Don't Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation - <AUTHOR> https://mocko.org.uk/b/2015/10/14/dont-feed-the-beast-the-great-tech-recruiter-infestation/ <comment><USER3> I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant.

>> "Fucked if we care" think the recruiters, "now grovel and be exploited". ... >> You're meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.

Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think "exploited" I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.

If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.

<comment><USER4> Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all.

To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write.

The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?

<comment><USER5> You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an _incredible_ opportunity to move to London and the result was:

\- £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer

\- No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc)

\- No free food/snacks/bevare at the company

\- No perks (equipment, etc)

When questioned about this, the recruiter said: _hey! impossible to get this, this is were I make my money you know!_. How is this a "fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions"?

<comment><USER6> Holy god, that's a job in technology? Sounds like your typical retail wage slave situation here in the US. Even entry level tech jobs are in the $40-$50k range generally.

<comment><USER7> Lol, I'm a C++ games programmer and make $30k/year. North East of England + games industry.

<comment><USER8> I certainly hope you meant to type £30k/year (~$45k/year).

If you're only getting $30k (~£20k/year) as a software programmer of any kind, anywhere in the world, you should seriously consider finding a new employer, even if it requires emigrating. And remote jobs still exist.

Canada has the 3rd largest video games industry in the world--after the US and Japan--and its growth has strained the available talent pool. So you might consider Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or Montreal. I have heard that UK-to- Canada emigration is more easily done than UK-to-US, though I had never had any particular motive to investigate the claim.

The "games" jobs earn less on average than the less-specific category of "software" jobs, and "programmer" earns less on average than "developer" and "engineer". So if you don't move, maybe you could pad out your resume to be a "software developer" instead.

I am biased somewhat by working in the US, where software writers are legion, and paid more than elsewhere, but if you have any skill at all, you can probably be paid more for work similar to what you do now.

<comment><USER7> £20k/year is exactly what I'm on. My problem at the moment is that I've been working just a bit more than 2 years now, and I absolutely love what I'm doing. I'm part of the engine team on a game that will be one of the biggest releases of 2016, and learning a tonne every day. I got very flexible hours, private health insurance and 30 days of paid vacation days a year. It's just the pay that's abysmal. I've got two computer science degrees and everyone I know in IT makes almost twice as much as I do. But at the same time, everyone I know works for a bank or a financial institution of some kind and they hate their jobs, their bosses, and everything that I on the other hand really like. So yeah, I could quit tomorrow and probably make 2x as much straight away. Do I want to? I'm not sure, and that's my problem at the moment.

<comment><USER9> Will you at least get a portion of the sales on the game? If the game really will be one of the biggest releases next year, a 20k salary is likely nothing compared to residuals/bonuses that might accrue to you.

<comment><USER7> There's very likely going to be a profitability bonus, but at the most it's going to be half of my salary. Pretty good for a bonus,but it's not making up for the low salary over all.

<comment><USER10> If you have 2 years experience in programming, you should be looking elsewhere in the game industry. The first couple of years are rough, but after "paying your dues" for a couple years, you'll find you can jump into another game dev job without much difficulty. This is a bit more problematic if you're not willing to relocate, since UK is one of the lower-paying game dev markets. However 30k usd is far too low even for the UK for a fresh-out-of-college junior programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At least in the US, the whole recruiting industry hit its nadir during the dot-com bubble of 2000. I remember getting a cold-call from a recruiter, "Hey, got a great gig at a soon-to-IPO startup for a Solaris and Linux guru", "No thanks", hang up, the phone next to me rings, same dude, literally just dialing up the extension tree.

My boss at the time had a strategy where whenever a recruiter called offering "top notch" development talent, he would demand that he only wanted people with >15 years of java experience (remember, this was in 2000, and we also weren't a java shop). If they said, "Absolutely, no problem", they went on the banned list. Most recruiters failed this test.

The whole market was so frothy, I remember people who went from being bartenders to high-end tech recruiters making crazy money and doing coke with their clients in the bars they used to work at...and then back to bartending when the bubble burst.

Today, I feel like it's settled into an annoying-but-manageable background noise. I still get random recruiter reachouts, "Hey, I have an immediate opportunity for a contract Oracle DBA in illinois at $20/hour, interested?" (no, of course), but at least it's easy enough to hang up on them.

<comment><USER12> In NY during that time period one company got a cold call from a head hunter asking to speak to "Mitch" or some name like that. That was the dog's name. They had gotten some list of names and it included the office dog.

<comment><USER13> Oh, I so want to make a LinkedIn profile for my cat now!

Major duties: Licking the spot where my balls use to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One fairly recently cold emailed me 4 times in one day, the last email quite put out and angry that I hadn't responded yet; this was followed by numerous cajoling to censorious emails in the following days, and then a letter mailed to my home castigating me for not responding. And then more emails. He finally went away.

Then there is the current one - scheduling an interview without my say so, I demanded she cancel it immediately, yet I subsequently get a call from the company "Roger, where are you". She didn't cancel it. I told her to she was not to represent me in any way, to not contact me again. Yesterday, what shows up in my inbox? Demands to respond to her email with regards to a client with clear evidence that she is still shopping/talking about me. All this against a backdrop of me telling them my dog is diagnosed with a brain tumor, my life is occupied with dealing with it, and just leave me alone (true story, not made up to make them go away). Holy fuck.

I had an absolutely great recruiter once, he spent hours talking to me, working to find a good fit (something I found myself ended up working), but don't ask me how to find someone like that. Unfortunately his specialty is in an area (HFT) that I decided that I don't want to participate in.

<comment><USER15> That's insane.

I've had a few exciting ones happen to me as well... including offers to interview for the COMPANY I AM ALREADY WORKING AT. That was a fun one. My boss was pissed.

Lately, I've been replying to recruiter emails with a short and sweet "$%INSANEAMOUNT% plus or I'm not interested". Haven't heard back yet.

<comment><USER16> Been doing the same. "Sure, ask them if they'll be able to give [1.8x-2.3x my current salary] and relocation." I haven't gotten any replies yet either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> About 10 weeks ago, I got an email from such a company, the payload being

"Our database consists of over 2 million resumes of qualified consultants that we rigorously screen and are ready to be deployed. Our footprint is Nationwide.

 __ __* is a company that specializes in providing Project /Program Manager, Architect, QA/Code Testing, Business Analyst, DBA, ETL, Virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Storage/Backup, Cyber Security, Analytics, Cloud, Financials, HRMS, ERP/MRP, Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Data Warehousing, Front end/Web/Mobile Development/Design, Middleware, Supply Chain, Logistics, Warehouse Management, Inventory Management, E-Commerce, SDLC, Networking, etc. specified contractors/consultants for contract/contract to hire projects."

I had to like the use of "specialize".

</comment><comment><USER18> Spammy tech recruiters are bad but corrupt recruiters and hiring practices are much worse"

I live in Canada and I am amazed at the amount of corruption/nepotism I see in IT hiring for government IT jobs. They will put out job requirements for senior java dev or web developer and you are supposed to fill out a matrix of required skill. In those supposedly mandatory skills/experiences, they will put in some weird shit --stuff no one outside the hiring manager's inner circle would know; this supposedly mandatory skill is used to weed out outsiders, allowing the hiring manager to hire their chosen people. In the 15 years I have been consulting as a Java developer, I have not received one interview call for any open position with any level government despite having all the other requirements. Considering the fact that so many IT initiatives of the government are plagued with controversies and their implementation is rife with incompetence, I feel the the recruiters and the hiring managers have kickback system in place.

<comment><USER19> I work for a large mega corp and we do this all the time. It's because we have a contractor who we want to convert into a real employee. You can't just say "This person has been working with us for a couple of years. Can we make them a real employee so we can keep them and they get benefits?". There is a whole process advertising the position internally and externally even though you already have someone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Had really bad experience with recruiters in London

\- Lies. From "They have a free gym pass" to complete bs like salary and position.

\- Screwed up formatting of CV that I've sent (they wanted .doc) I've written that I have basic perl skills, recruiter changed it to good and destroyed the layout of CV making it unreadable. Good luck with perl question during the interview.

\- Constant phone calls with no new information.

<comment><USER21> > Screwed up formatting of CV that I've sent (they wanted .doc) I've written > that I have basic perl skills

Isn't unreadable a plus in Perl? :-p

<comment><USER22> Haha! Nice! A bit like if you have an infinite number of chimps on an infinite number of typewriters you'll eventualy get the works of Shakespeare - the rest is Perl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Alright, here's another of my tech recruiter exchanges. This one got him to stop responding immediately.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Hello,

My name is Seth and I am a recruiter here at [redacted]. I came across your profile in our database and wanted to touch base. Are you still in the market for potential opportunities? If so, I would enjoy speaking with you soon.

