What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates - <AUTHOR> https://www.keyvalues.com/blog/what-tech-recruiters-want-from-engineering-candidates <comment><USER3> If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound like sales pitches with vague language?

"You'll work with the core of our digital strategy"

"You'll work close to the systems"

"You'll have a central role"

What systems? What is the company even _doing_? What about fundamental things like

\- where is this?

\- exactly what is the work I'm supposed to be doing here?

\- What's the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs?

\- What tech is used, ie what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit?

These questions are literally _never_ answered in first contacts from recruiters. And of course I'm not willing to compose a response or have even a 15 minute phone conversation or a lunch meeting with a recruiter for a job that might turn out to be in the wrong city.

Is this some secret to the recruiting industry that it's bad to give away details in the initial contact, so that the candidate doesn't just apply directly to the company? Or do I have to high expectations on these contacts? Or do I have unusual bad luck with terrible recruiters.

This is obviously the opposite of what recruiters want from candidates, it's what candidates want from recruiters. But seeing as there is obviously a gap there - does anyone have _any_ insight in this?

<comment><USER4> Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring. For example, the people who are writing the job descriptions got a 1-line email, "We need to expand the engineering team; could you take care of it? Thanks!", and so they're basically having to come up with all this on their own.

Their first stop is probably a Google search: "example job description software engineering"

Then, they replace the buzzwords with their own buzzwords, which they probably already know, and they're done. This takes much less time than scheduling time with the engineering team, and since they'll be doing the interviews anyway, what's the harm? Their part of the job is already done.

The second part is that companies are doing the same thing that applicants are doing with their resumes; they don't want to put any red flags out there, in order to keep their possible pool of matches as large as possible. There's a _chance_ they can persuade you to ignore a red flag if they talk to you; if they list it in the job description, there's a 0% chance.

Examples of information that might be excluded:

> where is this?

\- It's in the suburbs outside Reno, NV.

> exactly what is the work I'm supposed to be doing here?

\- You'll be maintaining our undocumented, 12-year old legacy backend.

> What's the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs?

\- I literally have no idea, I was just given a budget and a number of slots to fill.

> What tech is used

\- Something you've never heard of, running on top of PHP 4.

> what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit?

\- We will literally take anyone who can FizzBuzz.

Finally, there are some dog-whistle/shibboleth phrasing that seems perfectly clear to the person who wrote the description, but might not be clear to you. Examples:

> "You'll work with the core of our digital strategy"

\- You'll be working on our product that is the closest to making money (or actually makes some! who knows).

> "You'll work close to the systems"

\- You'll be doing some DevOps as well.

> "You'll have a central role"

\- We have a small team.

And so on.

<comment><USER5> > Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring.

I have the feeling many see this as malicious by employers. But it's already hard to find good developers, employing them as recruiters is a waste of resources. You'll try to find recruiters who have some idea what to look for and then only include engineers in the last stage. Having every application for a senior dev scanned by other senior devs won't work.

As for the recruiter, they can only learn so much about the job because the company probably has 20+ roles to fill where they need to know the basics for all. They can't be expert in all domains.

<comment><USER6> at larger companies you often have recruiters focused on specific areas - <USER2> they can know more. At places I've worked we've had just an engineering recruiter and just a sales recruiter and etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my opinion:

\- designing your resume

\- EQ

\- having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company

\- Think of your resume like a poem

\- visual representation of their experience/resume

These are great criteria for hiring a designer or marketing personnel, but these are TERRIBLE criteria for hiring a _technical_ person.

In my fantasy world, a _technical_ resume is in a monospaced font and is eminently readable; I would expect the resume to look good in a code editor.

My fantasy applicant would be very precise in the tech they list, and when asked questions, they would gripe about that technology all day long; if they can't complain about its shortcomings and pitfalls, they didn't use it.

They would not match the job criteria on the posting exactly, because the criteria on the job posting is for some fantasy developer that doesn't actually exist. I would instead expect them to have figured out the core of the actual stack and list it instead.

Sadly, my fantasy world doesn't exist, and we have to pretend we're designers to work around people like this who have no idea how to hire actual technical people.

<comment><USER8> A good balance between highly technical and creatively designed is to write your resume with TeX.

<comment><USER9> Is that more of a recommendation or a hard requirement? I've been using a bland resume that I thought would check all the boxes inside an ATS.

<comment><USER8> Just a recommendation. TeX is a very engineer-oriented design tool. An interesting way to spruce up your resume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > It may seem like common sense, but having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine > interest in some aspect of the company (whether it's the company's mission, > product, technical challenges, or its work environment) is important.

This frustrates me so much. What if I can't find a company that offers any such thing? This seems like anti-common sense to me.

If you have skills at carpentry, and do a professional job, you can get a job at any construction site. Nobody cares if you have a "deep, enthusiastic, genuine interest" in the type of structure, or the challenges of woodworking, or the layout of the job site.

If you have skills at programming, though, you might not even get a job these days if you can't demonstrate that you're sufficiently passionate about what exactly the company does and how they do it.

This isn't a blue/white-collar distinction. I once talked to the industrial design lead at Fluke, and asked if he ended up there because he had a particular interest in test and measurement. He laughed at me and said no, not at all. He just liked industrial design, and didn't much care where he did it, or what he was designing.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say it sounds like you're searching for people with passion so you can get them to work unpaid overtime for you. I don't know why else it would matter.

<comment><USER11> The way I think of it is that we haven't yet figured out concrete ways to assess whether someone can or can't be an effective developer on a team. So if you want me to hire you, and I can't directly measure your skills (because I'm a suboptimal interviewer?), then I need data points that increase my confidence that you are more likely to work out.

This is a 100% contrived, but here's an example...

\- I run a dev team largely using Microsoft tech

\- You are a Java developer

\- I had a Java developer try out the Microsoft stuff, and quit because they decided they didn't wanna go all in on C#

\- If you're work experience in largely in Java, but I see you spending a lot of time writing C# in your personal time, or somehow demonstrating a passion for you, I'm more likely to think you'll be a fit.

Maybe asking people to demonstrate a passion for tech is related to feeling defensive about that tech. Plenty of back-end-y developers trash talk CSS and JavaScript. Someone who works on front-end stuff all day long might not like that trend, so they filter for people excited about JavaScript, and I can't say I'd blame them for that.

<comment><USER10> I agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph! As an industry, we still don't have the first clue how to hire. It's not just you.

Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity.

I think "Hiring for passion" is the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It's the CYA response. We have no clue if a hire is going to work out, but if they spend their weekends writing C# for fun, and they don't work out at our company, we can at least tell our bosses "They came across as so _passionate_ during the interview -- we couldn't have known they would turn out to be a bad hire!"

<comment><USER11> > Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed > dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any > correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity.

