Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue - <AUTHOR> I detest recruiters with the fiery incandescent white hot burning heat of a nova, but unfortunately I feel like i have to deal with them because I live in Edinburgh but work in London, i dont take part in the local community because i'm not there.
I applied for a 3 month contract position online. I have this recruiter call me and give me the usual bullshit and it gets to the usual "can i send over your CV to them?", I say sure as i always do after they've wasted 15 minutes of my time asking if i know PHP, if i then know LAMP, then asking my if i know Linux, apache and MySQL, then asking me if i know HTML, then CSS and you get the idea. They ask me all these questions even though 1) my CV they are looking at in front of them says so and 2) they got my CV by me sending it on an online ad asking for these specific skills.
So after i've given them permission to send my CV, the woman asks me for 2 technical references, i say to her that if the company likes the look of my CV then i'd be happy to provide references but i dont just hand out peoples details on a whim because i'd hate people to do that to me. She tells me that she cant send my CV without first getting the references. Normally i'd tell her to piss off politely at this point but the daily rate was going through the market rate ceiling and i'm a whore for money.
So i say sure, i'll give you references, i'll go and get permission from them and get back to you. I do this and email her the next day with contact details. She emails back and asks what companies they work for, i tell them they're freelancers that i've done work for. She says that colleagues arent good enough and will need managers i've worked under. I explain they're clients, not colleagues, and that i'm not an employee, i'm a self employed developer with my own company and clients, i dont and have never had a manager, i'm the guy people come to because they're not technical, i take care of everything for them. The position i'm looking for requires me to be the main technical guy there, surely she'd get where i'm coming from. She asked for technical references, thats what i gave her, people who understood and could articulate my technical ability.
But alas no, i've been penalised for not being a corporate drone, i avoid working for large corporations because its soul destroying and i hate bureaucracy. I like working for other freelancers and small agencies, its far more friendly and less political and i dont have to write screeds of bullshit documents when a quick email is good enough.
Anyway, sorry for the rant but this pissed me off today, i really wish i could totally avoid recruiters as when i have found work without them its been orders of magnitude easier and faster, but they know where the good paying gigs are. Someone please disrupt this industry.
tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit. <comment><USER3> _...i say to her that if the company likes the look of my CV then i'd be happy to provide references but i dont just hand out peoples details on a whim because i'd hate people to do that to me._

You are right. She is wrong. It's that simple.

To you, TamDenholm, and anyone else here at hn:

Feel free to use me as a technical reference whenever you run into this illogical and ridiculous road block. Just email me one line of code to print "Hello World" to the screen. If it is correct, I will happily tell the recruiter that 100% of everything I've ever seen you program was perfect. My contact info is in my profile.

<comment><USER4> Now that's a generous and tempting offer, but how would it actually work? First, they usually want to know about the work relation you had with the reference. Just inventing something is dangerous and ethically questionable, recruiters or not. Then, what if the hiring company actually contacted you?

<comment><USER3> _but how would it actually work?_

Exactly as I propose in grandparent. Reread it if necessary.

 _they usually want to know about the work relation you had with the reference._

I will tell them that we are colleagues on-line. Although we have never met in real life, we participate in Hacker News together. Believe me, I know much more about lots of people here than many I know in real life. For example, I would heartily recommend patio11, kirubakaran, iamelgringo, or tptacek over some guy down the hall who I know nothing about except sports conversations at the coffee machine. It is 2010: in our industry, virtual relationships can easily carry as much weight as physical ones.

 _Just inventing something is dangerous and ethically questionable, recruiters or not._

There is nothing ethically questionable about my offer. I will tell the truth. I will also include this thread. Recruiters have created an artificial roadblock to keep people from working by protecting their turf. This is just a handy method to turn that roadblock into a speed bump. If they are required to collect professional references, this helps them satisfy their requirement.

I operate under the assumption that everyone is telling the truth until I find out that they aren't. Then I have nothing more to do with them. So, your CV and a phone interview should be more than enough for a recruiter to qualify you. It they can't (or won't), then one of two things must be true: either they are mining CVs or they are incompetent.

 _Then, what if the hiring company actually contacted you?_

I fully expect them to and I will tell them the truth, including this thread. AFAIC, your CV, phone interview, and participation on Hacker News deserves at least a minimal amount of respect from hiring people. Requiring references prematurely is unnecessary and insulting.

I (obviously) feel very strongly about this and stand by my original offer to anyone here.

A few asides:

1\. I _never_ give references until _after_ receiving a job offer (contingent upon acceptable references). If a company is incapable or unwilling to make a preliminary decision based upon the interaction between me and any number of their employees, then I don't want to work for them.

2\. I have a great deal of respect for competent and professional recruiters. But then again, you're probably not reading this because you were able to do your jobs without references in the first place.

3\. To recruiters who are mining CVs, representing jobs that don't exist, or misrepresenting jobs to protect your listings, please understand that I (and probably most of the competent professional programmers here) want nothing to do with you. Please become professional or just go away.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your detailed response (and the original offer!).

I had understood your proposal just fine, and was wondering about the recruiters' side. I and surely most of us on HN agree with what you wrote on virtual relationships, fairly assessing a candidate based on the CV, and handling personal references with respect.

However, will such an HN reference pass the recruiter, and then the hiring person at the company? A technically clueless HR person won't be too impressed by "this guy on a web forum says my Hello World is fine". Again, I agree that in an ideal world, they would call the candidate and figure out his skills on their own, but they don't.

In any case, I'll bookmark your original post, one never knows :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Remind me to tell you of the time a recruiter at a very large bank attempted to place me as their VP of Technical Operations for the Tokyo branch office.

"If I might ask, what gave you the impression that I had sufficient leadership experience to be appropriate for this position?"

"Your CV says that you ran a multinational software company from Japan for four years."

"..."

<comment><USER6> To be fair, most people would properly assume that "a multinational software company" was a bit bigger than bingocardcreator.com.

So I wouldn't blame the recruiter.

<comment><USER5> Hundreds of thousands of elementary schoolteachers manage to find my website and read the about page. It's on the blue Googles _and_ the green Googles, and the blue texty clicky thingy on my resume will take you to it, too. If reading that prior to contacting me about my desire for a job is not in the recruiter's job description, what do they _do_ all day?

<comment><USER7> I have always, always wondered that. The answer seems to be "have lunch".

<comment><USER8> I think they surf linked-in after lunch too for what it's worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been freelancing in Europe for the last 10 years and I have learned to avoid recruiters as much as I can. In the last 4 years I have managed to get contracts through connections and skip middlemen all-together. It takes more time but it's rewarding.

Few rules I use when I deal with recruiters (in Europe):

1) There are really an handful of recruitment companies with a good reputation and history. By default, I distrust a recruiter calling from an unknown agency. There must be thousands of small recruitment agencies in Europe, I get a fairly high amount of emails/calls every week and I mostly ignore them.

2) Be suspicious when a recruiter knocks at your door or publish a job ad with an out-of-market rate. Rates are low these days. They just want to harvest CVs.

3) If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview.

4) Don't waste time talking technical stuff with a recruiter. They don't know shit. In 10+ years I have met maybe 2 recruiters with a real technical/dev background. Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.

5) Most of the time jobs coming from recruiters suck. A company with a decent vision on how to build software will never use zombie recruiters. Maybe they will contact one of the big player or, more likely, they will go on the market themselves. Recruiters jobs are mostly financial/telco crap where Java 1.4 is the standard.