Please let me know if you or anyone else you know is interested.

Thanks, Seth

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

Hi Seth. I am definitely available for "potential opportunities" to "touch base" with discreet clients. I am very interested. Please give me more information about these "opportunities."

</comment><comment><USER24> _phone rings_

"Hello?"

"Hello, is this Cloud Strife?"

(pausing a moment to consider whether even to continue) "...Yeah."

"Hey, Cloud, how's your afternoon going? My name is Michael Gravitz and I'm a recruiter for Warmbody Technical Services. I came across your résumé on Dice, and I noticed you have a lot of Buster Sword experience. We've got a great opportunity for a Bodyguard role with an established, profitable company in the electric power industry that I think you'd be a great fit for--"

"It's Shinra, isn't it."

"Bingo! It _is_ Shinra! Out of curiosity, how did you know--"

"Not interested."

"Oh. Okay. Well, do you know anyone who's looking and might be interested in this role?"

"No."

"Oh! Well! I'm _so_ glad to hear that _all_ your friends have jobs, Cloud! You have a great day!"

"Bye."

 _click_

<comment><USER25> > "Oh. Okay. Well, do you know anyone who's looking and might be interested in > this role?"

this is the part I actually hate most. I'm not gonna do the recruiter job, especially not for free.

they have to get over themselves and stop thinking they are giving out 'opportunities' like they are modern messiah

<comment><USER24> What's worse is how snotty some of them get when you tell them no.

<comment><USER26> Guess I've been lucky. I can't recall anyone ever being snotty or rude with me when I say 'no'. I usually just ask them to email me details. Usually they don't, but sometimes they do.

<comment><USER24> I've had recruiters cop a very passive-aggressive tone when I told them I didn't know anyone interested in their position. It was weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I recently moved jobs. Since I work in a fairly niche field, made plenty of good friends at my old workplace, and the company was looking to add to my old team while I was still there, I've had the pleasure of seeing several sides of a hugely inefficient job search.

First, there is the Chinese whispers from within the company. They don't seem keen on finding candidates directly, which in this field is as easy as it gets, so off they go to the recruitment agency. My (now former) boss writes a job spec, this goes to HR (who aren't familiar with any of the technical details) and HR add some company blurb and send it on to a recruiter, but not before crippling the job spec by slapping on a below-market salary that nobody competent will accept to try and save some cash.

The recruiters think they have plenty of candidates who will take the salary, but the candidates simply aren't good enough or don't have the right experience. The recruiters have no way of telling this, so they keep telling the company that there are plenty of great candidates and to keep interviewing.

From the applicant side, several friends of mine who are generally looking to move to a new job had this role aggressively pitched to them by a recruiter. Most of them would be brilliant for this job. What my friends really need is a ten minute phone call with my old boss to see if it's a potential fit before starting any formal interview process. I'd have been happy to put them in touch directly at an earlier stage, but there has now been contact through a recruiter and I don't want to meddle behind the scenes.

None of my friends ended up going for the job since the recruiters were telling them confusing things, and all got better offers than the advertised range elsewhere. The company have unsuccessfully interviewed a few candidates that the recruiters have pushed on them, the team has been desperate for someone new for months (and they're crucial to the company's success) and people like my old boss have no idea and little way of knowing how close they are to finding the right people.

And yes, the stereotype of the shiny-suited young "failed salesman" recruiter is unfortunately true in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER28> At the end:

      To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires.  Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight's     salary.  It's a lot less than Shithead would cost.  And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to   work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay.  You'll be amazed how effective   this can be.

There are limits to this, and having someone from your team refer someone they know does not guarantee they will be an excellent worker, but I would tend to agreed that the overall quality of your team will be much higher this way.

<comment><USER29> Agreed. You need to be careful with exactly how much the bounty is. Too low and people won't bother. Too high and people will recommend anyone they know.

I find recommendations for peers are almost always high quality simply because people want to work with good people.

<comment><USER30> Bounty payout can also be phased. My current employer does half upfront and half once the hire has been with us for 6 months (i.e.: trial period). The bonus are small but not inconsequential (think a nice vacation or down payment on a Camry...) This has been pretty successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is mostly an angry rant, pretty amusing to me how upset the author actually becomes at times, I think its quite harsh.

I did like this idea towards the end of it: "To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight's salary. It's a lot less than [a recruiter] would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You'll be amazed how effective this can be."

<comment><USER32> This is completely common in America. Is the London job market scene just messed up?

<comment><USER33> I took a job abroad after coming from the U.S., and updated my LinkedIn accordingly. Soon after, the spam shot up through the roof. All of the same, non-descript, no-details contacts the author describes. It's been striking.

<comment><USER34> I torched my linkedin account a while back after recruiters wouldn't stop hounding me. I also despise social networks of all sorts so that contributed to my decision.

Before I torched it though I tried a little experiment. I left my tech skills in place, but also added things like "Blacksmithing" and "Former POTUS" as my skill set. I also said "Do not contact me" and "I hate recruiters" and something along the lines of "if you contact me, you clearly didn't read my profile" \- the spam seemed to increase for a while before I finally deleted the profile completely.

<comment><USER35> Meanwhile, I consider two LinkedIn hits in the same month to be a lot. :/

<comment><USER34> I never made a dime or had any positive experience with Linkedin. Just recruiter spam and "friends" begging for endorsements... so I don't think you're missing out on anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> US recruitment (at least around tech hubs) does seem a lot more civilized than the UK situation - most opportunities I see are directly advertised. I left the UK five years ago, and I still get most of my recruitment spam from UK agents. Someone clearly needs to educate those guys about aging their databases - someone who was in the market for opening level PHP gigs in 2001 is probably _not_ still looking for opening level PHP gigs in 2015.

<comment><USER37> I think it depends on where you are. I've seen this sort of behavior a lot. Less so now that I'm in DC, but it was really bad back in Philly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm looking for work right now (need an embedded engineer in the UK?) and some job boards have a tickbox "[]agency" or "[]direct employer" and most of the direct employer ones are also recruiters. That is a small thing but it's pure evil. And the sad thing is I'm sure that if I asked a recruiter "how can you sleep at night doing this" he'd just shrug and laugh because to him it's normal.

<comment><USER39> A recruitment agency that's hired on contract, or an internal recruiter at the company hiring?

<comment><USER38> No. Anyway, if that was the case why would they hide the name of the company?

<comment><USER39> I don't think "No" is an appropriate response to the question "A or B?"

<comment><USER38> Sorry, that comma changed the meaning of the sentence from "A or B" to "A? B?". You don't put a comma before "or". The answer to that question would be neither. It's just normal recruiter ads that tick the box direct employer despite not being such to get through the filter. If a company is using an external recruiter the recruiter will list the company name. I only ever saw this once in my life when a company used a recruiter exclusively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is an angry angry rant... and I'm not sure I agree. Some recruiters are pretty good. I was placed by one and I consider another an excellent giver of advice; he actually advised me to take a competing offer from another recruiter (of which I did not mention the name or deal, just the parameters). Generally my experience has been positive.

<comment><USER41> Yes this is a rant. However, the first point is a good one.

95% of the author's [limited sample] where recruiters earning a large amount of money for doing very little technically.

<comment><USER42> You know, I like how there is this view out there that anyone who's doing classically "business" or "sales" work is not actually working that hard. I know some recruiters. They aren't the world's smartest people, but the successful ones work really damn hard. They don't make more than minimum wage unless they place people.

These guys are cold calling, searching LinkedIn, crawling phone trees, and sending requests all day. When they can they're touching up resumes and doing screening/placement interviews.

Moreover, their technical is different than your technical. It's social hacking and networking. It's learning how to find better opportunities and better people faster.

You might not like that they're Ronin, and work socially. However, they're pulling 12-15 hour days to make their sale.

<comment><USER41> I never said they didn't work hard.

<comment><USER8> As I don't subscribe to the labor theory of value, I don't care how much effort they put in. I care about the value of the results they produce.

To a lesser extent, I also care if any of the manure that they shovel will stick to my heel.

In theory, you should be able to come out ahead by delegating job search to someone who is better at recruiting than anything else, when you are better at software than job-searching, _even if you are still better in absolute terms at recruiting than the recruiter_. In practice... well, let's just say that specialization only works if the single best thing you can do offers positive value to the market. If your top skill is wasting other people's time, no one is going to hire you for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> And yet they are our only weapon against business owners who are just as clueless but lack the incentive to pay a competitive wage. When it comes to salary negotiation, it's nice to have Shithead in your corner.

<comment><USER44> Could you expand on that? If you can't negotiate with the owner, how does shithead help?