Makes sense. I think I was trying to say we come up with seemingly arbitrary reasons to hire & reject people. Before getting into software, I had expected the opposite. As far as I can tell, hiring would be more effective if we asked candidates to roll a d20 to make a charisma check w/ a difficulty modified by how we're feeling that day.

<comment><USER10> Great point. The word "science" appears in the name of the field that I studied, yet I haven't seen any evidence that our current hiring processes in this field are better than random (i.e., the null hypothesis).

If I made a software company who openly declared that their hiring process was purely random, would it work as a company? Would it be legal? For that matter, is a standard tech interview legally valid[1]? What if there is no known valid method?

[1]: [https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/facts-about- validation](https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/facts-about-validation)

<comment><USER11> I'm imagining an overly academic interview question that goes something like this...

"It's been determined that our CS interviews are both random and unscientific, and we'd like to reverse that trend. To give us more control of the outcome, and to help us be more science-y, how would you design a random number generator which can be made deterministic by giving it a seed value? We need one for our hiring process."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met.

I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with SPA experience AND was able to build REST API's. I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and back-end services. He was convinced JavaScript only runs on browsers and I was full of shit.

That was at a big-name tech startup (one of: Lyft, AirBnB, Uber, Github).

Other times I've been told by recruiters things like "Sorry, we want someone with at least 5 years of Ember3 experience, not Ember2". Stupid stuff like that.

I don't know if the talent shortage is real, or if companies still haven't figured out recruiting. I think it's probably actually a combo of both.

I now write my resumes full of fluffy buzzwords, my GitHub is full of animated GIFS and pretty pictures and I adjust the buzzwords based on the job posting. Much higher conversion rate.

<comment><USER13> _TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I 've met._

You know what is impressive about (at least some) technical recruiters I've met? Despite not knowing much about tech, they can pull down $300K/yr (and this is not in SF or NYC).

<comment><USER14> It's perception. They network, get lucky sometimes, and don't stop preaching about it until everyone around starts believing they're valuable authorities in their profession. Snow ball rolls from there and they start attracting candidates based on perceived connection to the top company/people/teams.

<comment><USER13> The $300K/yr. recruiters I'm thinking of are not people who have some out- sized reputation, at least not as far as I'm aware -- I think the economics of the business simply allow them to make a lot of money if they can regularly place a small number of candidates each month -- see my reply below to another comment about how I figure that might work.

*

I do know one recruiter who truly does have a good reputation, but not for the reasons you suggest -- I met her years ago and while I haven't seen her for a while, every so often over the years, I'd be talking to someone about job- hunting and they'd say they knew a good recruiter I should talk to and, inevitably, the name they'd then mention was hers.

And I don't think she did this by networking or attempting to create a higher profile or becoming an authority or by convincing people she had access to top people at top companies. I think she's just done a good job for people and so those people feel good about her and therefore about recommending her to others. Someone like that might be worth paying a lot to -- for all that good will in addition to her skill and experience.

*

BTW, it occurs to me that the first $300K recruiter I met told me he ran a Python user-group out of his offices -- and perhaps that wasn't the only group he did this for. That kind of thing, obviously, can help a recruiter become known to developers, but, again, not because of having an out-sized reputation -- rather, by just being around when developers congregate, giving him a chance to introduce himself to them, face-to-face. (I don't know how much business hosting such groups actually brought to his firm, but it obviously couldn't hurt).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I fired one of my biggest clients because they appointed an HR manager who cared most about things like whether or not the career history timeline perfectly lined up and left nothing unaccounted for - like _really_ cared - would knock someone back after 3 tech interviews if there was a glitch in the resume.

I felt it was because she really had nothing tangible to contribute to the technical assessment process so felt she must do _something_.

I can tell you this - I'm not wasting my time recruiting for a company that does that sort of thing.

Why I point this out is that many of the things that these people say they want are things that are not really very important when trying to find very scarce technical talent, but such recruiting people are happy to throw away a great developer because some unimportant thing was not present.

</comment><comment><USER16> I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful 'what engineers want from technical recruiters' post.

<comment><USER17> Here is what I love to see:

1\. An understanding of the _fields_ of work and of their evolution. Don't look for candidates based on languages and libraries -- those might be OK to get an initial shortlist, but:

a) Any programmer past junior level should be able to pick up a library (from a field he understands) in ~1 week and become minimally productive with a language in 2-3 weeks.

b) It's the idioms of each _field_ that are difficult to teach, not the tech tools. Someone who did Java ME programming back in 2003 is probably better suited for an embedded software engineering position than someone who has 5 years of writing C++ code in the banking industry.

2\. Erring on the side of inclusiveness. If you have doubts about whether I should see a candidate or not, send me the resume and we'll figure it out.

3\. Valuing listening over "established patterns". Case in point: short job tenures. I've given favourable feedback for kids who, early in their careers, hand changed two or three jobs in a row. They were brilliant programmers who ended up in large companies, where managers many layers above them assigned them tasks way below their skill level, based on their title of "Junior Software Engineers" rather than on reading their CVs. They did the _smart_ thing and left jobs that _hampered_ their professional development. So far, I have not been wrong about this a single time.

That's not to say short job tenures are always something to ignore. Some people have them because they're assholes -- but okay, we won't hire them _because they 're assholes_, not because they spent less than an year in two places.

4\. Valuing honesty over "right" answers. I know people who left their jobs because their boss was a dick, HR wouldn't handle it, their boss's boss was an even _bigger dick_ and they had no access to _that_ boss's boss. These people should be able to say why they're leaving their jobs, not invent reasons about company culture and looking for new challenges and self-deprecating comments about how they just don't think they belong in that team.

5\. Appreciating competence, thoroughness and professionalism, not things like enthusiasm. Some of the best engineers I know work on a strictly 9-5 basis and go home to their kids and don't touch computers _by choice_ because their kids are the world to them. Professionalism and competence are hard to fake. Enthusiasm isn't.

If you want to appreciate enthusiasm, take real, falsifiable cues. Don't look for broad smiles and "I'm _so_ super enthusiastic about <this company culture item>". For example, look for relevant hobbies, like ham radio or restoring old computers. Any idiot can fake being enthusiastic about programming in an interview, but faking it by writing m68k on a Friday evening for fun is above and beyond what most people would do in order to look like they love their profession.

<comment><USER18> I'm surprised I didn't find this higher up the thread: I'm soooooo sick of people hiring based on languages. It's right there in the first response in this article: "make sure you've included the same language as the job description if at all possible". This is so ridiculous. Either you're hiring a junior person and you're going to have to invest in ramping them up anyway, or you're hiring a senior person who will quickly figure out whatever language you use.

The exception to this is if you're hiring the lead for a project, who will be setting the idioms and mentoring the rest of the team. But even then, why are you dictating technology to that person rather than letting them choose?