6) Be aggressive when it comes to rates. Recruiters markup is around 20% (again in Europe). It may vary dramatically. So think about it: You are giving 20% of your salary to a guy who phoned you one day, sent you to an interview the next and disappeared. Also, some recruiters (very few) are transparent about the markup. They are normally worth your trust.

7) When you leave a contract, keep good relationship with everyone at every cost. It will pay back.

<comment><USER10> _Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else._

Ouch. You cut me deep koevet.

In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here.

Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number).

If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency.

Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens.

TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.

<comment><USER11> I accidentally upvoted instead of downvoted. It it of course nonsense that you are adding to the salary. If the employer is willing to pay £600, then you are taking X% of £600 and giving the employee (100-X)% of £600. The £500 figure that you are "adding" to is just an imaginary number that has no real significance.

Do recruiters really take as much as 20%? This seems ridiculously high to me. How much of their time are they investing compared to the employee?

<comment><USER10> An employer is willing to pay an extra 20% to save themselves the time and effort of having to source & interview the hundreds of applications themselves.

As for recruiters taking 20%, that's a comparitively low figure for such a high daily rate. If one of my clients was requesting a £500 a day calibre candidate I wouldn't touch it for anything less than 30% in reality.

We are providing a service, plain and simple. The service fee is calculated in relation to the calibre of candidate as the more senior the candidate, the more difficult they are to find.

<comment><USER12> >An employer is willing to pay an extra 20%...

I'm sorry, but this is an accounting fiction. The cost of an employee to an employer is the total cost; dividing up the total cost and ascribing it to this or that is irrelevant from the perspective of the employer, and disingenuous from the perspective of the employee.

In the US we have social insurance taxes which are sold as having an "employee" portion and an "employer" portion, but this too is just accounting fiction:

        Perceived:
         Gross Salary:      $100,000
         Employee Tax Rate:     7.65%
         Employee Tax Amt:    $7,650
         Net Salary:         $92,350
         Employer Tax Rate:     7.65%
         Employer Tax Amt:    $7,650

        Actual:
         Gross Salary:      $107,650
         Net Salary:         $92,350
         Tax Amount:         $15,300
         Tax Rate:              14.2%

The employee is worth $107,650 to the employer; that part of the money goes to taxes, or to a recruiter, or to a gym membership is wholly irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit._

This statement acurately describes 95% of my colleagues.

I will happily accept the challenge of changing your perception of our industry. I'm a technical recruiter that covers the London market. Feel free to send me your CV. My details are in my profile. Also, feel free to have a look through my comment history. I'm not on this site to pick up leads or push for business, I'm here because I have a legitimate interest in the industry and I find that HN is a fantastic gauge as to the pulse of the industry.

<comment><USER9> I was actually hoping to read a reply from a recruiter. Good to hear that there is someone in the IT European recruiting business with a genuine interest in doing the job properly.

How would you go regarding changing the current "95% of my colleagues suck" situation?

<comment><USER10> You can't. My industry is driven by one thing only, money.

Recruiters get paid incredible bonuses for placing candidates and are less interested in how you feel and more interested in ticking off keywords fed to them by their client.

Example: One role I have on my books right now is for a 3rd line support analyst. My colleague, a guy who makes about £50k to £60k, submitted a candidate who he listed out the tech requirements to and asked the candidate to answer 'Yes' or 'No' if he had exposure to those systems/languages. No probing questions, no challenge of his competencies, no understanding of what the various languages were but purely and simply ticked the boxes.

People like him are the norm so when I get on the phone and ask the same guy to explain the difference between powershell and the command prompt and why the powershell is more advanced, a straightforward question for a techie but not what you expect from a recruiter, it throws him for six and those who know what they are talking about stand out from that point forward.

<comment><USER13> How much do you guys make per placement in general?

Lets say you have someone with a salary of £60-70k. On average, how much do you earn when you place them and how long do you spend to fill a position? I know that there are extremes, but still.

Looking at the amount of spam I get on LinkedIn, I'm always under the impression that recruiters are looking for like 100 different positions at a time, but that's probably wrong.

<comment><USER10> That's so hard to quantify but I'll do my best.

Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:

Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.

From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.

Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.

A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.

As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.

<comment><USER13> Interesting, why not start your own firm then? Is it that hard to get the actual vacancies?

If you know what you're talking about in comparison to 90% of the other people, wouldn't it be a lot easier to place one candidate and get £15k from him rather than the £1k you're getting now.

You say that the general aim is to earn your salary in bonusses, so that means that an average recruiter has to place around 60 candidates per year. If they earn around £15k per person for the company, that makes +- £900k of which they take home £60k. Rough calculations of course, but seems like pretty good margins for people that know what they're doing.

<comment><USER10> Part of the reason agencies command such high fee's is because of the influence their brand & network has with candidates. There are thousands of self employed recruiters fighting over the scraps and a lot of highly successful self-employed recruiters earning a mint by utilising the personal network they have cultivated from being in the business for many years. I personally haven't been in the game long enough to be able to rely on my own contacts to build a business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently applied for a programming position with some knowledge of maths.

The recruiter phoned me up and asked me if I was good at maths. I explained that it depended on the subject area because, although I have just finished a PhD involving mathematical modelling (as stated in my CV and cover letter), I wasn't a mathematician by training and it would depend on what methods the company were using.

I learnt an important lesson that honesty doesn't work with these people. He cut me off and said I wasn't suitable because this position required somebody that was good at maths. My CV wasn't put forward.

<comment><USER15> That doesn't sound like an issue of honesty. Context is important. Questions must always be answered from the questioner's point of view.

If you've finished a PhD involving mathematical modelling, from the recruiter's perspective you are definitely good at maths.

So the correct answer to "Are you good at maths?" from a recruiter is simply "Yes". If he wants more details then he'll ask for it. The correct answer is not a really long winded answer which the person who asked the question will not be able to understand because he doesn't know what mathematical modelling is.

Most people give long winded answers when they're trying to weasel out of giving the straight answer that they don't want to give because it'll make them look bad. Listen to any politician, for example. I think it's perfectly reasonable for the recruiter to come to the conclusion he did given that he didn't understand your answer.

Whether you think that recruiters should be able to understand your answer is another matter. We all know that most don't have sufficient domain knowledge, so the best thing to do is to answer appropriately.

<comment><USER16> "Most people give long winded answers when they're trying to weasel out of giving the straight answer that they don't want to give because it'll make them look bad."

It's well-known that "geeks" generally try to answer questions literally, and as accurately as possible. It's also pretty well known that the better at a field you are, the less highly you think of yourself (the Dunning–Kruger effect.)

Put those two together, and you'll see that geeks who are very good in a field will tend to give long-winded answers explaining exactly what they know and don't, instead of a simple answer. I do this myself all the time.

<comment><USER17> Your use of Dunning-Kruger isn't quite accurate. The better you are the less likely you are to overestimate yourself, unless you are in the very top, in which case you are likely to underestimate yourself _in relation to others_. Basically, because people have relatively little interaction with people that are _very_ different from themselves, most people tend to rank themselves in the 3rd quartile, whether they are from the bottom two or from the top. That is very different from not knowing what you are capable of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Also, remember the old recruiter line: "The more money you make, the more money I make, so I'm going to do my best to get you the best salary possible!"

While it's true: the more you make the more they make (usually, its about 30% of your first years salary, which is huge), what is also true is that they're more determined to get you hired at any amount than the amount you want.