<comment><USER6> If you have a good recruiter (the last one I worked with was such) they'll negotiate for you. This one asked me what I was looking for, said I could get more than that, and then got even more than that for me. Just because they have industry data and like jobs to back up the negotiation.

I've had bad ones of course, I think everyone has. But the good ones can do a lot more leg work than you have time for and find you a much better situation than you could find on your own, plus play both sides to make their comission as big as possible which benefits you.

The best are agents, the worst are pimps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't get all the annoyance at recruiters. I don't mind recruiters reaching out to me at all. If you don't want their help, ignore their E-mails. If the opportunity looks interesting you reply, if not, don't. Here's an entire profession that exists to help get you a job (and to help employers find talent). Like every profession in the world, there are going to be a few jerks --just ignore them.

When times are good and everyone has their dream job, we all seem so annoyed with recruiters. When times are not so good, and you're 2 months away from being broke, they are a potential lifeline.

<comment><USER16> The problem is that in recruiting, it's not "a few jerks". It's 99.99% utterly incompetent recent business grads. The 00.01% of recruiters that are labeled "competent" are actually still pretty bad, but they at least know that you won't find 15 years of Go experience and can at least half-tell when someone is BSing (perhaps because they actually spent a small amount of time coding themselves).

Out of the dozens of recruiters I've dealt with over my career, there was only one who was semi-competent. The article makes it sound like it's even worse across the pond; instead of incompetent doofuses, the tech recruitment industry populated by out-and-out fraudsters. I've met a few of those here in the US, but they're by no means the majority. Though I have noticed a trend among tech recruiters in the US that has really exploded in the last few years: hire traditionally attractive young women and call them "tech recruiters". The more recently they've departed their cheerleading squad, the better. This seems to be the primary qualification at a lot of US tech recruiting firms recently.

Probably the reason the competence of recruiters is so low is because almost anyone with the skills necessary to discern a good coder from a bad one can probably at least kinda code himself, and would rather do that than sales.

<comment><USER46> I agree on the pretty female observation. Just about every tech recruiter that's contacted me recently looks like someone I'd want to date. My father is a doctor in the US and the drug reps he deals with are also from this mold, so I guess that says something about what really works in male-centered professions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The tech recruiter role/economy seems like a tremendous conflict of interest, especially when they are outsourced. They are compensated primarily as a percentage of the salary for each hire they make. Like real estate agents, they get very little benefit from hiring well and primarily from hiring a lot. If those folks don't pan out, more roles to fill and more bonuses to be had. It seems like an extremely short-sighted solution, which leads to short relationships that don't sufficiently penalize nefarious behavior.

</comment><comment><USER48> >> Contract tech workers sometimes believe agencies insulate them from a defaulting client.

This is true.

In one of my last contracts I was working alongside a guy who was contracting for them directly. He eventually walked out when they failed to pay (again!)

Agents are scum, but as someone that doesn't have a vast network (most of the people I've worked with are still in the same perm position years or even decades later), and who doesn't live in London, I'm afraid I don't see that I'm going to be able to live without them any time soon.

Instead I'm actually trying to build relationships with the agents I have worked with that have found me appropriate work and who haven't f*cked up in any way. They are few and far between, but they do exist.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm not suggesting the author is necessarily wrong, but I've been in the IT industry long enough to notice that there are more "Recruiters are terrible people!" articles whenever there's a boom in tech jobs and people can find their own role. As soon as the market contracts and jobs become hard to find, all the articles stop.

I think people's view of tech recruiters is a function of the market rather than a de facto truth - recruiters are perceived as bad as the market gets better because people don't need them in order to find a new job. That doesn't automatically mean recruiters are bad. Come the next downturn they'll be useful again. We just need to recognise that.

<comment><USER50> Or as someone described above, the recruiters go back to bartending when the market sinks. The issue is not getting too many nice, well-though-out proposals from credible recruiters who can spell and use grammar properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Flash Harry was played by the recently deceased George Cole, gawd bless 'im. I've had first hand experience of the London recruitment scene, as permie and contractor, for many years now, and much of it is just as described in this funny & truthful article. However, one malpractice the author misses is Shitheads bunging brown envelopes to HR staff at large corps to manipulate the PSL. Also, there are some good recruiters out there who know and understand the skill sets they trade in. I've been lucky enough to use a couple of them as a hiring manager when I was permie at a bank. But they are very much in a minority...

</comment><comment><USER52> I totally agree on asking the actual company what they're paying the recruiter before you sign on; they will always be expecting an amount of work equal to full amount paid to the recruiter rather than the meagre sum that will end up in your pocket (which is exactly how hard you're planning to work).

I have been told of people learning they were on long-term $50/hour assignments where the recruiter is making $200/hour over the top; no lie.

But the sickness doesn't just come from normal people accepting jobs; these agencies are also held up by fucking Enterprise businesses. We recently needed to hire some additional staff and only received 3 resumes; 2 of which we'd seen before and were unsuitable.

I told management that the recruiter wasn't doing their job and that maybe we could just put something on Seek, get a reply, then refer them to the recruiter. "We can't do that! The entire corporation has a contract; everything has to go through the recruitment agency and there's no way around it!"

How the fuck they knowingly got themselves into such a farcical situation (and for what benefit?) I'll never understand... except that they're fucking idiots.

</comment><comment><USER53> The same stands for the real estate industry. Or worse. Most real estate agents add nothing just take money away from both tenants and landlords.

<comment><USER54> I'm still amazed they continue to thrive in the Internet age.

They do add some value to sellers (showing the house), but their commisions are WAY beyond the value they add.

And they're a huge annoyance to buyers, intentionally hiding information whenever possible.

<comment><USER53> I'm still thinking on a good strategy how to get rid of them completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Oh I'm not finished yet, but this is a hilarious read! Lots of moments I was belly laughing out loud at the author's wonderful use of metaphors.

Yeah in the USA, 2015 recruiting industry is far better than the author's depictions. I have no idea what its like in the UK.

The indian recruiting market is not unlike this.

Its still a funny read either way

</comment><comment><USER56> Yea, I just got one for managing plastic fabrication machines in some factory in the UK. When looking at why I got the offer, its because I had the words "Tooling Engineer" (title at current job) in my LinkedIn profile.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've started using more of Gmail's features to help control this.

First, there is the actual email address itself: Gmail ignores periods and anything after a + (plus sign). So every new site I sign up for gets a different email address, usually my normal email plus a postfix named after that particular site. This way, when I get emails from recruiters saying they found me through LinkedIn, but are actually using a form of my email address I've only used on Github, I know immediately what is going on.

And second, I just mark them as spam. Because they are.

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't know much about the English market, though I occasionally get their spam overflow. Still, I have to question how you regularly get into those kinds of relationships with anyone without being needlessly mean and disrespectful in initial interactions.

With recruiters here, I generally decline the job they were thinking of and tell them what I am interested given that it has to significantly beat my current work. After a few times back and forth, that eventually brings the conversation to an end. The nicer ones tell give me some local companies that wont pay third party recruiters but might be a closer match.

Really, I think recruiters naturally tend to over represent employers who are incredibly bad deals since the better the job the less often it is empty and the easier it is to fill for free through networking (I.e. you have employees who wouldn't see guilt/risk in recommending it to friends.)

Given that recruiters are sitting in that skewed perspective of the market, they should naturally get bitter and irritated with people who turn down their "best" positions while being rude throughout the process. Probably they also feel all the more helpless in their role since I can only imagine the bizarre feedback they get from their most rewarding/difficult/longstanding customers on what were "good" matches.

If recruiters were replaced by neural networks, it may kick off the first AI rights campaign to protect AI from poor input abuse.

</comment><comment><USER58> Some valid points which could be made with a clear head too. I believe in market dynamics, the reason the recruiters aren't gone by now is that market still needs them.

The author's moral high ground is also funny. At the end of the day these guys are here to make a living, and making a living is indeed really hard. Somehow suggesting these guys are just born evil isn't right, given the same circumstances most of us would behave the same way. Lucky we are engineers in demand. So far.

</comment><comment><USER59> Coderstack (which is dead now) used to only accept direct job posts.

I wonder if a similar service would gain traction again. Because all of the job boards for UK have 90% recruiter spam really.

</comment><comment><USER60> I think of recruiters more as a "realtor for my skills."

It's totally OK to not use a realtor to sell your house to your coworker's son and his new wife in rural BFE for 20k $USD.

When you go to sell your mcmansion in a small town suburb for $80k USD, you might have a lawyer look over the sales contract, but you might not use an agent. There just isn't that much at risk and you probably know the person you're selling to.

When you sell your house for $120k USD in a bigger city, you almost definitely use a seller's agent and might use a lawyer. There's more risk because it's a bigger city and you're playing for more money. There's probably some negotiation involved and you don't sell a house every day so you need to know what's normal, what's legal, and where hidden traps are.