It is worth asking people whether they are interested / willing to learn the tools you're building on, but it doesn't make sense as a filter.

<comment><USER19> > The exception to this is if you're hiring the lead for a project, who will > be setting the idioms and mentoring the rest of the team. But even then, why > are you dictating technology to that person rather than letting them choose?

Just because you are hiring a lead doesn't mean it's a greenfield project with nothing established; even if the lead has freedom to migrate over time, that doesn't mean that it isn't important for them to be able to guide and mentor on the existing stack very quickly.

I generally agree the I industry overemphasized experience in using particular tools rather than skill in engineering systems, but it is not the case that specific tool (including language) skill is completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER18> I see that what I said wasn't clear at all: I meant the specific kind of lead who will be setting everything up, ie. on a greenfield project. I think a lead on an established project falls into the camp of experienced people who can figure things out.

Another exception: contractors. In this case, you do want someone who is immediately productive in the language you're using because you do not reap any of the benefits of them ramping up like you do with permanent employees. For contractors, familiarity with the language and ecosystem is the more important part of their job; for employees, familiarity with the business is more important and the language stuff can be picked up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Crooters never seem to be asking a whole lot, as they always seem to think I'm a "great fit" for any company currently waving money under their nose. Of course it usually takes some prodding to discover that the crooter actually knows nothing about my background, is ill qualified to determine who is a fit, and I wouldn't want to work for their client anyway.

<comment><USER21> Upvote for "crooter"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think recruiters should actually start giving a shit about the lives of engineers before making demands.

\- Actually try to get to know and understand a person

\- Dont use fill-in templates

\- Have some actual knowledge of tech (java != .net)

\- Dont make offerings for positions I worked on 10 years ago during college.

\- Dont be greedy.

To just name a few...

<comment><AUTHOR> To be completely honest, I also felt a lot of frustration towards recruiters when I first started working on Key Values. (It might be one of the reasons why I built it...)

In the last year though, I've met a wide variety of people with a wide variety of responsibilities, approaches, and backgrounds, yet they all share the same job title. There are certainly awful recruiters out there, but there are also some really fantastic ones! (Just like how there are both awful and fantastic devs out there.)

I've gotten to see both sides of job searching/hiring and it has been eye opening. Both sides have similar complaints of the other, which is why the process looks so darn similar to dating.

My guess is that founders, CTOs, and recruiters would all probably make a list similar to yours:

\- Actually try to get to know and understand our company

\- Don't use fill-in templates

\- Have some actual knowledge of our industry/product

\- Don't focus on positions you worked on 10 years ago during college

\- Don't be greedy

<comment><USER23> >Don't be greedy

That is hilarious. If the representative of a multi-billion dollar company (or a startup trying to become a multi-billion dollar company) every said something like that to me I'd probably laugh and walk out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think many candidates tell the recruiter they're working with to be less greedy, nor do many employers tell candidates this. My point is that there's an extremely wide range of scenarios that both parties see, and most people on one side of it have a hard time considering the perspective of the other.

There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year salaries at Google and expect similar comp packages from startups. (Are they being too greedy? Meh, they're just misinformed or need to take some time to recalibrate their expectations.)

There are also plenty of companies guilty of the same thing. Their expectations are too high as they turn away great candidates because they don't have a CS degree from a top school or have an impressive track record of open source contributions.

The OP listed "don't be greedy," which sounds familiar to me. It's easy to have a few bad experiences and then draw a blanket conclusion that every tech company is trying to squeeze me. My point is only that it's frustrating on both sides, and whether you're an applicant or a hiring manager, understanding what the process feels like to the other party will make the process that much easier for you.

<comment><USER24> >There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year salaries at Google and expect similar comp packages from startups. (Are they being too greedy? Meh, they're just misinformed or need to take some time to recalibrate their expectations.)

If they're choosing between working at a company like Google or that startup, it's not greedy to expect competitive compensation.

<comment><USER25> I think it was implied by context that they weren't. Obviously if you need advice of "don't be greedy" then such a person isn't simultaneously weighing up an offer from the top of Google's pay tier, otherwise that wouldn't be greed, it'd just be realism.

<comment><USER23> I don't think that was implied by the context at all.

>that wouldn't be greed, it'd just be realism.

I think that's the point. Startups routinely want to convince people to work for them for less than established companies. They often talk about wanting to hire people who care about solving the problems they are working more than money.

When someone is being realistic by pointing out that they can make more money elsewhere, they say they are just "being greedy."

<comment><USER25> _When someone is being realistic by pointing out that they can make more money elsewhere, they say they are just "being greedy."_

You're assuming the big paying tech firms will hire any programmer who applies to any startup. They won't.

<comment><USER23> I'm not assuming that all "by pointing out that _they_ can make more money elsewhere". In this case I'm talking about someone who can make more money elsewhere.

I've often heard variations on "don't be greedy" from startups and recruiters when I was working as a consultant.

I'd tell them "We'll I'm making X now, so you're going to need to at least meet that in total comp before I'll consider it."

The response is almost always something like "We're interested in programmers who are really passionate about Y and aren't primarily salary driven, so we only pay X/2 here."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "EQ and self awareness"

What a crock of sh*t!! This is what happens when you pack HR departments with humanities and gender studies majors.

Personally I do not read any resumes, all the hiring I've done was either by referral or through online websites like angelList.

This is my process:

\- Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a branch hopper (2 months there, 3 moths here etc)

\- Check your github for samples of your code and your work ethic. (If you don't know proper git branch management you are no good to us). Opensource contributions are a major +++

\- Check your StackOverflow to see how good a communicator you are (best engineers are the best teachers)

\- Don't bother with social media .. unless I am looking for a good excuse not to hire you.

If you don't have any of the above, I will not even spend 10 seconds on you.

<comment><USER27> Meaningfull github profile AND stack overflow profile AND able to do full time job?! I understand you pay people to work on their GH and SO reputation during office hours?

<comment><USER26> Yes and No. A great GH and SO reputation is something you build over a period of time. It shows passion and consistency. That's what separates people who love to code from the ones who just want the paycheck.

Also, what is "office hours"? We are plugged in 24/7.

<comment><USER28> If only all hiring managers were this honest during the process, everyone would be better off.

The candidate, for example, could just walk out of the interview and go for a beer, while the hiring manager could get on with the business of finding a gullible new grad to hire.

<comment><USER26> I'm not the hiring manager. We are a startup, we don't have any bureaucracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Our hiring philosophy at Alto leans on hiring for experience as opposed to potential."

Wow! Refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't want weekly updates about key values in my inbox every week, I want the bottom quarter of my phone's screen back.

</comment><comment><USER31> Note that what "technical recruiters" want is not guaranteed to match what the hiring firms themselves want.

