> They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.

The part of the picture I'm more interested about is how the managers see it.

There must be a lowly manager actually trying to do something about their overworked team, and I assume they have access to HR and know which positions are real which aren't. And they know the company not only doesn't intend to hire, but is also gaslighting them, and they're made part of it.

It feels so gloom and just depressing beyond words.

The article doesn't really discuss the legality of this, which I'd be curious to hear the opinion of a lawyer.

In other cases, it's considered criminal if a company deliberately puts out false information about itself. E.g., if you lie about your companies products (like Theranos), it's pretty clear that this is not legal.

I don't see why it should be legal to lie about your job opportunities.

What kind of political action can we take to stop this infuriating practice?

This is just one example. While tech jobs are diverse, the well-heeled players substantially set the tone and they have gone berserk: over the last few years they have neutron bombed entire zip codes claiming hard times, then posted record-shattering EPS beats, then hired back a bunch of people at substantially lower compensation in a phenomenon so pervasive to have a catchy name: “boomerang”. It’s not even the first time recently got popped for wage fixing, Don’t Poach Gate was like 15 years ago. They’re giving us all the finger in the Crimson, and we will do nothing because we can do nothing.

It’s a trivial abuse of monopsony pricing power, it’s illegal in the sense that the laws as written prohibit it on a common-sense, “intended by the legislature” sense, a lawyer can tell you if it’s maybe legal via stare decis via activist judges bench legislating.

But more importantly it has destroyed what loose social contract there was: they cannot in fact run these businesses at 60-70% of peak headcount sustainably: they can merely coast on previous investments long enough to crush salaries and then clean up the mess because there isn’t any real competition. They can distort hiring to where McCarthyist vibe checks and loyalty tests hit a precision/recall that is Pareto optimized for the minimum amount of competence that admits an endorsement of their nepo baby “nice trumps kind” mythology.

And they’re going to get away with it at the level that matters: the individual incentives of executives are nothing to do with the long term interests of shareholders or the commons on this: progress is stalling out in a way that will never show up on a quarterly report in time to matter to the executives.

And you can see it in real time: we haven’t had such an embarrassing crop of people who were someone’s roommate at Harvard running the show in at least 30 years, the outcomes are awful, the software sucks, the products suck, and the game is soft communist friction around leaving the platform.

Par for the course for non-tech years for years...

I wish we could do more to disincentivize this kind of blatantly unethical behavior from companies.

Employees look for new jobs they aren't seriously interested in. Why shouldn't employers do the same?

Filtering through a 1000 unemployed people spamming every job listing isn't going to give them useful intel.

There would be less application spam if there were fewer spam job postings.

Because only one in a hundred postings is real, we have to send out hundreds of applications before even getting a rejection. There's no way to tell if a posting is real or if anyone will ever read your application, so the only option available is to apply to everything.

A lot of people pose this as a prisoner's dilemma, but it really is not. This problem is not mutual, it's entirely one sided. If companies would only post jobs they intended to hire for, there would be exponentially fewer spam applications. They've fucked around by posting spam and now they're finding out by receiving even more spam.

When the average applicant has to send literally hundreds of applications to get any response at all, absolutely nobody is going to handcraft a thought out application to any one posting. There's literally not enough hours in the day. Because we don't even get rejection letters back, the only way forward is to firehose as many applications as possible and just hope you win the lottery by getting your resume in front of a human.

It's absolutely terrible for everyone involved and the only ones who can stop it want to act victimized by the problem they created

Sure but what I'm saying is that the stakes for a company having to go through spam applications are significantly lower than the people trying to find a job who are getting spammed with dead ends while their savings drain lower and lower.

yeah, but at worst, you waste time on the dime of a company from the recruiter's/hiring manager's POV. on the other side, you're wasting precious capital (time & money) from someone who may instead be hanging out with their kids, or taking care of their sick mother--i understand these are contrived examples. from a pure utalitarian perspective, both are a complete waste of time. but from a moral/ethical perspective, i think there's a clear loser in terms of precious time wasted.

It doesn’t matter when you waste someone’s time; work hours are fungible for most professionals. Your ‘wild guess’ seems very convenient with respect to your previous comment, and happens to be incorrect.

Oh, he never interviewed, just posted on craigslist and collected resumes. But the impact on us was important. One of the purposes of the exercise for him was being able to show me a list of people could supposedly do my job better, faster and cheaper.

He was a friend of a friend and one of the most unprincipled people I've ever gotten to actually know. But I assume there are many similar people higher in corporate hierarchies that I wouldn't ever know.

Most likely a green card application related sham job posting where they already have someone working in that position on a work visa for several years with experience with their internals and doing a good job, but the regulations force the company to post their job at several places, interview people and reject them for some plausible reason, while applying for a green card for that person. All this needs to be documented properly.

It's extremely common at most companies, including MFAANG, because it makes zero sense to layoff the incumbent and hire a brand new person.

https://old.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/jy5rcw/lpt_bec...