When you sell a house for $500k USD, you sure as hell use a a seller's agent and a title company and a lawyer and everyone reviews the contract. That's a lot of money to not have many eyeballs on the deal and rounds of negotiation.

Selling your skills is like selling a house. When it's not that much money and you trust the people you're dealing with, you don't need a recruiter. When you're negotiating salary and benefits at higher tiers, you need to know what's normal and what's acceptable, and that's another service a recruiter provides. They also represent you to many buyers and help you with the negotiation and feedback process. Like a real estate agent, they are a critical impersonal cutout that helps everyone maintain face during a negotiation.

</comment><comment><USER61> I never liked overly broad brushes, I understand the author is angry but calling _all_ recruiters names is, I think, not cool.

But, I really enjoyed the funny writing!

</comment><comment><USER62> Graduated in 1993, started contracting in 1995, and pretty much been at it ever since then. I have no issue with agents. They make my life easier.

The only and ONLY rule I have is that the employer knows exactly the rate I am getting and is happy with the rate they are paying the agent. I've seen contractors walk out on jobs once they find out the margin the agent is getting. An honest relationship is key.

</comment><comment><USER63> I was thinking off writing almost the same blog post today. Its the same shitty situation here in Austria... Recruiters should burn in hell.

</comment><comment><USER64> I've been on the job market the last few weeks, going mostly through New York recruiters. The quality of the experience has varied wildly, with some obviously doing the minimum work necessary, and just as obviously not knowing or caring about the "acronyms" on my resume. Others seem pretty professional, have apparently done research, and the clients they recruit for would indicate they have a reputation to maintain.

In the end, the gross factor doesn't really matter to me -- the recruiters find me on LinkedIn, and I just say "sure, I'll talk to XYZ Co." unless it's obviously sleazy or a bad fit.

It's a bit grueling to cast such a wide net, and it's obviously a hustle, but for me it's mostly just a way to get an initial phone introduction/screen with companies, and from there it's apparent whether it's worth the trouble to move to the next step.

I might not go this route again, though, having seen how little most recruiters add to the process.

<comment><USER65> Unsolicited I know but a good friend of mine runs a recruitment firm in NYC. He's a tech guy (I've worked with him for nearly 10 years) and the founder is an ex-Google dev too (I've only Skyped with him but he seems to know his stuff).

They mostly place for contract roles - but I could be wrong on that.

Happy to introduce you if you wish.

</comment></comment><comment> joe-mccann [https://twitter.com/actualrecruiter](https://twitter.com/actualrecruiter)

<comment><USER66> [https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter](https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I guess I'll chime in here as someone who's had a different experience. Actually quite a pleasant experience. They weren't spamming me, they wrote to me once but something about the way they wrote to me caused me to remember this one particularly six months later. Probably because they weren't spamming job postings, just saying "hi there, I'm a recruiter, if you ever find yourself looking for a job I can help you find one." They had me four different interviews the next week and weren't embellishing my qualifications. One of the interviews quickly lead to a job offer in a position I actually wanted to have. They're taking a cut but it's because they made my transition process fast and easy, instead of spending what could have been a month or two unemployed and starting to worry, and to me that's worth something.

</comment><comment><USER68> Hm recruiters are fine mostly for entry-level jobs. As time goes on, dealing with middlemen is increasingly irksome. Not only that, but then you need to deal with an up-to-30% paycut because of the middleman.

It's a shame really. At my last job we would invite recruiters to send us candidates for entry-level PHP/MySQL web devs, and largely they sent people who had been working with Wordpress too long, or only knew how to function in <insert framework>. The mismatch was worse than putting the ad out and filtering through the resumes, but it was less effort. I also saw some of the ads the recruiters posted, and I never would've applied because of a) wording (rockstar/ninja crap), b) ridiculous skillset (10 years PHP experience... really?).

So the author here is a little harsh, but largely on point. Way too much slime, but sometimes necessary if you're entry level

</comment><comment><USER69> Just as an aside as the original article seems to think that the recruiter is taking money from him, i.e.t he 15% is 15% he could be receving. It does not work like that. Most employers know what the going day rate is for their required skill set. If they got a contractor directly they would pay the day rate, they would not bump it up 15% because they didn't go through an agency. they pay the agency fee to undertake the work of locating the contractor. If they do the work to locate the contractor themselves why would they pay the contractor extra? They would not.

Its almost as if the article writer has so little knowledge of how recruitment works that he is a target for shitty people in the industry, kind of like how once you respond to a Nigerian prince loads of scammers come out of the woodwork.

</comment><comment><USER70> I really dislike the lack of expertise _typical_ recruiters have with the technical jargon and requirements of our industry. I've had many poor recruitment experiences where the recruiter couldn't accurately explain the role, requirements, or why they thought I was a good enough fit to contact me in the first place. My github simply hits the right keywords and that's good enough for them.

This has been made worse by not being able to explain the interview process. I specifically asked, many times to various recruiters, what I would be quizzed on or what I should prepare myself for. Few could tell me anything beyond, "some technical questions about algorithms and data structures." Inadequate. The interviewer proper would ask random questions about memory architecture, optimizing the brute-force KNN algorithm, or simply how to reverse a string. Meanwhile I was studying binomial coefficients, heaps, tries, and the standard sorting algorithms. I have github projects that implement lattices for a logically monotonic distributed programming language. For someone such as myself this is unacceptable and leads to some dead-end interviews that are a complete waste of time.

I blame the way we "funnel" the "dregs" of candidates and have little to offer in terms of solutions. I agree with the author that companies seem reluctant to do actual head-hunting. I always assumed that if you contacted me for a job there would be a reason: you like some of the projects I host on my github or have seen my contributions to various open source projects -- that you already have an idea of my skillset and abilities and want to get to know me. Recruiters are more inclined to match keywords and send me through the process... they're not incentivized to get to know me at all. All I can suggest is to not use a recruiter or at least choose one carefully: choose one that knows your industry well and can tell a min-heap from a max-heap.

 _edit_ : fixed wording implying a specific github project was some sort of library or system when it implements a single programming language, not languages.

<comment><USER71> I dislike this expertise as well, but lets get at what you are saying, that a recruiter should have some sort of programming background to know how concepts actually are used versus the sorts of mixed metaphors one comes up with in the absence of that understanding, which are often quite comical.

This just isn't realistic. Most recruiters are doing this job in some sort of entry-level commission-only type role, and if they had any sort of basic IT skills/understanding are likely to have better offers to do something in that arena. Some recruiters do learn a good bit and are more successful over time and make a good living, but most people try it for a bit and don't do well enough to keep at it. Combining the sales ability with technical ability is a bit rare, but for people who have both you can do pretty well both in recruiting and in other lines of work as well.

<comment><USER70> I understand it is probably an unreal expectation. If you actually did know your min/max heaps and could implement them you'd be better off being a programmer. Never the less it is counter-productive to know nothing at all as we agree.

That's why I don't have any _good_ solutions. It doesn't seem like there are any. Unless we can find magical unicorns who know enough about programming and software development to be competent enough to assess the abilities of programmers themselves... or at the very least understand the process enough to be able to answer their questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> It's the nature of the beast, other option...

Company hates recruiters.

Company builds an internal recruitment team.

Find out they can't perform.

They then start using external recruiters.

There has to be a solution to this, whoever solves it will become very, very, very rich. At present, only internal hires or referrals seem to work best.

</comment><comment><USER73> Had a recruiter email me recently saying:

"JASON knowledge is an advantage..."

Yep. I still don't know jason

<comment><USER74> I recall one phone call where the guy said "how much do you know about Ajax?" (pronounced like the Dutch football team). There was no reason for the guy to know any different, but it amused me at the time....

<comment><USER65> Haha, I'm a dev and I pronounced it like this for a while (knowing it was incorrect).

Someone like me probably set them down the wrong path!

<comment><USER54> I live in Uruguay (South America), many developers don't speak English, and most that do don't speak it well (they usually do read and write decently).

You'd probably be hard pressed to understand what they're talking about :) - for example JSON is definitely JASON, and you'll be looked at funny if you don't pronounce it that way :) , and Ajax is pronounced like the Dutch football team.

If I don't hear it on a video or a talk, I'm probably pronouncing it wrong (and not knowing I am). I hope to get corrected if I do.

<comment><USER65> I guess its important to make allowances - especially for non-native English speakers.

I worked on a portlet system a few years back (oh the horror!) with a Chinese dude. Super developer. It wasn't until the last day that I figured out what he meant when he said 'poorer led'. Should have figured it out sooner looking back :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> In Dublin this is starting to ring true for me.

though i don't agree with classing them as reptilians. They're trying to survive in a industry that forces them to things to survive.