This is why you'll see recruiters offer jobs for $90k+, but then when you get to negotiations, suddenly you're being presented ate $60-$70k.

If you take the job at $90k, the recruiter would get $27,000. If you take the job at $70k, the recruiter would get $21,000. If you don't take the job, the recruiter would get $0.

While an extra $6k is nice, $21k is a lot better than $0. So be sure to watch out for this common misconception. When dealing with recruiters, get them to introduce you to the company, and then do everything on your own. Don't let them negotiate for you, don't let them tell you not to tell the company your salary requirements. It's your job and career, you do all the talking and negotiating.

<comment><USER19> This reminds me of the bit from freakonomics about real estate agents. Basically when they're getting 3% of the sale price of your house, holding out for 1 month to get you $20K (and them $600) isn't worth it to them.

[http://www.wisebread.com/why-you-cant-trust-a-real-estate- ag...](http://www.wisebread.com/why-you-cant-trust-a-real-estate-agent)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You have failed to understand her job. Her clients are requiring these things.

I know this, because the company I work for has had to draw hard lines on recruiters. Before that, they would send us utter crap and waste our time. Now, we don't get many hits, but most of them are actually worth talking to.

She asked you all those questions because when she assumes things, her customers get really angry. Sending bad recruits can get her banned from that company altogether.

She asked for corporate drone references because you'll be doing corporate drone work and her clients want to make sure you can do it.

<comment><USER21> I respectfully disagree. Every reputable company I've ever been offered a job at requires references after they've decided to hire you.

Any recruiter trying to harvest references of "managers and people in authority" is just a weasel trying to fill their sales contact database.

<comment><USER22> Bingo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm a contractor in the UK and I get the "references first" request very often. I always say no. As far as I can tell this only happens when the agency doesn't have a real job and is just looking for corporate contacts to add to their rolodex.

My real beef with agencies is that they are yet another lossy filter in the process that goes:

Manager with role <-> HR Department <-> Agency <-> Jobserve <-> Me.

Neither the HR department nor the agency knows that Sybase and SQL Server are profoundly similar databases. The manager doesn't care - he wants a Java dev with some basic DB skills. But the hiring spec says "Sybase" so Sybase it must be.

</comment><comment><USER24> Her insistence on getting managers for references makes me wonder whether she wasn't mining you for new prospective customers (on the employer side).

<comment><USER25> She definetely was. It's the oldest trick in the book of recruitment. She first got herself 2 UK CVs and went for more.

There was probably no job, and she was doing "market research".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just yesterday I received an email from a recruiter saying that she had come across my resume and I looked like a great fit for a position she's hiring for. She asked me if I'd give her a call to chat about my experience and so she could tell me about the position. She obviously didn't remember that five weeks ago we talked for 30 minutes on the phone when I explained what I've done and exactly what I'm looking for. As I recall from that conversation, I kept telling her what type of company I was looking for, and she seemed to ignore me and ask me repeatedly if I knew .NET, which it clearly states on my resume that she liked so much that I do. Are recruiters incentivized to ignore everything you say?

<comment><USER27> Yes. Recruiters are incentivized only to listen to Managers. They are the ones with the money.

Oh I feel dirty... I really don't think incentivize is a word.

<comment><USER26> btw, Merriam Webster seems to disagree:

<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incentivize>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I almost started to cry last week when I had to explain the difference between Java and javascript to a recruiter that had found my resume online and called me. She couldn't make up her mind about what the client was looking for. I tried explaining they were vastly different technologies but I still don't think she got it though :(

<comment><USER29> The safest thing is to just say "yes, yes, yes" and let the actual interviewer sort it out.

<comment><USER9> One recruiter once sent me an email for a position in "the Nordic countries". At the time, I was looking into working in either Finland, Denmark or Sweden so I replied the guy I was interested. He called me back straight away and when I have asked him in which city the position was, he replied "Brussels". After my initial silence of disbelief, he went on explaining that he had to write "nordic countries" because Brits don't want to go to Brussels, but they consider Nordic countries more attractive because girls are supposedly hot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Here's my experience with HHs from the financial industry. There is a large batch of newbie HH's coming straight from college who are pushed hardly to overperform and 'make it'. I've found that the inexperienced recruiters can be quite pushy and aggressive and so frankly, in situations like you describe just say thank you and bye quickly.

The established and more senior recruiters will be much more professional and polished. They all have their quirks and little tricks, but just learn to deal with it and if you're senior enough, be patient to find appropriate recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER27> Having spent a 3mth contract working on the IT systems for a decent sized IT recruiting company I can tell you that recruiters get rewarded for calling managers and nothing for calling and talking to candidates. And I find it hard to believe that that a recruiter would actually insist on seeing your references before putting a CV forward so I'd assume that it was a fishing exercise. Another clue is that if the rate is higher than market rate then why would the recruiters not be just taking a bigger cut.

</comment><comment><USER31> Come along to the next Hacker News meetup in London - <http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/>. The organiser Dmitri is inviting people to give talks. So, if you want to show off your work and make connections, this is a good chance.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why are you going through recruiters?

You already know how to market yourself. You're just trying to market yourself to a different set of people.

Also, you can't at the same time say you're a whore for money and then complain that you have to prostitute yourself to make your money.

<comment><USER33> Oftentimes as an independent contractor you _must_ deal with recruiters in one way or another, because they're on the dreaded "preferred vendor list", which is the only way you're getting work from any company bigger than a few hundred people. It's a total scam, but there's no easy way around it.

<comment><USER34> Except figuring out how to get on the preferred vendor list yourself.

<comment><USER33> True, but in most cases that's not worth the effort, unless you want to have a really long-term relationship with a particular client. Where I work, that's not usually the nature of the gigs, but ymmv.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Keep in mind that recruiters "get people for jobs, not jobs for people".

You, as a potential employee, are not their customer -- you're the commodity being sold. It doesn't change the way you feel about how you are treated, but awareness of that relationship may help keep your patience and a level head.

(Quote taken from this "What about your job do you wish other people understood?" Reddit thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e1dsi/what_about_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e1dsi/what_about_your_job_do_you_wish_other_people/) )

</comment><comment><USER36> So many hoops to jump for. The last company I worked for demanded full references for the last five years (it was a bank so apparently this was a legal requirement), but later I found out that their company policy is to 'never give personal references.' (ie. the reference would just go to the HR department who would confirm your presence, your actual managers wouldn't get to say anything) I thought at first this must be something to do with liability, but then I wondered if it was merely another barrier to discourage employees from leaving their lowly jobs, to make it harder for rival banks to employ them, and to eliminate the man-hours cost of providing references. Either way, one minute they're requiring all these references, but when its their turn to provide, they opt out.

</comment><comment><USER37> Some extra information to consider:

0) Many employers hate recruiters just as badly as most job seekers hate recruiters

1) Recruiters earn their money off of getting employers to sign with them, they lose money on trying to find employees (and pretending to screen them the way the lady did in this post).

2) Proportionally they spend a great deal of time being very courteous to employers, yet are very brisk and rude to employees

3) They feed your MS Word document through a program that scans it for key words, they never actually look at it

4) They just copy and paste your information into their resume template which removes any of your contact information but has their huge logo on top

5) I've been in 2 companies that went under and had to find a job fast, all 3 times I found a job it was _never_ through a recruiter.

So yeah, just avoid recruiters. Your time is too valuable for that.

