people just trying to make a quick buck, whom I want no involvement in

Nobody believes in your "spam every github e-mail account" jobhunting site. Thousands have spammed before you. You are nothing but noise.

It's just spam.

It doesn't last long, but it sure is annoying. Sometimes they even join and then spam DM rather than post in a public channel.

It must pay off often enough to make it it worth it, but I can't imagine hiring someone I found through a spam message.

Best wishes and hope things work out soon.

No spammer will manually reply to that, some AI spambots might, but it should be apparent to the LLM that's what is happening.

"I saw your comment about GOLANG and I thought you might be interested in our TOKEN DROP FOR FREE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS".

Spam from YC companies happens now and again, from other scraped content regularly. I've started making GDPR personal information requests in retaliation; they don't do anything useful but I figure tying up a "real human" for a few minutes at least makes their spam slightly more expensive for them.

This applies to literally all of society, and has absolutely nothing to do with tech. Every society, everywhere. I mean, the guy sending that spam probably is pretty hard on their luck as well (and will probably eventually post a sad story about their lot and how they're just trying to hustle, etc). That doesn't excuse it, but it's turtles all the way down.

Before internet access became as ubiquitous as it is today, the vast majority of these scammers were stuck wallowing in their misery in their own little corner of the world, far away from you, unable to do much more than maybe call your phone.

And before the rise of LLMs, they had to write their spam by hand instead of being able to spit out thousands of customized scam messages with zero effort.

This is terrible and needs to stop.

One of them even started blasting their identical message to about 8 different addresses at my mail server (careers@, talent@, jobs@, etc., all of which don't exist and I have never used) with stuff like "Would a 20-minute call next week make sense?". This is such ashamed pre-rejection shit that it betrays a near-zero level of confidence in their own ability. What employer wants someone like that? Employers want someone determined to make a difference, not someone who is groveling to avoid asking too much of you.

That's what they are relying on, and that's why they will never stop. You're asking sociopaths to be empathetic at the one time when their sociopathy pays off big - when people are desperate.

"Right now, we are running a $35,000 API Hackathon. If you build the best tool on our data, we acquire your codebase for up to $20k.

But here is the real hook for your job search: To get API access, you must pass our Architectural System Design Audit. If your submission clears our technical bar, you don't just get an API key—you get instant VIP access to our job pipeline, and I will personally bypass HR to pitch your profile to hiring engineering leaders."

a) Written by AI [LLM shibboleths all over it]

b) Getting people to do interviews for things that aren't jobs.

c) Trying to get fire-sale "purchase" on people's IP assets / work?

d) Acting like a recruiter, but actually gatekeeping for jobs that... may not exist.

People are using the HN hiring forum posts to produce these.

Be careful out there people.

This isn’t agi. Or anything in the way to bring it.

We are in mass delusional state.

Slightly unrelated, but years ago I went in similar situation, and at around the same months I was in the same mindset, anxious and frustrated, but months after that while still unemployed, something snapped in my brain and I just stopped caring, kinda fuck it all, despite start getting offers and employers are reaching out, I used to ignore some and replying late to others, and when I got the offers I was being too critical about them.. eventually things went back to normal but I have no idea what was that, the confidence and the risk taking were off the charts!

Just hang in there, it will get better, that’s how life works, like a sinusoidal wave, ups and downs.