I'm also skeptical this will last or will Tech bubble 2.0 burst soon?

</comment><comment><USER7> I work in IT and I have literally never received an email from a recruiter. My secret? I don't have a linkedin profile. Yeah, despite what everyone says my life and career have not collapsed without linkedin.

</comment><comment><USER76> Ha ha - that was a funny read. You've got a talent for words, forget this new fangled DeVelOps thing you've been doing for 15 years and get into comedy writing.

</comment><comment><USER65> A recruiter once lost it with me when I was job hunting about 5 years ago. They has put me forward for a job which I'd already applied for (one of the biggest consulting co's in the world) and was convinced that I'd cut them out of the process completely (despite the fact I'd told them I'd applied).

Got offered the job in the end. Shitty salary (and not the most exciting of jobs as I gathered too).

</comment><comment><USER77> disgusting text. could not finish reading it.

the author should try appreciating the fact that IT is an industry where one can choose between jobs. many people do not have that luxury and must swallow a lot of shit to earn a living. the author comes across as an entitled brat that has absolutely no empathy or understanding for fellow human beings, all the while dishing out horrible insults at their humanity. disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER78> I don't understand. If recruiters are leeches, why do employers work with them ? perhaps, it's because they provide a service, no?

<comment><USER16> Because _everyone_ is really bad at recruitment. Companies hire recruiters because they think it'll help dampen the badness of their own recruiting abilities, but really it just makes it harder, as recruiters scare away decent candidates.

<comment><USER78> I don't get it. If a recruiter calls you, you are either interested or not. So, what's the harm ?

<comment><USER79> The problem is Google doesn't yet have a spam filter for my phone like they do for my email

(I mean, in practice I just don't answer any calls I am not expecting - <USER2> not everyone can do that)

<comment><USER80> What I would really like is, when someone calls me, a voice menu saying "You've reached David's phone. If this is an emergency or he's expecting your call, press 1 to ring through. Otherwise, press 3 to set up a time to call, or 7 to leave a message."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> There have been times in my career when good recruiter was my best friend in the world... at least for a couple of weeks. These days I get spammed or called by five or six of them a day, most of whom haven't even read my resume, and have no idea whether I am a fit for the latest position they are trying desperately to fill. It resembles a boiler-room stock pumping operation.

</comment><comment><USER82> Given how common the experiences OP describes are among tech people of my acquaintance in the US, I have a hard time believing that anyone here saying "I know hundreds of recruiters and none of them think like this" isn't a recruiter themself.

The thing I hate most is having a recruiter get in the middle of my salary negotiations and try to talk me down.

</comment><comment><USER83> this post is truth. i removed myself from linkedin because of the amount of recruiters spam / calls, the most annoying part was the constant incorrect matching of my skills with proposed jobs. (i work with node.js but was getting tons of requests for php and java jobs). the same recruiters didn't stop contacting me even after i found a job (without their help) and stated clearly on my accounts that i was not available anymore. this was super annoying.

at first i put a warning on my linkedin profile, but it didn't decrease the amount of spam.

then i started to threat via email every one using my personal email without any consent (seems like they sell cv database to each other).

i end up closing my linkedin account because i could not stop anymore all this annoying crap from recruiters. i still receive some emails once in a while and i threat them to remove my identity from their db, it seems to work for now.

</comment><comment><USER84> These types of people don't just get themselves into recruiter roles lying about vacancies and candidates to swindle clients and skim the takings, but also into roles managing open source projects lying about download numbers and faking popularity rankings, to flip companies and sell consulting services and conference seats.

</comment><comment><USER85> This was quite excellent. You could just as well find & replace "IT" with "marketing", too.

</comment><comment><USER86> I got my LAMP stack certification and this all went way!

[https://github.com/thoughtbot/liftoff/pull/178#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/thoughtbot/liftoff/pull/178#issuecomment-57690259)

</comment><comment><USER87> While I agree with most of this article, its a bit extreme. I've never liked spam, but is it really that hard to ignore them? I've had a recruiting firm call me 4-5 times and send emails and I started getting a bit upset...but far from that extreme

</comment><comment><USER88> Possibly the most entertaining and well-written post I've ever encountered on HN.

</comment><comment> c-slice I love this. The writing style reminded me of "A Clockwork Orange."

</comment><comment><USER89> Over the course of my career in Cali and Silicon Valley, I've been fortunate to work for some top tech companies on exciting projects (all through recruiters). I'm very thankful to recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER90> After reading through this thread, it would seem that many commenters from the UK are able to relate, and that a number of people in the US market are judging based on no experience.

</comment><comment><USER91> It sounds just as bad as New York City. I'm getting my UK settlement visa within the next month and will be back on job market, definitely not looking forward to this!

</comment><comment><USER92> Some here are listing good and bad experiences. I'm considering finding one to help find jobs for my particular interests in another area.

Any tips for picking one?

</comment><comment><USER93> I had a total clockwork orange moment reading this. Unrelated note - you may call me a pig, but I only take calls from female recruiters.

<comment><USER94> actually I've experienced that they're nicer, or at least try to (?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I think the plugin to block email doesn't go far enough. I think it should be enhanced to autoreply with a markov bot.

</comment><comment><USER96> Best way to not 'feed the beast' is to write a quality resume/CV and post it to your local tech careers site.

</comment><comment><USER97> > Once I talked a client into advertising a position themselves. The signal- > to-noise ratio was appalling and sorting through the flood of applicants > took days. Some cover letters were tragic, begging in broken English "I fast > learner, my family starving, England less shooty, pliz you help us move?".

Bah, you can rant without resorting to racist aping of ESOL speakers. Especially when the odds are good that the author only speaks one language.

</comment><comment><USER98> In London, recruiters and real estate agents appear to be interchangeable. The bullshitter ratio is off the scales.

</comment><comment><USER99> For the UK the picture is so very true. I admire the proper English of this article. Well worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER100> I don't give my email or contact info to recruiters or random job sites!

<comment><USER101> Does that stop the ones that spam you on Github?

<comment><USER100> Github has an option "Don't show my email address"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> I stopped answering the phone to unknown numbers because of this.

<comment><USER103> I turned off my voicemail because of this.

<comment><USER104> My voicemail recording is just several minutes of classical music with the occasional "All of our representatives are currently busy at this time. Please stay on the line and we'll be with you shortly." at regular intervals.

<comment><USER105> I'm fond of the Intercept tone. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IC_SIT.ogg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IC_SIT.ogg)

<comment><USER104> That's a nice idea too, but in reality it creates trouble (I tried it once). For example, my bank's fraud department often likes calling me several times a day asking me to "verify" transactions. I told them _several_ times to NEVER call me, and that _I_ will monitor my transactions via the online interface and call in the event of suspected fraud. However, they continued calling me, often at the most inconvenient times. Like when I have a bag slung across my shoulder, a grocery bag in one hand, a hot drink in the other, and standing on crowded public transit, they expect me to answer my phone, spill my drink, fall over on a moving train, and yell my social security number in front of everyone on the train? To top that, don't they realize that I need to login to my AWS account and check my instance usage before I can "verify" any transactions? Sorry bank, just DO NOT CALL. Ever. Period. E-mail me. This is the 21st century.

So back when I had one of those error message tones, they once decided that my contact information was "out of date" and just disabled my credit card while I was eating lunch, leaving me stranded at a restaurant like a fool, ATM and credit cards all disabled, without any way to pay. (Like seriously, are you trying to stop fraud, or stop your own customers?)

With the hold message this doesn't happen. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> time to finally implement my non profit side-project

bad-recruiters.com

</comment><comment><USER107> Complaining about recruiters has to be one of the all-time great humblebrags.

"Oh woe is me--all these people keep calling me to offer well-paying professional jobs!"

</comment><comment><USER108> You lost me at suggesting "IT" = "engineer" when speaking to your grandpa.

</comment><comment><USER109> As a manager I've had a recruiter basically say "That's a nice development department you have there, shame if something were to happen to it." As he described that by signing a contract with him and keeping "active" by hiring his candidates a couple of times a year, he would not solicit the developers at my company.

<comment><USER69> I have seen that done, basically a company I worked for had a contractual agreement to use a certain agency for their contractors. The agency finds out contractors are being hired and they are not being offered the opportunity to out forward candidates. The recruiter came to a meeting with my manager and was very cordial and asked why they were not being used, the manager said he didnt like them (or something similar, basically making it a personal issue with them). The recruiter simply said they had a contractual agreement and whilst they probably would not pursue it legally they would quite happily use his company as a resource to select contractors from.

After 2 staff members were offered new positions the manager decided he didnt hate the agency that much. Whilst I liked the manager it was refreshing to see someone combat this situation whilst expressing clearly they would not pursue it legally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> You do realize that there is an entire IT Industry outside of Facebook and Google?