There may not be a great solution to this problem from an applicant's perspective (because if you fail to impress the recruiter, you may forfeit the opportunity to impress a manager in subsequent practice). Still, it's worth keeping in mind, not least because your ultimate success at the company depends more on what happens after the hire than before.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me sum up the recruiting industry in a single quote from this material:

> Watch for spelling and grammar. [..] After conducting my own A/B tests on > this matter, the data showed that candidates who had untidy resumes faired > less (sic!) than those with well written ones.

Edit: I was going to write a longer post about what I am more interested in seeing as an engineer who does the interviewing. But most of it was obvious stuff. Instead, here's what I _don 't_ look at:

\- What libraries you used. Languages, maybe -- libraries? If you're past junior level, I expect you'll be able to pick up a complex one, in a field you're familiar with, in a week or two.

\- Length of past tenures. I gave favourable feedback for a lot of kids who, early in their careers, left from two or three jobs in a row because they were hired by large companies who then proceeded to give them completely uninteresting work that was entirely below their programming skills, without any mentoring, any meaningful source of professional growth and any timeframe for when they'll get to do some _actual_ programming. I'm talking kids who, fresh out of school, could write a decent kernel driver, but were asked to write automated tests for REST APIs. I was never wrong about this.

\- Hackatons, coding competitions and the like. The former are entirely unverifiable. I've seen plenty of people _claiming_ they went to this hackathon and wrote this application that could potentially solve the problem of water crisis in Africa, using advanced GIS algorithms and numerical optimization and machine learning and whatnot. One of them even showed me the app on their phone. Then they don't know how to iterate through a list or find the race condition in three lines of code which contain literally nothing but a function name, an initialization, and a race condition. Copy-pasting from Stack Overflow is a useful skill to have when it sits _on top_ of other skills. The latter tend to be completely unrelated to programming in the real world.

\- The length of the resume. If you have enough relevant experience to fill four pages of resume, then _write four damn pages of resume_. A one-page resume that drops three pages of relevant stuff will put you in the same basket as someone who can barely fill that page. It's not ballast, it's stuff I can ask you about in an interview.

\- Layout creativity, cleanliness, typography, visual identity and the like. Pick a CV template for Word (or, if you want me to instantly like you, LaTeX). This is Andrew S. Tanenbaum's resume: [https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf](https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf) . When you can sport one that's more impressive than his in terms of content, look into making it pretty, too.

<comment><USER32> As someone who has done a lot of hiring, I've observed a strong correlation between spelling/grammar and the best programmers I've worked with. Details matter, and by failing to even read over your own submission you're showing you don't care about such details. Your commit messages and code isn't likely to impress anyone either.

Being able to write really well can also make you stand out and do wonders for your career, especially if everyone else on the team is likewise a high performer (Jeff Dean style). The best people I've worked with have also all been really nice and kind to a fault.

<comment><USER17> I absolutely agree. Every single good programmer I know is also exceptionally adept at written communication (and, indeed, really nice). They tend to be good at oral communication, too, but it's a little hard to get an accurate reading of that in an interview.

The part I quoted is representative of the recruiting industry because _it has a spelling mistake_. It's "fared", not "faired", and unless "fared less" is some strange idiom that I'm not familiar with (I'm not a native English speaker, and I'm more familiar with British English than with American English), I could swear it's fared _worse_ (or _less well_ , if you must).

This is... very representative of the recruiting industry, in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How do I dismiss that subscribe box that takes uo a quarter of the screen on mobile?

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm surprised none of them mentioned the abominable "culture match". I've heard repeated complaints that it's much more important to be a brogrammer who likes craft beers, than it is to be any good at the actual programming.

<comment><USER35> I've been consulting the past year and a half. Recently I decided to contact some companies just to see what the landscape was like, and if I could maybe find an interesting opportunity that also paid well.

On one of the first calls I had, the recruiter heavily implied that I was "not a culture fit" after I explained that I'm only interested in a job if it pays more than I currently make consulting (this particular job paid about half that). I'm not socially inept, I know how to speak politely and it was definitely polite. I mentioned it on the first call because I didn't want to waste anyone's time (mine included) interviewing for a job that I wouldn't take.

The HR lady seemed completely taken aback and offended... says "we're looking for people passionate about the problems we're solving, even if it means taking a pay cut."

Get the f- out of here with that BS. That really grinds my gears. The company is allowed to be profit seeking but the employees are not? No thanks.

I'll stick with consulting... I like having multiple clients over one employer. I like that there are no "interviews," just my own confidence and sales skills to pitch proposals to clients. I like the respect that clients show me that no employer ever has. I like the autonomy, the lifestyle. And yes I like getting paid more than I would at a local job. There's nothing wrong with that.

<comment><USER36> I think it's actually kinda straight-forward:

* If you have sales/negotiation skills, but no technical skills, you do sales/HR/whatnot.

* If you have both sales/negotiation AND technical skills, you do consulting or start your own business.

* If you have good technical skills, but poor negotiation skills, you go work as a software developer.

So yeah, an unwritten requirement for many technical positions is having poor negotiation skills. And no recruiter will obviously tell you outright that "you know, we're just looking for a sucker to take a crappy deal and you don't look like one, so move on", so instead they will use the politically correct "culture fit" to make themselves feel better.

<comment><USER37> There's a lot of wisdom here.

Regarding negotiation for engineers-- a few years back, I had been happily employed at a company for ten years. The CEO of some company calls me up and says I'd be PERFECT for a job opening he has. He says its C2H for 6 months to make sure I'm a good "culture fit". I politely decline, and he was incensed.

I said, "Why in gods name would I leave a position I've been in for 10 years for a contract position?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Think of your resume like a poem."

Roses are red, Violets are blue, I need a job, You're hiring, right?

<comment><USER7> "... I need a job, and you're hiring, too."

<comment><USER39> I need a job, `isHired = true`

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> These are all half-truths meant to avoid the real answer. They want high IQ ambitious people who don't suffer from mental illness. They will put you through strenuous interview processes as a makeshift filter for high IQ.

No technical interview question I've ever been asked has anything to do with "self awareness" as Tammy pointed out. In fact self-awareness for the hyper- productive is a negative for the organization, as that individual eventually realizes they deserve a significant share of what they create and aren't getting it.

</comment><comment><USER41> I love how they have a "share on hackernews" button on the side. As if hn let's you submit more than one url at a time.

So the other way around: I would love to see tech recruiters with actual technical understanding.

<comment><USER42> These aren't "technical recruiters" they're recruiter's of technical professionals.

<comment><USER41> They used this term for themselves.

> Greg Banks: Recruiting Manager at Digit, previously a _technical recruiter_ > at CourseHero.

> Lana Herzig: Technical Recruiter at Dia&Co, previously at Quartet.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, well its a misnomer. Lol.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to fully de-gunk a PC of Crapware - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=547

<comment><USER2> From the multiple addendums to the article, it seems that quite a few Windows users have broken their installs.