</comment><comment><USER38> My startup is working on fixing this problem :-)

However we're avoiding the contractor market at the moment, because for contractors the recruitment agency often acts as an employment agent as well as recruitment agent (i.e the company will pay the agency and the agency will pay the contractor). Companies prefer this model so they can just have a handful of agencies they can pay rather than having to deal with paying hundreds of contractors directly.

I'm currently playing around with a couple of ideas how to innovate in the contractor market, but essentially they involve minimizing the pain of dealing with recruiters rather than replacing them. Although as my focus is more on the permie market initially, it may take me a while to get around to turning those ideas into a reality !

</comment><comment><USER39> When faced with such nonsense, hack the system.

Invent a couple "companies." Give them a web site and an important gloss of Serious Business. Have a couple friends or clients act as the contact point for the reference. Even more amusing: hire an offshore outsourcing company to act as the "human resources" department of your reference company. They should be under strict instructions to act very haughty with the recruiter, and tell them that "Mr. X" is far too busy to take their call, and to then sing your praises to the sky. Most recruiting drones will be quite satisfied with this encounter.

Recognize that they are only jumping through the hoops of their own corporate policy. Your hack is to grease this path for them and get that sweet, sweet money you desire.

<comment><USER40> Vandelay Industries!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Some advice: If you don't like dealing with recruiters, come up with your own marketing strategy that doesn't involve recruiters.

<comment><USER22> Easy to say, hard to do, no? If he could, wouldn't he already be doing it. Assuming that it would actually work better, of course, otherwise there wouldn't be any point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> In all probability, the job didn't exist, and she was just mining for information.

</comment><comment><USER43> You have to understand one very important thing. Recruiters are the email advertisement newsletters of the real world. Someone (or yourself) places your email in a bucket and boom, you're getting this great offers, so yo go check one out. Then the offer is asking you to provide more info about yourself and then asks you to get other people involved. After a while of this process you start to get the impression that the offer is not worth it, and if you ever actually bought something you realize it was actually vastly overpriced (underpaid?). So you then click on the unsubscribe link, but alas they keep sending you stuff, and then you get emails of the people you placed in a similar position. Six months later you get emails from people you don't know asking you how you could be so stupid to start a chain reaction of people giving out other people's details, and then by chance you save a telemarketer from suicide and he then tells you the story of how he used to be in charge of a newsletter. He helps you unsubscribe and all, and then tells you: "Oh who cares about the offer (job?) it was no good anyways, we just wanted to get as many names and emails from you so we could tell our bosses that we deserve that 20 dollar bonus at the end of the month."

Conclusion: Don't deal with recruiters, you need to build yourself as a brand and create your own reputation wherever you want to work. No excuses.

</comment><comment><USER21> To give you an idea of the completely unqualified recruiters I've dealt with: I'm a Systems Engineer/Architect. I do hardware, Linux, UNIX, etc. On my resume somewhere it says I have experience maintaining Java application servers, Tomcat, BEA Weblogic, etc.

To this day, I still get random emails from recruiters trying to post me in a position as a Java developer. I think the only qualification for a recruiter is the ability to type "java" into a Monster search field.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm not sure what you think your problem is. When someone asks you for reference you don't have, whether it's a landlord or a new employer, and you don't have the kind of references he wants, call up your best friends, and tell them that today, they're senior developers at this big company, they've worked with you and they love and respect you.

You're a freelancer. Nobody's gonna do this shit for you.

</comment><comment><USER45> You say you can't engage with your local community because you're not there, but what about online? You're participating in the HN community, which a) takes time, and b) may very well include others in that area. Branching out from here to find more location specific outlets shouldn't be too difficult.

(A _very_ cursory search reveals startupcafe.co.uk, for instance)

</comment><comment><USER46> My favorite recruiter story:

In summer 2008, I was looking for work. At one point, I saw a job listing at The Hive [1], calling for Erlang. I don't have much Erlang experience (one proof-of-concept DNS server), but it's on my résumé. I applied, just in case.

Well. It turned out that, when you Googled "erlang resume", I was on the third page. Over the next month or so, I heard from about 20 bottom-feeder recruiters, with that same job. Most of them were trying to claim that the job was with a client of theirs, but none of them knew anything that wasn't in the listing on Dice. It got to the point where my wife could recognize a new one on the phone, even if they didn't say "Erlang" to her.

(Mind you, I've also had _good_ experiences with recruiters. But "he wasn't a fool" doesn't make as good a story.)

[1] <http://www.thehive.com/>

</comment><comment><USER47> "The glorious history of HR in software companies"- A footnote from one of PG's essays that I made into a blog post.

[http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/glorious-history-of- hr...](http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/glorious-history-of-hr-in- software.html)

</comment><comment><USER48> Don't worry, it wasn't a real position. She's just looking for people to call up and sell to.

</comment><comment><USER49> It really is unfair to paint all recruiters with such a wide swath. Don't get me wrong, I've considered becoming one because I have a technical background and feel like I could provide a real value to a client just to show the bad ones up.

However, you do find some gems. When I find them, I keep them updated at ALL times about where I'm at what my situation is. I even have a few friended on FB (which is a big deal for me) because they're friends now.

They will always call me when something I'm a really good fit for comes up just to see if anything has changed since the last time we talked. They trust you because you make them look good and in return you get "first dibs" on really good positions.

</comment><comment><USER50> I've just started working with a recruiter a former manager introduced me to. While I appreciate what they are doing, as jrockway pointed out with playing hardball regarding salary, I often feel that they don't have any interest in me whatsoever. Communication is, at best, sporadic and every time I've been to their office, I hear a bunch of yelling, see paper airplanes flying and general lackadaisical attitudes.

This is my first experience with a recruiter and I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone. It's much better to market one's self than to rely on others, even if they can negotiate a better salary.

<comment><USER51> Recruiters work on commission, so they're in the same boat as real estate agents and used car salesmen. There are good ones out there, but they're all constantly looking for the next payday. It's like sharks - they have to keep swimming or they die. If you're not likely to get them cash in the immediate future, then you're exactly right - they don't care.

<comment><USER52> Recruiters are more like Doctors than used car salesmen. They are a necessary evil for some companies who have a problem that they can't solve on their own. People don't like going to the doctor and they don't like going to a recruiter, but sometimes you just have to do it to get on with things. You can self-medicate before going to the doctor and you can go to the online classifieds, but that isn't the answer for you every time. Just remember that recruiters are not all STAFFING AGENCY PEOPLE.

<comment><USER51> Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on this one. I've been working in the IT sector for more than 15 years and I haven't seen a recruiter yet (whether agency or in-house) that cared that much about any of their candidates ... unless they had a position open at the time and could cash in.

It's not much different from the employer's point of view either. Unless your vacancy is for something which is very low skilled, you're much better off making contacts through your existing programmers or reaching out to local user groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It's not arbitrary bullshit to the recruiter, it's her bread and butter. She really wants managers because they are decision makers whom she can pitch her services to, nothing to do with the client.

Never give contact information for other people to recruiters, whether that person is a developer or employer, they will be spammed relentlessly because that is how recruiters make money. Some of them are so despicable they might claim you referred them.

Recruiters (with very few exceptions) are the lowest of the low, always keep that in mind when dealing with them and act accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER54> Stop dealing with recruiters. Figure out a way to market yourself directly to clients.

Your geographic location should not be a barrier to this; you have the power of the intarwebs at your disposal.

</comment><comment><USER7> Most recruiters really are terrible. What we need is some kind of peer-to-peer job-hunting site that will let you find out what jobs other people are doing in software engineering, and just go straight to other engineers who _know_ what the job actually requires.