<comment><USER111> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10399372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10399372) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused. Writing a long, mean spirited rant about millions of faceless strangers is totally okay, but saying "I know lots of these strangers and I think the opposite is true" in the comments section is off topic? Soooo are we at a spot where its 100% ok to rip millions of strangers, but the second someone disagrees a mod gets upset and starts editing the discussion? This is bizarre.

<comment><USER111> > _the second someone disagrees a mod gets upset_

That's quite the understatement. You posted close to two dozen indignant comments in a single thread, crossing repeatedly into incivility. That's an abuse of HN by any standard, regardless of how flawed the article and the other comments were.

<comment><USER4> So, to be clear, since you never had a single problem with ANYONE shitting on an entire profession. "Crossing repeatedly into incivility" is something youre offended by only when its not being done toward an engineer. Just trying to figure out the logic behind being okay with the literal hundreds of negative comments about an entire profession in this thread but being super duper upset for me being not that polite in response. Is there logic here or was this just a bit of a tantrum on your part? Perhaps we should have some disclaimer like "feel free to shit on other professions, but if you DARE respond to those posts, fuck you."?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> IT people talking about being exploited, particularly by unskilled laborers, well... I understand how "boring" it might be to be _harassed_ in this way, just as telemarketing is, but - come on - a little perspective, please. Surely you'll understand that your _boring_ doesn't trump someone's need to make money.

P.S. The author talks about "us social inepts in tech". I hope he understands his article is a great banner to said ineptness.

<comment><USER105> Your 'need to make money' does not entitle you to any of my time or forbearance, both of which are finite.

<comment><USER112> Sure. That's roughly what I tell telemarketing operators. But a) talking about exploitation is still ridiculous; and b) what do you suggest? Do you propose passing a law forbidding unsolicited contacts? Via which channels?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> It always depends on how you react, if you are passive (like the author of the article) or active. While I too get many mails/calls that are unnecessary, I like to keep active contact with some recruiters I came to like and call them/meet them on a regular basis, even when I have absolutely no need for a new contract. If you are a contractor, you are essentially owning a business and if you have a business, you should value potential customers. Crying like a baby about too much interest in your person is a loser attitude. As long as there are not too many middle men, I also do not care about them getting their cut, as the better ones use that money to get the right contacts for me in case I want to change the position. My current recruitment agency also uses some of the money for great parties and events, which helped me to get to know many others (clients/colleagues...).

<comment><USER37> >> Crying like a baby about too much interest in your person is a loser attitude.

I wonder why you thought this would be appropriate to post.

<comment> UK-AL His saying when you're a contracter. The recruiters are your outsourced sales people</comment></comment></comment>


The Crack Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/crack-language/ <comment><USER2> This page doesn't sell it to me. Maybe it's a great language, who knows?

1\. With Go, I understand the point. It makes advances in terms of how easy it is to write concurrent programs, without completely ditching the traditional imperative model.

2\. Rust is a different take on the same point. We want concurrency and safety. Rust's difference from Go is that it is more safe, and makes it easier to give latency guarantees.

But I don't get what's "hard" about, say, Go, that Crack would make things easier for me. What does Crack offer that Go doesn't? Or Python? Why would I want to use Crack at all?

(I get that they want to say it's "addictive" so they'll call it "crack", but it's a terrible name. I worked for a company that wanted a product to go viral so they code-named it "Marburg", after a biological weapon. Maybe I should name my next product "Enola Gay" because it will level the competition?)

<comment><USER3> Technically, work on Crack became public before work on Go did. So you should be asking what Go provides that Crack doesn't. Technically.

<comment><USER4> and rust,

but yeah, maybe its the name

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
       import crack.io cout;
        x := 'test';
        cout `This is a $x\n`;  # prints "this is a test" to standard output.

Really weird strings... I don't even know how to type this character with my keyboard layout. Nice job for this language. It has a lot of things for so few versions. I couldn't build something like this. But who would use this? D is 10 times better and mature and almost no one uses it.

<comment><USER6> You don't know where to find the backtick on your keyboard?!

<comment><USER7> I''l give you an example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Italian.svg>

edit: a couple of funny things for italian keyboards, if you are a programmer or use linux/unix: there is no backtick, there is no tilde, '/' is shift-7, '/' and '?' are on different keys, '{}' are on altgr-shift-è.

<comment><USER8> It might go a long way to explaining why I don't come across many Italian Unix sysadmins, and the few I have come across coded their system scripts in php.

<comment><USER9> I'm Italian and nearly everyone I know (who's a programmer) uses an US layout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"Crack aims to provide the ease of development of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language."_

Where's the speed comparison? Where's a substantial enough code sample to show that development is "easy"?

<comment><USER2> They probably assume that as long as it's not too burdened with runtime dispatch, then LLVM will take care of the speed. And they'd be right.

(Popular JavaScript implementations manage high speed even with runtime dispatch. The optimizations make heavy use of static analysis, but this is difficult to do.)

<comment><USER11> Why do you think run time dispatch is that slow? With static typing you can setup an efficient vtable, while even with just dynamic typing there is a lot of cachingq you can do to reduce call overhead. Static analysis helps for some inlining, but the gain isn't more than a few percent.

Garbage collection and run time safety checks probably cost more than call indirection.

<comment><USER2> Call indirection prevents inlining. It's not about comparing indirect calls versus direct calls, it's about comparing indirect calls against no function call at all.

For example, imagine a function that multiplies two matrices. If the matrices are statically typed, the resulting function would only need to allocate the result. If the matrices aren't statically typed, you need to dispatch on the type of each element in each matrix. That will take _much_ longer.

Yes, there are ways around this in languages with dynamic dispatch. However, my point is that LLVM won't do it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Crack aims to provide the ease of development of a scripting language with the performance of a compiled language."

Have you looked at the Flua project yet? It's pretty much this and much more. <http://flua-lang.org/>

<comment><USER3> You are joking aren't you? There's not a line of documentation on the Flua webpage. The Windows download doesn't open on my Windows machine and I need a GUI to run it on Linux (which my linux box doesn't support). It also claims to be as fast as C, but a cursory examination of the source suggests it is entirely written in Python and Flua!

<comment><USER12> That's because there is no online version of the documentation right now. It's only available in the editor, it's an Alpha after all. Just because the compiler is written in Python it does not mean the Flua programs are executed in Python. In fact they can be executed in multiple environments and C++ is the one which is currently being developed, hence the programs _are_ fast. How come the Windows download doesn't work for you? It works on vanilla Windows, that's really strange.

Just stay on a constructive level. It would have been nice if you submitted a bug report on GitHub about the error you got on your Windows machine.

<comment><USER13> Locking people into needing a specific editor just to get the documentation is a bad move.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, sorry - I just couldn't find any time to write an online version. Will do it as soon as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some more info here: [http://www.mindhog.net/~mmuller/projects/crack/Manual-0.7.ht...](http://www.mindhog.net/~mmuller/projects/crack/Manual-0.7.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Start reading the spec, get to "For complex types (which we'll discuss later), a null pointer is used" under _default initialization_

wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER16> Once could make all sorts of comments about the fact that this article currently appears immediately above the one on 'hacking my vagina' - but that would be too easy.

<comment><USER17> Joking aside, 'Crack' is a questionable name for a programming language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am inclined to dismiss the language for this:

      i++

<comment><USER19> Why?

<comment><USER20> I'd venture into guessing that the parent reason is that ++ and -- operators tend to make easy to bury side-effects where they're not obvious, like in the provided code sample:

__raw[args[i++]] = 1;

(C programmers would disagree about this, of course :) )</comment></comment></comment>


Better Language Models and Their Implications - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/# <comment><USER2> Is anyone else troubled by them not releasing the source model/dataset/parameters here? Yes, the technology can be used for malicious means - but would argue that "DeepFaking" language is FAR less of a problem than "DeepFaking" video/photo/audio... which already occurs. Seems like they went back on their charter to share AI developments broadly ("not concentrate power") under the excuse of "safety."

(These results look fire btw)

</comment><comment><USER3> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163522)</comment>


Native Win32 for fun and profit - <AUTHOR> http://ben.straubnet.net/post/3074077580/native-win32-for-fun-and-profit

<comment><USER2> Nice to see some Win32 code from time to time. I have to admit I'm a big fan of decoupling the GUI from the main application. I typically write the GUI in C# or Java and the main application in C++.</comment>


Vote for your favorite math video created by middle school students - <AUTHOR> http://videochallenge.mathcounts.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I attended one of the regional competitions held in Northern Virginia over the weekend and it was great to see so many 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students participate in MathCounts.</comment>


How to establish a company in US for non-european based in Europe? - <AUTHOR> I want to start my startup, and I want to establish a Delaware company to have a US bank account and be able to receive payments. I don't know what's the process from Europe (Netherlands/Germany). I have a non-european passport. My concern is how much it takes to maintain the company annually? and what if I wanted to shut it down? What are the steps and things I have to take care of? <comment><USER2> Stripe Atlas does exactly this for you.