Here's a really simple rule: If you don't know what it is and you cannot be bothered to research it then don't delete it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Answer: Uninstall Windows.

</comment><comment><USER4> Simple: switch to Ubuntu.</comment>


Web Decay Graph - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/05/25/URI-decay

<comment><USER2> I gave up on considering the web to be a "web" of hyperlinks. These days the www just feels like a collection of siloed (namespaced) applications. I expect a link to be valid at least long enough to use in an email (i.e. days/weeks), but I wouldn't use a link in say a blog post without also copying the relevant information out of the page. The url is then just a source reference identifier, not a hyperlink that is expected to go anywhere.

<comment><USER3> It's not that bad. And about silos: Years old bookmarks of Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, IMDb, Amazon and Twitter work fine. And for MySpace, Geocity, Tripod and Frienster you better visit their backup on Archive.org: [https://web.archive.org/web/20060202160308/http://www.myspac...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060202160308/http://www.myspace.com/)

<comment><USER4> YouTube isn't a good example there. I often find links to YouTube videos that have been taken down by a copyright claim (whether legitimate or not) or been "made private" by the uploader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A commenter raises an interesting question:

 _" How did you detect "decay"? Just based on HTTP codes, or by actually looking at the linked content? On my own blog, I found more often than I like that old links still "work" per HTTP, but now refer to something rather different from the content that I originally intended to refer to."_

What would be some good way to detect such spam sites in an automated way? Looking for the link's title in the remote HTML? Check for common domain placeholder page contents and spam words? Maybe Google has some API one could use?

<comment><USER6> I've run a similar test on my own blog (links dating back to ~2000), and I had the same problem. Some sites do a permanent redirect on broken links, others don't even redirect but show generic content on the original URL. I guess your success in automating this would depend on the nature of the links, but from a completely random collection the only success I had was with visual inspection.

(Someone with far too much time on their hands could probably write a script to attempt to retrieve a copy of the page from the Wayback Machine from around the time the link was posted, then calculate the percentage change compared to the current version. Not really reliable, but worth a try.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Donate to the internet archive. Then once in a while run some script to check your links, if they fail or pointing to crap link to the archive? Check them again later just incase you got a false positive?

Yea I know it won't work for all links.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like there should be a service for that:

* make a copy of all linked resources when each post is published

* regularly compare the linked resources to the copies to make sure the links still work as expected

* when a link dies, automatically replace it with a link to the copy

<comment><USER9> more than a service (the service provider could also disappear), it should be a function of the publishing platform

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can find a lot of academic research on this area: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=web+decay](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=web+decay)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is why for my own personal reasearch and archiving I moved from keeping "interesting links" to using a web clipper to take a copy of the page. Too many times I'd think "Oh there was an interesting article on that" to find it had gone, so now I take a copy of the article for later reference.

<comment><USER12> Pinboard can keep archives of bookmarked pages, and can also watch, say, your Twitter for new links.

<comment><USER13> But who will keep archives of pinboard?

Seriously, this approach will only shift the data from one unreliable online service to another one. Having decentralized offline copies of relevant information is much better. And maybe we will be able to come up with a mechanism to coordinate these decentralized backups, a la freenet [0]

[0] [https://freenetproject.org/](https://freenetproject.org/)

<comment><USER12> I think Pinboard is deliberately aiming at changing less than most web sites, and he _probably_ has better backups than I do for my own computers. Also, I have lots of devices, and it's nice to be able to save and access the archives from _all_ of them.

Disclosure: I use the bookmarking there, not the archiving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think one of the problems, is that many people do URL's the wrong way. And I can not blame them, as writing information in the URL at least used to give better ranking in search engines. Most SEO people will say that the URL is important! So like many other problems with the WWW, we should blame Google :P

One example on good URL's are HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9637215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9637215)

It will not help ranking on search engines, but the URL will hopefully never change.

<comment><USER15> Indeed, Cool URIs Don't Change: [http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html](http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html)

<comment><USER16> What a wonderful fantasy that would have been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmmm, the Y axis of the graph is tough to interpret.

Isn't it kind of weird to use a percentage for a line graph? With percentages, the goal is to provide an obvious fractional breakdown, that viewers can readily sum to 100%, visually.

I have no idea how to sum a curve and reconcile back to the original universe.

If the complete set of links in this data is a count of 12,373 links, then how many have decayed? Based on that graph, I have no idea.

</comment><comment><USER18> > From: Charlie (May 31 2015, at 20:36)

Bret Victor posted some interesting thoughts on this subject a few days ago:

[http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/](http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/)

[http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html](http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html)

[link]

</comment><comment><USER19> Internet's Natural Selection silently doing its job</comment>


Which programming language should I learn first? - <AUTHOR> http://pixelstech.net/article/index.php?id=1335686357

<comment><USER2> "To feel depressed: SQL"

SQL isn't a programming language you would learn to program general purpose programs with. It's a language to manage relational data in a database.

It's not a depressing language. Depressing, is watching a programmer fight with procedural ORM when doing anything remotely complicated with data in a relational database.

<comment><USER3> Well, there's one bit about SQL which is depressing, and that's the way that the language has been undone by its own fragmentation.

Each dialect of SQL is different enough from all the others that the lowest common denominator - the version that you can really call 'SQL' and not 'PL/SQL', 'T-SQL' or whatever - is really, really low. So most the tutorials on 'SQL' out there present the language as a dumb insertion and retrieval mechanism rather than the powerful declarative programming language for query and analytics that it really is. Meaning most programmers out there really don't know what they're losing when they choose to go with the naive approach to relational databases that ORMs encourage.

I got led down that path first. And I spent a lot of time struggling with the ORM. And then somebody or something finally convinced me to take the time to learn SQL. Not that least-common-denominator crap - real SQL, the native dialect of my DBMS and all of its ins and outs.

And soon after, once I had properly encapsulated the database with well- written stored procedures and all that, I dumped the ORM, because it had become the stone in the soup. And everything got so much better, so much more performant, so much easier to maintain, so quickly. And I remembered all the struggling from before, and saw that none of it had to happen. And I mourned for all the wasted time and gray hairs.

I learned SQL, and it made me feel depressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > To be a god which can do everything--Assembly A god that uses more time than > necessary doing some tasks, but when they run, it's so fast.

<comment><USER5> As for current architectures, humans are really bad at writing assembly. Advanced compilers like gcc are much better at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> FRACTRAN. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRACTRAN>

</comment><comment><USER7> I started at PHP and still learning.

</comment><comment><USER8> > To mingle with programmers who call themselves "rockstars": Ruby.

Oh fuck off. I'm really getting tired of the Ruby backlash. It is a FINE language, better than most.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cute.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the Cute programming language is ready to be used as a first time target for developers yet. Try scheme.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is Cute programming language?