I call it wantmyjob.com, and I launched it a couple of days ago. The current (few) jobs on it are US-based, but you can be the first to change that if you like.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is it normal for freelancers to pay recruiters a referal fee? I figure normally they have a set of contracts they're trying to fill and they're not going to submit me for anything else since they wouldn't get paid.

But what if I paid a 10 percent fee? Would they then be out there finding contracts for me? Is that something that's ever done?

<comment><USER56> Check out www.careerelement.com; our agents will find you a job for a 10% fee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I agree. Recruiters suck. They never ask for references for your benefit, it's always to extend their sales reach. They tend to drag you out to their offices for a 'face-to-face', for no relevant reason whatsoever because all of that 'stuff' you had to do there could've been done online anyway.

<comment><USER52> Of course they don't. If the recruiter doesn't ask you for a reference then the hiring manager you are interviewing with will.

You are right about the face-to-face meetings though. A lot of staffing agencies require that their people do this. It is a core metric for many of them. If you are frustrated by this then find a good recruiter and don't bother with the others. You should want a good recruiter to know you are out there - they are going to be thinking about ways to help you. The flip side is that they only call you when you showed up in their search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> You have to ask yourself why the position of "recruiter" even exists in today's market.

</comment><comment><USER59> Similarly job sites are filled with keyword-spamming agency offers ("Java/Javascript, LAMP, .Net, AJAX, PHP and Photoshop mobile developer required!")

I wonder if one could recruit and interview recruiters?

</comment><comment><USER60> Recruitment pays well enough to fund any startup. All developers should consider it as a source of startup funding.

</comment><comment><USER61> I thought techiferous made a good point - but in many cases the direct contact with the company might re-direct you to the recruiter. I am not sure how it is working in London area but it seems to me that many of the financial firms in NYC are only hiring through an outside agency. Techiferous's point works well if you take the Pareto principle and target that 20% of companies in your sector/ area and write targeted letters about what d you can do for them, etc. I am not sure if there are too may other alternatives at this point. If companies are using recruiters (and I am seeing this in the NYC-area) then they are a necessary evil. Precisely because you are in Edinburgh and your job search is in London

TamDenholm, I agree with your basic principle. But - in my experience you don't really want an adversarial relationship with the recruiter.

I have had recruiters misrepresent me and even send me to the wrong place for interviews. There is a real disconnect at times and often they completely misunderstand the technology they are trying to find someone for. When I deal with them I try to be as simple and 'transactional' as possible. Clearly in your case the recruiter had little or no idea as to why you were not complying with what looked like a simple request (ie to him/her). It might come across as simply being difficult. Don't misunderstand me - I think your point is completely valid. You are being very considerate of yout contacts. I would read your hesitation as coming from a place where you value privacy and where you do not see your contacts as instrumental.

When I was in high school I had what might end up being the best job of my entire life. I cleaned kennels at a veterinarian's office and held the dogs/cats/sometimes horses when the doctor treated them. Great fun everyday learned something new, worked with animals, etc. We had a simple filing system. When someone came in with their pet we would retieve the paper file and on the outside edge there would be a place for a colored sticker - <USER2> indicator of the animal's temperament. Red meant extreme caution, yellow meant the animal was fearful and might bite defensvely...

I guess I have internalized this in that I imagine, in this current job market, an absolute flood of applicants. The recruiters are making flash judgements on each person. Since they often do not understand the underlying technology they are basing alot on either simple metrics (number of certifications, etc) and soft skills. Something which comes across like evasion throws up a red flag and in my imaginary world merits a red sticker on the side of your folder. From his/her point of view this is a simple request that you did not comply with. What nefarious crimes are you hiding? I sincerily doubt that s/he thought for a second about privacy concerns.

For me this is where LinkedIn fills a need. My few references are people that are 'pre-approved' to provide this sort of need. The way references are done on LI is that they show the relationship and give the amount/type of contact the person is willing to grant. I am sure that other social networking sites may have a similar function - I only know LinkedIn... When I get asked for references, I have 'preapproved' ones

tl;dr - Use social networking sites (ie LinkedIn) to handle this in advance. Streamline interactions with recruiters.

</comment><comment><USER52> Have you EVER encountered a bad software engineer? Maybe one who managed to over-write something you contributed to a project more than once? Better yet, someone who just annoys the hell out of you? There are probably some who you would never work with for a variety of reasons. Zed Shaw swore off the whole of the Ruby on Rails community. Now imagine that there were bad recruiters too. There are good and bad people in every category and for you to flame everyone in a community because you had a bad experience with one, several or even all of the recruiters you have ever encountered is flat out missing the problem. You should be looking for recruiters who get it just like any savvy person who is willing to hire you for whatever it is that you do right has to look for you. More importantly, you should direct your frustration at the company that hired the recruiter you are frustrated by. When I hire a programmer I do a paired programming session with them and take the time to get to know them and the other way around. Maybe you should spend some time recruiting some recruiters who are with-it by your standards.

Last, but not least, you have to realize that there are some companies that choose to use bad recruiters as a standard business practice. The prefer this. If they do then your recruiter pal isn't the problem.

You should know by now that if a job pays too well then there is a reason. If you are willing to take on jobs that others are most likely passing on then you might want to think about this.

A good recruiter, on the other hand, can create some really good conversations and teams that lead to some really successful companies. A good recruiter is not going to bother asking for references unless there is a reason to, unless they work for a big huge staffing agency and that company requires them to in much the same way that some programming jobs require CMMI. Contrary to britman's comments, recruiters ask for hiring managers because they do serve a role that is SUPERVISORY and that part of their job is to see the team as a big picture. They are often more reliable as a source than a peer. However, peers can be highly reliable too. Think of it as best of 3 - you might not get the truth on the first or even the second try.

Recruiters are a lot like detectives - they have to figure out of you are telling the truth or not, whether you can assess your own capabilities or not, and whether or not you can work well with others. In your case it sounds like the latter might be an issue. A good recruiter might find this post and not ask for a reference from you at all.

To leftnode's point, the "I make more, you make more" line is only true when there is no contract to hire or temp to hire in play. This ONLY applies when someone is doing a fee for placement that is straight up. NOT EVERY RECRUITER WORKS ANY OF THESE WAYS. Some work for the company, some freelance, etc. ASK!!! You are probably not going to get the particulars of how they are getting paid (e.g. the % if it is a fee for placement), but you should reasonably expect that they will tell you that they are getting a % of your hourly or a % of your first year's compensation, or if they are being paid for their time. If they don't want to give this to you then tell them to have a nice day.

If you, or anyone else here, want to talk about this in more detail feel free to email me - email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER62> I have the impression that the British recruiters are slimier than in other places?

At least, most of the horror stories I've read about European recruiters come from England?

(My limited experience from e.g. Sweden is bett... hrm, not as bad. An article written by me would use the word "clueless" often, but just a few "sleazy" and maybe one "evil". I'd even use some positive adjectives, like "human", "working hard to learn" and "serious".)

<comment><USER63> I don't know how to adequately compare, as I've never used a recruiter in Europe, but I can safely say that recruiters in the US are quite slimy as well. There are good ones, for sure, but as a whole the industry doesn't have a great reputation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> HN user should just start their own tech recruiting agency: Recruiting HackersBYHackers..</comment>


UK Postal Code Data leaked - <AUTHOR>

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_government_database_of_all_1,841,177_post_codes_together_with_precise_geographic_coordinates_and_other_information,_8_Jul_2009
shortened:
http://bit.ly/efbnS <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=825589></comment>


JavaScript library for browser to S3 multipart resumable uploads - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TTLabs/EvaporateJS

<comment><USER2> I like the multipart aspect but the key signing and putting your keys in plaintext seems unnecessary.