[https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas)

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with Atlas is that it only helps you start, but you don't know how to take it from there.</comment></comment>


Ask HN – What payment services auto-distribute for collaborative works? - <AUTHOR>

If a team of people want to create and sell a product online , is there a payment gateway that will not only handle the transactions but automatically distribute the money to each member of the team based on whatever percentage everyone agreed upon? I'm basically looking for something dead simple like Gumroad that will do the diving up of each purchase and send each member their respective percentage. Light and simple are the key words here.<p>Thank you. <comment><USER2> Well you're up late. ;)

I believe Stripe can handle dispersing funds to multiple accounts.

<comment><USER2> I knew I remembered reading it someplace...

[https://stripe.com/us/marketplaces](https://stripe.com/us/marketplaces)

"Stripe supports complex flows that span multiple sellers—and anyone else you need to pay as part of your business."

<comment><AUTHOR> If I read that I would have scanned the phrase " complex flows " ... and left the page.

I guess Stripe it is. I was kind of looking for a UI analogous to the Toy's R Us giraffe with a big "Buy" button attached, preferably with little mini arrows labeled 'pay to' pointing to other smaller giraffes representing all collaborators involved.

but this shall do. Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment>


Declassified: US Military's Secret Cold War Space Project Revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/31470-manned-orbiting-laboratory-military-space-station.html?cmpid=514648 <comment><AUTHOR> The declassified NRO documents are here: [http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/MOL.html](http://www.nro.gov/foia/declass/MOL.html)</comment>


An Economy of Faith and Trust - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/opinion/16brooks.html <comment><USER2> I can't wait for the NYT to go out of business. No more of these paywall/registerwall articles.

</comment><comment><USER3> _This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis - how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once._

I can explain it. Republicans like giving businesses new ways to make money. Subprime loans allowed businesses to lend to a whole group of people they couldn't lend to before. Democrats like giving poorer people the opportunity to build wealth. VPs at banks want to move up and proposing a whole new business area gets noticed and promoted. So, you use overly optimistic calculations that show only good coming from them and lots of people jump on the bandwagon and years later you're in trouble because reality never works as cleanly as paper. No one had done it before and they didn't know what would happen. I'm sure if you took foreclosure rates from standard loans and applied them to these subprime ones, the situation looks fine. Anyway, I remember something about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

The author (in my opinion) is very right. Until people and companies feel secure in their livelihood, they won't engage in the economic activity that makes an economy truly strong.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. As soon as people making 40k per year were able to buy 500k houses with little to no money down, my sirens went off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Reason is not like a rider atop a horse. Instead, each person's mind contains a panoply of instincts, strategies, intuitions, emotions, memories and habits, which vie for supremacy._

I can't express how badly I want this meme to take hold! I've wondered for years why anyone can believe that humans are rational agents in the face of the existence of the huge marketing apparatus present in advanced economies. I mean, if we really are rational decision-making agents, why does a manufacturer pay someone to come up with a jingle? To engineer a fad via guerrilla marketing? To create brand impressions by slapping a logo on a race car or sports stadium? All of these techniques, and all of the other successful marketing techniques out there, survive precisely because humans can be persuaded to spend money irrationally.

"So what?," you say? Well, that great artifice, "Classical Free Market Theory," rests on the foundation of rational agents making locally optimal solutions with imperfect information. It seems to me to predict, for example, that there's no profit to be made anywhere in a steady state condition. The rational masses, so the theory goes, will always seek the cheapest goods that meet the need, regardless of brand recognition, sexy women placed next to sports cars, or celebrity endorsement. In this case, every competitive scenario results in goods being produced at cost.

Thankfully (I think), this is not the case, and there is a way to wealth that is left open. Namely, a successful entrepreneur needs to be present when people are making non-rational decisions with their money. This is not to say that these are bad decisions, or that the entrepreneur needs to be unscrupulous. It's just an acknowledgment of the fact that rational decision- making in a quasi-equilibirum economic scenario results in zero profit margin.

<comment><USER6> Even if each individual agent isn't rational it is possible that, on average, we are.

Think of a room full of gas that you slowly heat. All sorts of quantum effects and chaos affect individual particles. But, on average, we can predict the net outcome with fairly good results using very naive models (laws of thermodynamics, ideal gas law, etc).

And you're absolutely right about profit. Standard economic theory predicts that, in a free market that is at a stable equilibrium, each firm won't earn any profits exceeding the marginal cost of production (economists say that a firm is earning "Normal profits"). But, obviously, no markets (that I can think of) are perfectly free or in perfect equilibrium (and economists know this, and have far more complex models for real world situations).

Although, if memory serves, this hypothesis has been empirically verified by many almost-free markets (i.e., commoditized goods sold to intelligent/large consumers). You have a bunch of sellers doing business, barely making ends meet, until something happens that disrupts equilibrium (new technology, another company's bankruptcy, sudden changes in demand, etc), where they can hope to earn supernormal profits in the short term, before the market returns to equilibrium.

<comment><USER7> When each individual agent is not rational the group is not rational. Take car buying, a major car company that cut it's advertising budget in half they could try to sell a higher quality product for less money. At which point all other company's would have to limit their budget to compete etc. However, this does not happen because consumers are not rational as a group.

You can even measure the level of rational behavior by comparing stable markets. EX: Gasoline vs Bottled water, there is vary little to distinguish the products, but brand name water carries a huge price premium.</comment></comment></comment>


Basie flu guidelines because it's bad this year - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/flu-vaccine-prevention-advice-from-physicians <comment><USER2> Some notes on measles vaccine. If you were vaccinated in the 60s, you likely are not protected.

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=549794...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5497945)

You may want to get a single dose vaccine as an adult anyway:

[https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/adult-mmr-vaccine- guidelines](https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/adult-mmr-vaccine-guidelines)

<comment><USER3> Please don't point people to Webmd; it's a horrible adware and privacy suck -- 33 trackers on the first page alone, and there are 3 pages.

Use noncommercial sources instead, e.g.

[https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/adult-mmr-vaccine- guidelines#...](https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/adult-mmr-vaccine-guidelines#1)

<comment><USER3> Ha! Not sure how I screwed that up. Intended sources _instead_ of WebMD were:

[https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/adult.html](https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/adult.html)

[https://www.vaccines.gov/who_and_when/adults/index.html](https://www.vaccines.gov/who_and_when/adults/index.html)</comment></comment></comment>


LSU Sues Elsevier for Breach of Contract - <AUTHOR> http://www.arl.org/news/community-updates/4264-louisiana-state-university-sues-elsevier-for-breach-of-contract <comment><USER2> Here's an amusing anecdote that happened in my own veterinary school a few years ago.

An exchange student from south america came and used our (european and valid) school licence to mass-download veterinary papers (not sure if it was for use in his school or for piracy, the story doesn't tell). Our school also got IP- banned by publishers, even though they pay the rights to access them.

This is really crazy, I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers during my lifetime.

<comment><USER3> When I was doing my MSc six years ago I was told by my supervisor not to download too many more papers relating to my project because the school could get IP-banned. I'd read pretty much every published paper relating to a small subfield of Physics at this point, but still no more than 50 papers in all.

I think I just laughed it off and said I'd got no plans to scrape journals. I always thought it was a bit of institutional folklore and that maybe there had been threatening letters or something. I didn't realise they actually do go ahead with the IP-banning.

<comment><USER2> Yep, they do ! We actually learned about it in the same context "don't download too many papers, you can get us banned".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the meantime, the LSU Vet school can use sci-hub.io, and get easier access to pubs than the paid version.

<comment><USER5> I wonder: how is sci-hub not been shut down yet? It does not even try to mask as a legal operation.

<comment> vertex-four The fact that the media companies aren't involved here should give you a hint. It's incredible how much power we've allowed them over the Internet.

<comment><USER6> There is also an important difference: media piracy can have a somewhat negative image in the eyes of the public, but pirating scientific papers does not. If academic publishers attract too much attention with a lawsuit, and more people understand their revenue model, I doubt that the public would be on their side. So maybe this encourages them to be more cautious.

In fact, Sci-Hub is not a real threat to academic publishers as long as universities do not cancel their subscriptions because of it. Of course, many universities probably won't want to tell their researchers to just use Sci-Hub (because of legal concerns, and because it could disappear the next day). So leaving Sci-Hub mostly alone may well be a deliberate decision from academic publishers.