<comment><USER11> It's a Cool variant designed specifically to encourage female students into Software Engineering and/or Computer Science.

<comment><USER9> Serious?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shaken by the latest digital gold rush, San Francisco struggles for its soul. - <AUTHOR> http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/how-much-tech-can-one-city-take <comment><USER2> Grrrr. Existing SF residents are facing an influx of newcomers, who are pushing out (pricing out) some existing residents. And somehow, it never occurs to them to just _make room_ for more people, so that existing residents don't get pushed out.

SF has _plenty_ of opportunities to build _upward_ , but as long as SF insists on being anti-development and anti-height, the housing supply problem is going to continue.

<comment><USER3> How are current residents being priced out? If they rent, then rent increases are limited by law and no-fault evictions are nearly impossible to get honestly. If they own, the no one can force them to move short of the city invoking eminent domain.

<comment><USER4> "then rent increases are limited by law"

In certain cases, yes, but personally I lived in SOMA in an apartment for 2 years and my rent was going to go from 2k to 3k because Google had asked the building if they could rent some of the units. So I mean, maybe it was illegal and I don't know about it, but I can certainly say I don't live in San Francisco anymore because I was priced out by new incoming tech employees.

<comment><USER5> I'm assuming you made a thinko there; as written your comment says you were forced to move because living got too inexpensive.

<comment><USER4> haha good call, thanks for noticing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was recently contemplating moving to the bay area from Midwest. Then a few months ago i shared a hostel room in Edinburgh with a guy from Portland. When we got to talking he told me that he is originally from San Francisco but decided to _ran away_ to Portland to escape nearly insane cost of living. I don't know how much of this is true but he was telling me that some dingy studio apartments have 10-15 people in line to sign contract. Landlords are reluctant to negotiate mainly because the next person in line is a Googler who will pay $1000/month above the asking price without thinking twice.

A couple of months later, an acquaintance of mine got a gig as a software engineer at Apple. When i got in touch with him, he told me that he's dishing out $5K/month to pay rent for the house his family lives in. My jaw dropped.

<comment><USER4> "Landlords are reluctant to negotiate mainly because the next person in line is a Googler who will pay $1000/month above the asking price without thinking twice."

I actually lived in 388 Beale, right by the Google towers. My rent went up exactly $1,000/month when Google started renting units at insane prices for their interns/traveling employees. So yeah, pretty familiar with this and this is why I no longer live in SF. Also, it really feels like shit to get pushed out of your apartment so some sales exec at Google can stay there once a week. Yay efficiency?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This just in: economics applies to San Francisco.

If demand rises faster than supply, prices go up.

Demand is rising fast. Supply is being held down. Prices go up.

I come from Darwin, a wonderful little city clinging to the northern edge of the Australian continent. About 10 years ago a confluence of factors (expanded Defence presence and the early stirrings of the resources boom) meant that property prices took off.

At the same time, the hyper-local nature of politics in that part of the country (each member of parliament in the state-level government represents about 2500-3000 voters) means that infill doesn't happen because the margin of victory is easily less than two or three streets getting angry at you for authorising a new block of flats.

So: demand shot up, supply did not. Unsurprisingly, Darwin is now one of the most expensive places in Australia to live. If you can find an unoccupied flat, good luck renting a nice one for a price affordable on a normal middle- class income. And good luck finding a house for a price affordable on a normal middle-class income.

Supply and demand. It's the same everywhere for everyone. There are no exceptions. If SF wants to keep its middle class, it needs to make more housing available.

Especially high density housing _for the wealthy_ , not the poor. Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power. Every rich person who moves into a $2 million dollar apartment is a rich person who isn't bidding the price of an older building up and driving out the middle class, who in turn will drive out the poor.

Another dumb policy: giving money for deposits or loans. It just drives up effective demand. Every seller _knows_ you can get the $X thousand dollars and then, surprise, surprise! The price of every house just rose but ~$X thousand dollars. Everything that gets given to the middle and poorer classes to subsidise housing is in fact a wealth transfer to the landlords, via good old- fashioned populist policy making.

<comment><USER8> > Opening space at the high end of a market can have a disproportionate effect > on a total market by removing massive amounts of bidding power.

Are there studies on this bit playing out in practice? My impression so far, mostly looking at Manhattan redevelopment, is that building high-end condos typically does not reduce prices for other buildings in the area, but rather raises them: the presence of new high-end housing increases demand in the immediate vicinity by more than the new building's own supply provides, assuming the area (like Manhattan or SF) is rather desirable in general terms to begin with. That may be good if you want to raise the housing values in an area (each building provides a multiplier effect that raises the prices of neighboring ones, making the whole area more desirable). But probably not good if you want to lower the prices. Good statistics either way would be interesting, though: are there cases where opening new high-end housing actually lowered the other prices in an expensive urban area? E.g. when new condo towers open in Manhattan, does it produce an observable downward move in prices?

(The main point I'm getting at is that demand and supply aren't independent variables: demand for living in an area depends quite strongly on the housing stock in that area, so building more housing stock affects both supply _and_ demand, in possibly complex ways, which need empirical data to tease out.)

<comment><USER7> > _But probably not good if you want to lower the prices._

The thing I'm thinking of is the city-wide market, rather than in a particular locale. One way or the other, though, the wealthy will get to live where they want. The best thing you can do is to try and save the furniture by putting them into golden ghettos, rather than having them fan out and drive off people in multiple districts.

> _Good statistics either way would be interesting, though: are there cases > where opening new high-end housing actually lowered the other prices in an > expensive urban area?_

Good on you for calling me out on numbers. I'd be interested to see that too.

NYC is a poor case study; you have the confounding factor of widespread rent control. It both creates an artificial limit on housing supply and distorts your official statistics because people have a strong incentive to behave deceptively.

<comment><USER8> I agree the wealthy will generally get to live where they want. I think there can be some variation in where they want to live, though, depending on policies. Some wealthy definitely want to live in urban areas, and others definitely want to live in suburban areas, but for others it may depend: for example, if you build shiny new condo towers with modern amenities, there are people who currently wouldn't consider moving into a dilapidated Mission complex who _would_ consider buying one of those new condos and moving up to the city. So you might bring in some new rich people to SF depending on what gets built. The worry some anti-gentrification people seem to have is that the end result will be that the new demand gets soaked up by new rich people, and the only place demand is lowered is not so much a city-wide basis as a metropolitan-area-wide basis: prices go down in outlying suburbs, which is where the poor people then have to move. That's what seems to be happening in NYC: every time a new neighborhood is gentrified, poor people have to move another 15 minutes further away from work, into yet another further-out area with worse transit.