Here is an alternative: make a bucket with a policy where it will accept anonymous uploads (but not reads) and automatic object deletion after say 24 hours. You can then on the backend just copy the object to it's final destination. The simplicity means it becomes very versatile.

There is of course a risk that somebody will maliciously dump a huge file on you or many but it won't cost you anything because the files get automatically deleted. Furthermore, none of the files are publicly readable.

<comment><USER3> As making a policy involves no communication with Amazon, I used to just create a policy on the fly for every upload request that said "allow upload to this specific key(path)". The key would be unique to every upload request. Once the upload is done, I'd just start processing the upload and move it where it belongs.

Thus, in plaintext you'd have to put only your AccessID and a policy which would expire after a few minutes.

EDIT: typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another alternative to consider is FineUploader which has a mature S3 module[1]. However, FineUploader does require a commercial licence of $80-$500p.a.

[1] [http://blog.fineuploader.com/2013/08/16/fine- uploader-s3-upl...](http://blog.fineuploader.com/2013/08/16/fine- uploader-s3-upload-directly-to-amazon-s3-from-your-browser/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is great. The S3 multipart upload API is a super bitch. Can't wait to have a reason to try this out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey great job! I've used mule-uploader [1] in the past, seems similar in feature set. Perhaps you can take some inspiration from that project.

One major downside was the lack of multiple file upload support, maybe that's the direction you can take your project.

[1] [https://github.com/cinely/mule-uploader](https://github.com/cinely/mule- uploader)

</comment><comment><USER7> EvaporateJS author here - just saw this on HN! Good to see more people getting involved - thanks. Always happy to see questions, comments, and PRs :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice library. I currently use Plupload's S3 module [1], which does not support multipart uploads, but is otherwise convenient.

[1] [http://www.plupload.com/docs/Upload-to- Amazon-S3](http://www.plupload.com/docs/Upload-to-Amazon-S3)

</comment><comment><USER9> How annoying... I just implemented 70% of this last night. Sods law.

<comment><USER10> I don't how this could be seen as something going wrong? From my perspective the vast majority of programming is solving issues that have already been solved multiple times.

It's not like this is the first solution there's ever been to solve this problem.

<comment><USER9> No I know :-D I didn't find anything that did quite what I wanted and I understand how the signing process all works now and how to send files with XML Http Request which I didn't before. Just got a deadline for Monday morning and time spent on this could have been better spent.

It's just more that something like this appears literally the day after I build something that does the same thing - a look at the code would have helped no doubt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Browser support?</comment>


Please Stop "Fixing" Font Smoothing - <AUTHOR> http://www.usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, I'm just waiting on this to become a useful standard and for resolutions to be universally high enough to really make it work. I've disabled font smoothing almost altogether on my machine, which makes some sites look a bit odd, but it improves readability for all the PC-oriented bitmapped fonts that make up the bulk of my reading.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think ignorance the main reason designers keep misusing it. I, for one, simply didn't know any better and would always throw one of these in my CSS:

        -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; /* Fix for webkit rendering */

</comment><comment><USER4> Why on earth is this decision left up to the page designer in the first place?</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you currently work? - <AUTHOR> What company do you currently work at and what is your role? <comment><USER2> People who are willing to share this information about themselves usually put it in their profiles. Many people, like myself, would rather be anonymous on HN so we can speak more freely.

I noticed that you haven't answered these questions about yourself, either in this post or in your profile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice Try NSA.

<comment><USER4> this is what made me laugh for the day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work for anyone who wants to pay an old sick Lisp hacker and tech writer with a great resume and no patience for whiteboard interviews to do good work. Lots of times that's nobody, but just lately it's been a Xerox PARC researcher and a cloud sharing company.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work out of my home chemistry lab. I create new research chems for city folk seeking mental renewal

<comment><USER7> How difficult is the NSI-189 synthesis?

<comment><USER6> Good question. I mostly stick to psychedelics and variants of the chems in Tihkal and Pihkal so I can't really comment on nootropics but you can see the patent for it here - [https://www.google.com/patents/US7858628?dq=neuralstem+NSI-1...](https://www.google.com/patents/US7858628?dq=neuralstem+NSI-189&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qa6XU6PlGdSsyASJ14KwBA&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBw) \- which might give you some details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Software Developer at a small but reputed privately held company. This means that the company has no legal obligation to generate profits for stakeholders.

</comment><comment><USER9> I work for a software company specialising in statistical analysis. I am a software developer. Not necessarily in that order.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hello recruiter

</comment><comment><USER11> I work for a large retailer as an analyst/Developer.

</comment><comment><USER12> I work for my mom</comment>


The Future of Digital Products is in Storytelling - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/design-of-a-technology-business/21e841927513

<comment><USER2> Great read on storytelling. One point I'd be interested on your thoughts is how data drives the story. How do you know you're telling the right story?</comment>


IJR (Small Cap Index) Is Down by 50% According to Yahoo Finance - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IJR?ltr=1 <comment><USER2> Lol what an epic screw up. The index has never been up to be down 50% at 67 or so that it is at now.</comment>


Twitter's descent into the extractive - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3328-twitters-descent-into-the-extractive <comment><USER2> I don't understand why so many people are criticizing twitter for trying to monetize here on HN. Twitter is not a startup anymore, they have real investors and have to earn real revenue, and thus they cut everything that can potentially affect that.

Is trying to be profitable now considered a bad thing? Is selling a startup to big company that will close it down the only exit strategy that HN praise?

I know that some people feel betrayed by twitter for cutting something that used to be free. But what should twitter do? Jeopardy its own business in order to make others happy? That's not how business works.

edit: s/that/they/

<comment><USER3> I always wondering if its monetization that people are criticizing or the path. Perhaps it is a bit of both. If people have something they like, and it was 'free', and you ask them to start paying for it, well they are going to grumble. And economics tells us that for some there is no amount of money they would 'pay' to be part of the twitter universe. So those people will leave in a huff and complain loudly.

But more interestingly for me it seems that the _way_ they have gone about this seems like they are trying to piss people off. Their actions have the same sort of uncomfortable feeling around them that you get when a sensitive relative asks how you like their plaid and striped outfit. The words conflict with the reality and its clear to everyone that is the case.

So why doesn't Twitter just charge for API access? $X per K API calls? They charged for the 'firehose' (too much though, nobody seems to want to pay that much) but still. It may be there is no pricing model underwhich the current company can survive, perhaps its the tech equivalent of Hostess.

For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement? Is their mission to be real time news? Is it to be social situational awareness? Is it to be a highly focussed advertising channel? A club house? I wonder if they have a mission, does it tell them what to do next? If not why not?

Yes, I'm just as confused by them as everyone else.

<comment><USER4> I certainly don't have the answers either. But you bring up a good question:

 _So why doesn't Twitter just charge for API access? $X per K API calls? They charged for the 'firehose' (too much though, nobody seems to want to pay that much) but still._

Charging for API access (or the firehose) casts them in the role of a utility -- infrastructure. So too does their diminishing tolerance, such as it is, for "Twitter clients". One might imagine their investors prefer to envision the company's future not as a utility-style service upon which others build user- facing properties, but as a dominant entity in full control of all direct or derivative revenue streams, real or imagined. A utility-style valuation is not what they signed up for, so any lean in that direction is being corrected.