<comment><USER7> My university blocks scihub and I'm every angry about it.

<comment><USER8> Use tor to access the onion domain for scihub (they have one) if you don't already do so.

<comment><USER9> Maybe [https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link](https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link) will work.

Or install Tor browser, and use [http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion](http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some people are wondering what is happening inside of Elsevier. Here is my speculation. When any large corporation sees the writing on the wall that it has a major threat to its business (Comcast, RIAA, MPAA) due to the fact that something is disrupting it they will take a really hard defensive position. This entails lowering of customer service and everything else in response.

Eventually the market kills them off and the situation changes. The large disruptor is Discrete Analysis which is a journal that has nearly no overhead. [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis- an...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv- overlay-journal/)

<comment><USER11> I think the real disruptor is Arxiv; which is where Discrete analysis will host their papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So LSU has a license with Elsevier, and LSU's School of Veterinary Medicine had a license with Elsevier.

How come LSU acquired two licenses in the first place? Was there a merger of LSU School of Veterinary Medicine with LSU? Has LSU SVM always been under LSU? Was the LSU license negotiated after?

<comment><USER13> The article doesn't state this explicitly, but it sounds like SVM and LSU had two independent contracts at first, then LSU's was renewed to be an umbrella contract, then SVM's independent contract expired. I'd even bet that it was planned that way, LSU would have wanted to combine the formerly independent contracts, so they negotiated for full coverage and then allowed SVM's to lapse.

<comment><USER14> Based on experience with academic libraries, this is likely, and it's plausible that Elsevier would use the existence of the former contract as an excuse to claim that veterinary students/faculty are somehow not covered under a contract covering all LSU students/faculty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is from 3 months ago (May 2, 2017), although it doesn't seem there have been any updates to the case since then.

<comment><USER9> Well:

> Elsevier has not accepted service of process for the lawsuit through the > Louisiana long-arm statute nor at the Elsevier corporate office in New York > City. Since Elsevier is headquartered in the Netherlands, LSU is attempting > to effect service of process through the Hague Service Convention.

So Elsevier also hides from the law ;)

I wonder what's happened with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The only thing I still don't get: if there is a contract for unlimited access, why aren't unis setting up mirrors locally?

<comment><USER17> Because they have unlimited access?

<comment><USER16> There are mirrors for many things, like linux distributions & packages, for which universities, historically, set up mirrors, to make things faster and distributed. It also makes sense not to leave the university network in my eyes.

Apparently they don't have unlimited access in reality (see the top comment), so if someone was doing this to me - "unlimited", yeah, not really - I'd set up a mirror and slowly copy the whole thing over to avoid not being able to access the documents in case I get banned and sorting it out takes time.

I'm well aware this might be a legal problem, but blocking valid access is also a legal problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know what's going on inside Elsevier? Publicly at least, they're acting like the music industry acted in the 90s. Are they doing anything internally to make sure they stay in business in ten years, other than fighting for every crumb of business they have now? Is there anyone there seriously looking ahead?

In a lot of ways they're in a worse position than the music industry was, or than Netflix was a few years ago, since at least those guys had the content- creation side to work on. I don't know what Elsevier can do when there's no money in distribution. The editors don't add that much.

<comment><USER19> Elsevier is making a lot of moves to stay relevant. They're now one of the biggest open access publishers (where the revenue comes from article processing charges, not subscriptions). They've been realigning themselves as more of a data/information company than just a content company (see these products under the heading of "research intelligence": [https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/products- serv...](https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/products-services)). They bought Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which is one of the largest preprint repositories in the social sciences. Before that they bought Mendeley to try to get into the researcher social network/reference management/data collection game.

Say what you will about Elsevier, but they are most definitely not just sitting on their subscription content and waiting to become irrelevant.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What IDEs for front-end web development? - <AUTHOR>

The last time I was a full-time web developer, the state of the art web development IDE was Allaire HomeSite, and sadly it turns out it's no longer available.  What are people using these days for front-end development?  Is there anything available for Windows or Linux that's relatively lightweight but beats using Notepad++? <comment><USER2> You might have more luck with Atom [1], though I personally use the browser tools for debugging and Sublime (currently) for editing.

For many developers these days, there's generally post-processing, from using coffeescript or jade or sass--and as far as I know, there's no "has- everything" solution out of the box that handles things for you.

You likely will already switch between editor and browser regularly--use the tools the browsers give you.

I don't think a tool like dreamweaver will serve you well these days either.

[1]: [https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out Brackets: [http://brackets.io/?lang=en](http://brackets.io/?lang=en) It's optimized for HTML, CSS and JS. I've slowly fell in love with it. Very usable and well designed. Bonus points for being open source and hackable.</comment>


Extracting hidden data from an audio file with the FFT - <AUTHOR> http://scott.wolchok.org/t500.html

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of this article on Aphex Twin (and others) embedding images in spectrograms: <http://www.bastwood.com/aphex.php>

<comment><USER3> Aphex Twin does a lot of interesting stuff. I recall watching an interview with him where he claimed that not only does he make all his music using software, but he actually has written some programs which compose the music for him. Can't remember where I saw that though.

<comment><USER4> Why would you believe him?

<comment><USER5> He got loads of software from the French organisation IRCAM (which Ted Nelson says he visited in 2006).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who has created many puzzle-hunts and participated in some, I really hope that the article is abbreviated because if they went from FFT to Wikipedia article in that few steps they are a truly amazing team (and I would feel bad).

Then again, it is DEFCON CTF they're trying to get into, so it does require some amazing problem-solving skills.

<comment><AUTHOR> I elided the hour or so spent trying to figure out what Power PAQ was. Google has no results for PAQ804; as the writeup says, a teammate eventually Binged it. I also elided the debugging needed to get the FFT to work (but you need to know what the decompressor is before deciding that it doesn't work!). I had commented out the line that applies a Hamming window to the FFT because I didn't understand it, but it didn't work right until I added the window. My theory is that it worked OK until the "background" (i.e., the song) got louder.

<comment><USER7> PAQ is a series of compression algorithm tests led by Matt Mahoney and a ton of compression enthusiasts who keep tweaking PAQ algorithm (be it for better memory use/speed or most importantly: compression ratio on a corpus).

Checkout their fabulous journey at

<http://mattmahoney.net/dc/>

PAQ804 says that it is fourth modification to the initial PAQ8 archiver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> the article could use a little more context/backstory too...

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a tiny bit and an index of other writeups now at <http://scott.wolchok.org/ctf2010/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> articles like this remind me that I'm just a web app kiddie, copying and pasting code from google, and that theres way more complex hackery going on in the world which I'll never really understand.

<comment><USER10> tip: get an arduino or a DSP board and a soldering iron and some basic electronics if you can afford it, spend a few months with it as a hobby.

It will increase your insights in to programming tremendously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Did anybody else find it shocking that a utility to decompress a small file would use 1.7G of memory to do so ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was assuming it was bytes allocated and freed; this system has 4 GB of memory, I had a few VMs plus chrome with many tabs open running at the time, and I didn't notice any thrashing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have the file in question mirrored somewhere? It's hosting seems down from here

<comment><AUTHOR> Local mirror should be up at <http://scott.wolchok.org/ctf2010/t500_47b7c308e6d24e14c5.bin> (also now linked from the article).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting, but the way the article is presented... Feels like it is written by Scr33p7 K1ddi3.

<comment><USER13> You may think it sounds like its written by a script kiddie, but he solved one of the most difficult challenges in the game and did all of this in only a few hours -- likely on little to no sleep.

Half of the competition requires exploitation of network services. This year included x86, x86-64, sparc64, ppc, compiled python, a java interpreter statically linked into a x86 binary, among a bunch of other random ones. You can't be a script kiddie and do well in this competition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I had just woken up from sleeping ~8 hours about 3-4 hours before the question was released, and we didn't do any of the exploitation of networked services except Pwtent Pwnables 200 (compiled Python) and Binary L33tness 100 and 200 (trivial patches in a debugger). I was tired by the time the rest came out, and the other reversers on the team burned themselves out on the PP400 (the PPC question) and Binary L33tness 300 (a huge red herring that actually printed the answer, encoded in hex when it was run). Thanks for defending me, though.</comment></comment></comment>


APROL: Array Processing Lisp (1993) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/aprol.paper.pdf

<comment><USER2> Interestingly, Julia 0.3 is out today. As far as projects like this go (LUSH is another variant), Julia seems to be the one most likely to hit the mainstream.</comment>


Steve Woz (Apple co-founder) Feels Trapped on Facebook, says it's not open - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tvdeck.com/2010/12/steve-wozniak-speaks-on-apples-closed.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg would say to that. He's always stating that Facebook is an open and social place.</comment>