Some people hope to make the city stay unattractive to rich people, so they prefer to live on the Peninsula or North Bay (or in NYC, maybe some nice condo towers on Jersey's "gold coast"). So you still have the golden ghetto, so to speak, but you try to put it elsewhere. Even leaving aside whether that's a good goal, I think it's certainly a good question whether current policy will actually do that; it's quite possible anti-growth policies won't have that effect anyway (e.g. Paris's anti-growth policy has certainly not resulted in a non-gentrified Paris). The interconnections are pretty interesting though, and seem hard to model, especially with the existing data points (e.g. NYC) having, as you point out, their own oddities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> blaming the "rich" techies for the over priced rental market in SF and the rest of the Bay Area is terrible. The real reason rent is sky high in my opinion is because SF is acting like a small city when it's not. Real estate development is pretty much kept flat. Yes they are adding units but if you look at the expected growth, we will stay flat at best. This results in bidding wars for rentals and real estate purchases, because frankly there isn't enough for everyone. Builders would like to buy up more space and crank out energy efficient/modern housing, but no sir, no permit for you.

<comment><USER4> I can tell you that my SOMA apartment's rent went up 1k because Google wanted to rent some units in it. This pushed me out of San Francisco. I don't think most of these Embarcadero/SOMA startups are interested in high rises in the Sunset or in West Portal, they want high rises in SOMA, which is where they're being built.

<comment><USER10> How does this change the fact that if you allow more high rises in SoMa, you can accommodate both the existing tenants and the new techies moving in, all without raising rents?

<comment><USER4> Part of the stated problem was "and the city only allows high rises in SoMa" I was under the impression SoMa was the only place where you could build high- rises and didn't think the restrictions were very tight.

Also, I don't think if someone demolished a lower-class apartment in SoMa they will do anything but build the highest cost apartments (If your options were to build apartments that cost $1500/mo for locals or $3500/mo for new tech employees, which would you build?) and push those lower income people out, which is basically the problem we are discussing, so no, I don't agree with the above assertion. Sounds good in theory, wouldn't work that way in practice.

<comment><USER10> Do you understand that demand is _finite_? You cannot go on building apartments for new tech employees forever. If you allow widespread construction of new housing, then at least some of that housing must target lower income people.

Moreover, I don't agree with the restrictions on high rises to SoMa. Why not allow them to be built elsewhere? And who says that you have a right to live in SoMa anyway? If it were allowed, high rises would go up in other parts of the city, and you could live there instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A little over a year ago, I moved out to San Francisco from D.C. because I knew this was the hotbed of innovation and start-ups. Before moving here, I had no prior knowledge of any of the culture or neighborhoods (beyond a little about the Mission) but after being a resident of this city for a little over a year I love it. The people I've met since I've been here are some of the smartest people I've associated with; the food is better than any city I've lived in, the people are friendly, and I feel like I can have intellectual discussions with like minded people that understand my passions.

One thing I do struggle with is making this a permanent home. I feel like right now, people are coming here (as I did) because frankly, this is where the money is. Even Y-Combinator advertises that if they invest in your company; They want you to move here and encourage you to stay here.

> If we invest in you, your group is expected to move to the Bay Area for > January through March 2013. (You can of course leave afterward if you want, > but it's a good place for a startup to be.)

I'm curious to see what happens when/if the bubble pops. Will people stay or will they go back home? For people that have been here 15+ years, could you shed some insight into what happend in between 1999 and 2003 as the last influx of innovation left the area? I feel like those were the years when giants such as Apple, Yahoo, Google, Sales Force, and Mozilla were essentially minted.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know. How does New York deal with people in finance and artists in the same place? Do all the artists just live in Brooklyn now, instead of Manhattan?

<comment><USER13> Yes, more or less. But there has been a number of areas getting gentrified before it. Meatpacking district, Lower East Side, Williamsburg. At least that's what I've heard, someone from NY could probably tell you if this story hadn't been flagged to death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does San Mateo county (home of daly city, san bruno, south SF, milbrae, colma, etc) have such development restrictions too?

<comment><USER15> They have similar mechanisms in place, but this is more understandable because SM is composed mostly of small cities (under 100k inh), so any new development must take into account traffic impact and offer some way to mitigate that or in some way address the foreseen impact. In addition, each municipality (town, whatever) has relics of 1950s height restrictions reflective of their town sizes.

It does not help that back in the planning phases of BaRT, San Mateo co. in the late 1950s, opted out of the system. Now they are plagued by a mediocre public transit system and they're in a catch-22. They don't have the density to sustain a working public transit system, so one does not get built and they don't allow higher densities due to the adverse effects on traffic. Eventually BaRT will reach San Jose, via the East Bay.... the idiocy.

I think if SJ plays its cards right, it could take away the clout back from SF. Back in the 80-90s (the hardware days) SJ (the 237 triangle) was more or less the 'capital' of SV (as the peninsula was more amorphous and one could not annoint P.A. or Sunnyvale the capital of SV, for example)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> By far the funniest part of this is the image points "non-tech workers" straight towards SOMA:

[http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/s...](http://www.modernluxury.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/story- photo-with-inset-main/story/freeway2.png)

Geography fail.

<comment><USER11> That is pretty funny and ironic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _When I moved to this neighborhood in 1993_

But isn't this how it always is? You form one idea of how the locale is and if it improves a bit but keeps going, you want to somehow freeze it at your favorite time.

Travis McGee, in fact, many years ago, lamented something like this about San Francisco " . . . she now sells what she used to give away . . .". Florida too, if I am not mistaken. (Travis McGee is a fictional character, by the way).

My Oregon friends say it is wonderful there, but we don't want any more folk to move here.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ugh. This city does have some bad housing shortages right now, but this kind of whiny name-dropping i-was-here-first essay doesn't help. Neither does this epic rant I am about to write, but I'm going to do it anyway...

My favorite quote so far:

"If San Francisco is swallowed whole by the digital elite, many city lovers fear, the once-lush urban landscape will become as flat as a computer screen."

Lush urban landscape eh? Is that from all the feces on the sidewalks? Who are these city lovers? Are they the same NIMBY types who are trying to prevent any kind of night club or live music scene from being established in the city (google the "War on Fun" for fun). Well, that nameless person made up by the author is boring and terrible and they should probably move out to the suburbs to make room for someone who actually enjoys what this city has to offer now instead of what it was back when you couldn't take your kids to the park, a story which you told us yourself!

"When I moved to this neighborhood in 1993, just before the first dot-com boom, I avoided taking my two toddlers to the playground across the street from the café, because local gangs sometimes stashed their guns in the sand."

Yeah... soo.... that's bad, right? I didn't live here back then but I visited frequently and it was awful! Your fake nostalgia for the grittiness of urban life can go burn in a fire made from hobo shit.

Another stupid quote:

"The unique urban features that have made San Francisco so appealing to a new generation of digital workers—its artistic ferment, its social diversity, its trailblazing progressive consciousness—are deteriorating, driven out of the city by the tech boom itself, and the rising real estate prices that go with it."