<comment><USER3> That is a credible argument. I wonder if they get trapped in the 'zero trillion dollar market' paradox. Tom Lyon introduced that one to me, basically it went like this, the market for one telephone is 0, the market for telephone services for everyone is a trillion dollars, but you can't get to the trillion dollars without first having a telephone for everyone. So its the tech equivalent of the chicken and the egg. What paralyzes people in those spaces is that they "see" the trillion dollar market, and they don't want anyone else to get their first, so any progress toward it from 'not them' is shut down. Sadly if they are in that mindset they are already dead, they just don't know it.

Another anecdote. I was trying to create a viable replacement for the newspaper briefly. E-readers were new, but had gotten past 'fringe.' There were some vendors who had good hardware but not great software, one of the vendors was Plastic Logic which had exclusive control over a process for making flexible e-ink screens that were very durable. At the time, (and to some extent today), that the screen needed a glass substrate meant large format e-readers weren't feasible. My iRex Illiad V2 had the largest screen at the time and folks complained bitterly when a coffee cup or some other modest 'event' cracked the screen. I decided that to blow the lid off this we needed to marry a big flexible screen with a core of open source software and a new UI so I talked with the guy at PL who helped the CEO define the overall company strategy (well that is what he said, hard to know etc etc). The key founders at PL were the scientists who had 'invented' this technology. They _knew_ how huge it could be and dammit all that money was going to flow right into their pockets! E-readers were a zero trillion dollar market and they had showed a reader which had some really nice properties for shipping 'later that year'. The only problem was that nobody knew what a 'real' UI was for these things, nobody knew what the best price points were, they were only B&W and tablets were threatening (iPad hadn't been released yet) and I said "You can't possibly hope to out invest everyone else in making these things successful, especially Amazon who has a built in way to make money off these things in perpetuity. If you stay on this road you are already dead."

Obviously not what the guy was expecting to hear, after all they could do something nobody else could! Except that geeks and freaks like me were buying e-readers for exorbitant prices because we did that kind of thing but the _real_ market was much lower in price, and a company trying to capitalize the creation of an entirely new fabrication process was going to amortize all those costs over their ability to deliver what was essentially a consumer electronic device? You can bet all your money on one number at the roulette wheel but its not a good business strategy.

Needless to say things played out exactly as I said they would, PL was always just about to release or finalize their specs when the next thing dropped and added new checklist items they needed to go back and implement, early results with the UI were poor and the price floor fell out with Amazon pushing things out at cost. Their reader that they thought they would get $1,000 for was going to under perform a $400 reader with a built in pipeline of content.

Compare that to making displays and selling them. Sure its the 'parts' business and your margins are a lot lower but you can start amortizing the cost of your manufacturing right away. And as things start falling out in the e-reader market you find niches that are under served and get folks to attack those markets with your parts. You watch you learn you profit on all the investment everyone else is doing. And then you step in with your own awesome solution.

It would do Twitter good to embrace the utility model, then while that was keeping the lights on, figure out what this thing was really doing, _why_ did people value it, what did it do that couldn't be done elsewhere, and _then_ move up the value chain. But if they remain afraid that "someone else" will get there like they have, they open the door for alternatives which will kill them anyway. Just like Plastic Logic who you never hear about any more and nobody had any big payday. Emerging markets are great, but they are fragile, and missteps are more costly. I hope they figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's as simple as this: it is extremely hard to do a big business on something that is trivially reproducible (like Twitter is), just because there is a big momentum at some point. Because the outcome is one of the following three possibilities:

1) You ruin the experience because of the business model. People switch to a competitor that is annoyances free as you were.

2) You ask for money. People switch to a competitor that is free as you were.

3) You invent a business model that is an _added value_ for users instead to be a problem. You win.

To make "3" working you need to be open minded and design the business model for months, with creativity, thinking at your users. It's hard but you could do it, but unfortunately there are this guys that gave you millions that will ruin this process. So "3" is very very very hard for Twitter IMHO.

<comment><USER6> If Twitter were a utility, I'd agree with your points. But it's not, and network effect on Twitter's scale is not "trivially reproducible."

<comment><USER5> Yes what I mean is that _if just the technology is trivially reproducible_ , if you have the network effects on your side (everybody is using XYZ), you take the leadership as long as you don't annoy users over a certain limit. In the attempt to make money it is easy to go over the limit...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it ironic to see the usual "follow me on twitter" at the end of the post. Yeah, people will bitch @twitter but nothing will change.

Also, Twitter has 1500 employees. That's absurd.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand how such a simple service is able to block 3rd party clients. Just scrap that web site if need be!

I have an user, I can acces the site via a simple text-based protocol, who cares what weird client I'm using?

<comment><USER9> In part because scraping the website is going to break all the time, and sometimes on things you simply can't see because they're running an a/b test. Then there's usually the site TOS that explicitly denies scraping (I don't know if Twitter does, but it's standard fare).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why are so many sites crashing Safari on my iPad1 now?

<comment><USER11> Lack of memory on iPad1 plus general lameness of Safari on iOS 5 and above, I should think. (But mainly lack of memory, I suspect - Safari is not quite so bad on iPad3.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sad that a link like this makes the frontpage of Hacker News.

It contains nothing we didn't know before, it's not interesting at all and there's no value in it. David just talks shit about another company.

</comment><comment><USER13> At least they didn't go public and tank subsequently, and their downfall looks like it is happening before any IPO would be a risk.

Big consumer IPOs which tank hurt investor confidence across the market, and particularly in the tech IPO sector in the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> The business model is broken, the monetization prospects aren't there, and ultimately, Twitter is a fad.

<comment> k-mcgrady I don't think they've released much publicly but most of the speculation I have read has said that Twitter's revenues are good. I don't find their advertising model too intrusive either which is a good sign. And with half a billion accounts and at least from what I've seen, more and more people joining, it's hardly a fad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Someone should build a decentralized (p2p-based?) alternative to twitter/reddit.

This way we will finally have something we can settle on, we will have multiple competing clients and no censorship or arbitrary rules, and no monetization.

Only problem is that it may be a harder technical problem than it sounds.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wonderfully written.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if jaiku.com could have kept twitter honest?

</comment><comment><USER18> When did the word 'extractive' become the opposite of the word 'inclusive' anyway?

</comment><comment><USER19> I think I'm more curious about what they need 1500 people for. That blows my mind.

<comment><USER20> An example of what they could use all that manpower for: a real, non-trivial problem that they need to solve for a better user experience is to squash spam. That is not a fight they are winning at the moment.

<comment><USER21> Yes it's a very hard task, but you don't need 1500 employees to do that :p</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: The most pure elastical/parallax view library for react-native - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/100010/react-native-parallax-header-view <comment><AUTHOR> This is an elastical/parallax view for the react-native. It supports the latest react version. There is no single dependency so it is very flexible to customize. It solves the problem of parallax-view in the past.</comment>


How to Ensure Your Merchant Account Application is Approved - <AUTHOR> http://www.shopify.com/blog/6614567-how-to-ensure-your-merchant-account-application-is-approved

<comment><AUTHOR> James_Henry2,

That is true but is more US-centric. In Canada and the UK the merchant account provider and gateway have always (traditionally) been an integrated solution. It's only in the US that you usually have to go off to authorize.net or cybersource (or the like) to pull the gateway together. Stripe sure is making a name lately though!