Wait, aren't techie types usually considered to be sort of trailblazing and progressive and friendly to the arts? What the hell are you talking about dude?

Okay, rents have gone up in my building by 50% in the last 2 years. It's bad. The building, that is. It's basically been a slum apartment for a hundred years and 3 families do live upstairs from me in one unit. I WISH they'd move out, because I can hear everything that goes on up there. Ugh. We have new employees who are trying to move to the city and there aren't any good options, most of them have ended up in Emeryville or Oakland. I certainly wouldn't recommend my own building. I only stay here because the rent is cheap because I moved here before this current boom. So here I am taking advantage of the very upside-down rental market that's contributing to the whole problem! I don't know what the long term fix is besides building a LOT more new buildings, which seems to be happening... But it's only happening because rents are high enough to justify new construction, which is good for non-tech jobs and city property tax revenue in the long term, right? Would you rather have a bunch of fenced off city blocks with nothing but empty holes in the ground on market street? There's a new Draft House Cinema moving into a theater that's been empty for like 20 years two blocks away from McSweeny's. You don't think that's awesome?

Eventually this mini-boom will end and that's going to suck WORSE than what's going on now. Oh man, it's going to suck. Maybe rents will go down then, but only if a lot of people lose jobs and move away. That's not good is it? In fact, that's a worst case scenario for the city. The cafe you were sitting in when you wrote that article will probably go out of business too. Is that what you'd prefer? Maybe one of those techies who moves to SF this year will invent an alternate fuel generator that runs off baby boomer hand wringing and then we'll all be amazed when you single handedly save the city.

Still, until recently there were dozens of empty city blocks that had no development at all on them. Many stalled projects are in progress now, and it is all going to be high priced brand new luxury stuff. 3 new buildings have been built within a block of my current location in the Mission just in the last year. Sure, they're small and overpriced, and maybe only rich techie types can afford them but I'm FINE with that. When the people who can afford it move in to those places, they'll free up space in the dumps they moved out of and things will probably equalize in a couple of years, and that's probably the best case scenario.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for this, I agree with everything here but you've illustrated things in a much more detailed and articulate fashion than I could have.

My family owns rental property in the city, so perhaps I can add a little more color here. The reasons that the housing market is so messed up in SF basically boil down to the following:

* Rent control - provides a huge disincentive for landlords to upgrade, invest in, (or for the unscrupulous) maintain their properties. It also artificially limits housing supply and saps liquidity, since people who've been in their units for long periods of time have distorted prices and very limited incentive to move or upgrade.

* Onerous city bureaucracy and regulatory environment - the myriad, overlapping, and draconian sets of rules governing property development and ownership have made new development unnecessarily time- and capital-intensive. Oh, and there's always the tenant's union and the ridiculously pro-tenant judiciary, but that's a story for another day.

* Prop 13 - basically this drives a distortion of property tax rates, with a disproportionate share of the tax burden falling on residential households and newcomers to the city/state.

Note that as (relatively) long-term owners in SF, we've done very well thanks to (2) and (3).</comment></comment>


The best productivity and lifehack apps of 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/12/20/35-best-productivity-apps-of-2012/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=35%20of%20the%20best%20productivity%20and%20lifehack%20apps%20of%202012&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia

<comment><USER2> That article should _really_ have "Apple ONLY" in the headline so that people's productivity isn't wasted.

<comment><USER3> It included Android and web apps as well. The Shortcuts for Gmail Chrome extension made the read worth it for me.

It was curious that only one Windows app was mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is this obsession with to-do list apps?

<comment><USER5> I was thinking the same thing. Does anybody use more than one? What is so special about a to-do app that can't be done with paper or a plain old text file? When I read the title, I was expecting mind-keyboards or something awesome...not a bunch of to-do lists.

<comment><USER6> Being a founder of a todo-list featured in the article (Todoist) I find your comment quite ignorant. Modern task managers aren't just about managing text. For example, our app integrates with Gmail, Outlook and Thunderbird and makes it easy to manage your emails. We can also send you reminders and you can access your tasks on 9 different platforms, including iPhone and Android. We can manage your links via our plugins for Chrome and Firefox. We also take care of sync so you can have your tasks, emails and links anywhere you go. We also try to visualize your productivity. We include very powerful calendar features (for example, you can write "every mon, fri at 8pm" and our date parser will understand it - - and you can even do this in 10 different languages and we will still understand it). Plus a thousands other things that your text-file solution simply can't do.

<comment><USER7> Wow, that's an off-putting reply. Normally I don't comment on things like that, but you may want to think about coming across a little less.... of an asshole... when you're talking about the company you founded.

<comment><USER8> Spot on comment. If you're founding a company you're its face. Don't make that face an ugly one or you'll have an ugly company.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Game of Nonsense - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nonsense.twa <comment><USER2> Installed to give it a try. The UI is fine, a bit too flashy imo but that's ok for a game. The game itselft was just not very fun, maybe it's meant to be played by many people at once ? i tried it alone, and it was either an instant guess or a long wait for the timer to end while the phone was bleeping. Maybe show 3 or 4 different mashups at once, and give them a shorter timeout ? Also, if this is a wrapped web app, why not just make it a website ? There are APIs in vanilla js to get speech recognition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Thanks for your constructive and honest feedback.

I've been playing it with a few people which has been making it funnier. Trying to gear it like a friend's or family type of game (sort of like charades).

Was going to add difficulty levels (easy - 60sec timer, medium 45 sec timer, etc).

It's a PWA but I added it to play store to get more exposure.

Thanks again for the feedback, I will continue to add more topics and phrases everyday :)</comment></comment>


Java IO: slowest readLine ever - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tsunanet.net/2010/12/java-io-slowest-readline-ever.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> A seven year old article about version 1.6... nice!

<comment><USER3> Good things always remains for long time !</comment></comment>


Raising Angel Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/07/19/raising-angel-money/

<comment><USER2> I am curious why he says that VCs don't want to invest in a company in which the angels diluted the investor too much. Why should this matter to the VC?

<comment><USER3> Because there will not be enough equity left to give proper incentives to founders and early employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an interesting read. What happens when you're raising angel money but don't actually expect to need additional rounds of capital?

<comment><USER5> Convertible debt generally comes with a time limit, at which point it converts into equity at a pre-agreed upon price, just like if an angel had put a price on the round. That price is usually pretty low (good for the angel, bad for the entrepreneur), often lower than what it would've been if you'd just priced the angel round from the start. This is because in this situation the assumption is that you've tried to raise money from VCs and failed, implying the company has some problems that will prevent it from scaling.

In other words, if you seriously don't think you'll need to raise from institutional VCs, the standard convertible debt terms aren't for you.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that. :)</comment></comment></comment>