<comment><USER2> Hacker News in particular loves Stripe

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's because they've taken the aggregator (Paypal) model, gotten rid of the off-site checkout and made it really appeal to developers and technical folks through the API's. The website almost reads like a wiki. It's a really neat idea and I think it will gain lots of traction in that community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Good article, but the whole payment industry is moving toward all-in-1 solutions like Stripe. Much easier than messing around with finding a processor AND a applying (and locking into a contract) for a merchant account. IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article!</comment>


Show HN: A genetic simulator for artificial life - <AUTHOR> http://leverlabs.io/blog20160714/ <comment><USER2> Cool. I used to be big into artificial life. An old project of mine for anyone who is interested: [https://github.com/taliesinb/floatworld/wiki](https://github.com/taliesinb/floatworld/wiki)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty exciting - but MacTierra is the gold standard for this stuff: [https://github.com/smfr/mactierra](https://github.com/smfr/mactierra)

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting to watch. It almost looks like its forming a drawing</comment>


Show HN: Convert European grades to GPA - <AUTHOR> https://raed.tn/php/gpa/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an attempt to explain how "unfair" a direct translation of grades might be.

A EU 15/20 is not 75/100 (especially in CS)</comment>


Customers say Getaround has been slow to pay repair bills - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-03/they-rented-their-cars-out-online-then-things-fell-apart <comment><USER3> > She purchased a Prius last year specifically to rent on Getaround, using the > money to cover both its monthly costs and those of her primary vehicle.

That seems like a risky move, and an attempt to compete in the general car rental business without the protections of a well established business (compared to a startup).

While it may make sense for a car owner to assume some risk to recoup costs on a vehicle they already own, buying one for the sole purpose of renting it out seems less sensible.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like it wasn't some sort of investment decision, but a setup that worked for this person.

Say you live in a major city and need a car, but it would sit there parked 80% of the time. You can't justify the cost.

But if you could rent it out that 80% of the time, you end up in a situation where you have a car to use, but it's either costing you nothing or making you a little bit of money.

<comment><USER5> But that wasn't this situation:

> _She purchased a Prius last year specifically to rent on Getaround, using > the money to cover both its monthly costs and those of her primary vehicle._

She bought an investment vehicle (no pun intended) that worked for a while and then crashed (still no pun intended). She overextended herself and can't handle the downside.. this feels like a bit game of musical chairs and she was caught without a seat. :|

<comment><USER4> I misread that statement the first time. I didn't realize this was in addition to her primary vehicle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This pandemic is really shining light on many flimsy and questionable business models. In good times, it looks great on paper to own a business with no inventory and whose sole purpose is to be a marketing middleman between people offering a service and those in need of a service.

But in bad times, income dries up—in this case, extremely quickly—and the flaws of that business model are exposed.

Airbnb, coworking spaces, Getaround, and home services companies are just a few examples of this model. Bird/Lime also have this issue and will likely collapse as well—both have laid off most or all of their staff (Bird in particular handled it poorly.)

<comment><USER7> I don't follow this logic.

Bird/lime own their inventory.

Airbnb is better off than the hotel chains IMO. The hotel chains have to keep paying their staff and rent while revenue drops, but airbnb just sees the revenue drop.

It exposes the people who bought properties to list on airbnb on aggressive margins or like the example in the article of someone buying a car just to put on the platform. I wonder how much rental prices will be affected when the properties that were bought to use for airbnb are brought back to the long- term rental market.

<comment><USER8> AirBnB will be worse off, because post COVID19, people will trust hotels more than random strangers' houses. You _know_ the hotel will be cleaned. You can't say the same of an AirBnB.

And it's very likely that AirBnB restrictions will increase post-COVID19 to eliminate a lot of the apartment units that were (illegally) converted to AirBnB units, and that enforcement of existing AirBnB restrictions in cities like NY and LA will increase dramatically, both for safety reasons and to protect the hotel companies that actually employ workers, pay hotel taxes, and contribute to the local economy.

<comment><USER9> I can't speak for every city, but where I live, a lot of Airbnber's are hurting for the sudden drop in revenue. Hotels might get bailouts or credits from the government but short term rental companies will get nothing and be hard pressed to find the resources to continue paying their mortgages. We're already seeing condos that were rented out as Airbnb's pop up on the real estate market.

<comment><USER8> That is a good thing. Those condos should never have been converted to unregistered hotel rooms, and I'm sure the other people living in those developments will be glad that the parade of strangers will no longer be invading their buildings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After I bought an electric car, I kept my other car around just in case. I figured I'd rent it out on Turo since I wasn't concerned about maintaining the condition of the vehicle (it's a 6 year old Nissan).

Even though I wasn't concerned about my car being mishandled by renters, I couldn't believe the condition some renters would return it. After this experience, I would NEVER rent out a nice car through these services. If people treat your car like shit, imagine what they do to big rental car company's vehicles.

<comment><USER11> Big rental car companies can keep coming after you for the damages though. A lot of people don't have the same fear of some startup making the same effort for a vehicle that isn't theirs in the first place.

<comment><USER12> It's a common theme with many of these "sharing economy"/"gig economy" companies:

"We're like X but without all the stodgy process and procedure!"

[a few years pass]

"Turns out all that extra stuff was there for a reason and now we're going to either punt on it and screw over our customers and/or contractors, or monkey- patch it onto our business that wasn't built with it in mind."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One might say they pay when they... get around to it.

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://archive.md/tHwp4](https://archive.md/tHwp4)

</comment><comment><USER14> The rentier economy, aided by automated systems online, is now proving to be a total failure.

The downside risks versus the short-term gains are too asymmetric.

Car rental - damage is very expensive, margins are tiny House rental - <USER2> term loans, short term lets that have proved very volatile in the pandemic. Office space rental - wework, again long term borrowing, short term rental.

The idea that we can endlessly slice and dice risk to get a "free" gain is rotting society.

Learn a skill. Create value. If everyone does this we live in a better society. We cannot all live off each other. Someone has to create value.

<comment><USER15> but they are creating liquidity in the car rental market! /s

<comment><USER16> But they are, for the buyer. More sellers = more liquidity. It just also turns out they (the sellers) are making money by picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Umm the economic world is falling apart unfortunately! Thus, put any startup or company's name here in which their business deals with ppl congregating or where germs are spread and the story is the same.

There should be a list of what businesses will remain strong and become stronger so entrepreneurs can quickly create new businesses ..anything food related, medical, online sales & delivery, anything internet/communication infrastructure related, govt services, COVID prevention, COVID research... are some I can think of

<comment><USER18> What this is most affecting is the service industry. If your company makes a product that can be put in a box and shipped to the customer's door, people can still buy it. Maybe even more people buy it because they're working from home but still getting paid or just got a $1200 check or both, and they're not about to spend that money on restaurants or theater tickets right now.

That may even carry forward somewhat. You have someone who doesn't have a washing machine, well the laundromat is closed or they don't want to go there and they just got $1200, plus there are lower interest rates and cheaper financing, so now there's a truck delivering a washing machine and they're never going to go to the laundromat again. Even if it eventually breaks they'll buy another one because by then it's the status quo.

It may be a good time to get into the business of making stuff.

<comment><USER19> > well the laundromat is closed

For what it's worth, in every emergency shutdown order I've seen, laundromats have been classified as "essential businesses."</comment></comment></comment>