Facebook got caught.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/03/facebook-...

One of the reasons might be that you belong to a protected category (by gender, age, race, etc). These interviews are sometimes referred to as "compliance interviews". These candidates will be reported on the HR diversity metrics to prove that the company made an effort to reach out to diverse candidates (even though no actual effort was made). A few companies (Wells Fargo I believe was one) were fined by the Feds for these practices.

You're supporting the wrong team?

I've also been hired after similar "non-interviews". Sometimes it's hard to know if it's just disorganisation/incompetence or if there's outright fakery going on.

the interviewers are being paid to do interviews

Perhaps a higher layer of management had a headcount target they wanted to fill for some reason, but this team didn't actually want or need new people but were forced to go through the process anyway.

I took that to mean ”we don’t really need anyone right now, but if someone who is very good applies, we’ll hire them”.

Edit: Or maybe not, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42012035

devaluation, but also just knowing if we could replace people.

I have 5 Sr. Devs and if any of them split, how long would it take me to replace them? and at what rate? and what skillsets will they have and not have?

My implications are that companies are either lying and being readjusted from later audits, or government is choosing not to take data into account until later, where impact is lessened. It's not a "ghost job" in the modern meaning, but it does seem to be pretending there are a lot more jobs than in reality.

People who work in HR seem to generally lack ethical principles, from what I've seen.

By chance I saw it recently; I remember because it stood out. And the job application seemed genuine as the poster was engaging on the "who's hiring" thread here.

I would never fill that in, because I wouldn't want to bother my references. I know some of them don't really like doing it, but do it as a favour because we're on good terms. Probably not a rare scenario. I'm okay asking in a "if you provide me a reference, I will get a new job" as the final stage, but not as a "just checking in case I might land a job".

It’s kind of rare but it happens, I’ve definitely seen it AND been asked up front. I tell them that I don’t “burn” my references on any jobs except those I’m pretty sure I have a great chance and after some interviewing has happened.

>it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long.

If it helps, the system works great on an honor system. Have a community of passionate hackers, a site encouraging those hackers (some of which may be part of the community) to start up their own business and realize their ides, and the ad system would have good actors on both sides the pipeline. Interesting jobs for a community of passionate people.

I feel like that "honor" comes and goes with the economy though. Anything for an applicant to survive, anything for a job poster to make the company look good for investors.

Honestly, even referrals are sucking for me in 2023/4. Referral would almost always mean I at least talk to someone on the hiring team . Now it's been maybe a 40% chance I even get a recruiter call?

H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.

The ones at Amazon were super generic. SDE skills were supposedly "fungible."

Control. Like always. An H1B can't just job hop to the next company without more hoops and strings attached.

You would be surprised how hard can some managers negotiate 10% salary change during hiring, despite the fact its not their own money, or anyhow useful for their work. I talk multinational mega corporations here. People just want to be good employees(TM) or at least seen as such.

At large tech companies, the pay is entirely driven by level and rating; so there's no savings in salary; just added costs to comply with the directive.

It's endlessly frustrating that the US government wants to centrally plan my hiring decisions.

Not sure why this was downvoted. Obviously it is by people like who will keep bending over until they become a circle.

I've gotten 3 separate jobs from linkedin recruiters approaching me cold.

I dont engage with the platform, I don't post, I won't connect with recruiters, and yet still... they find you, and inmail you. It's usually local jobs with humane commutes and decent pay.

By contrast, I've never gotten a single interview for an application submitted via linkedin, and I've put out hundreds.

having been on the employers side, i agree with that idea because i think it aligns incentives a bit better. with paying per head only, the recruiters are motivated to get me to accept the first candidate they can find with the least amount of work. with a monthly subscription the recruiter can take more time to find a good candidate because it won't hurt their bottom line.

Talent acquisition is the cost of being in business. Hiring is hard, I admit. Being efficient while remaining within legal and regulatory frameworks is fine and expected, fraud and misrepresentation through job postings with no intent to hire is not.

I guess there is some cost for the job ad too.

It is quite common with some sort of time consuming application process before interviews, where only the applicant waste time. Like, the employers seem to use "willing to waste time" as some sort of filter.

E.g. my brother applied for a job this summer and was pre-screened by some sort of chat bot, which I guess will become way more common.

>Any smallish 1-2 hour meeting with a couple of people on it can easily cost thousands if you work out people’s hourly wage.

Companies expect employees to work late, for free, to get their duties done, so time spent on time-wasting hiring meetings only affect the employees, not the company's finances.

Yes, just not everywhere.

That’s true - it’s not in proportion.

But how do you punish this without making it even worse in some other way?

Much of the current situation stems from fairness-minded regulations forcing companies to post jobs they already have a candidate for, wasting everybody’s time.

It's also an outrage how much leverage companies have over their H1B employees (especially from India, etc).

If you have any long-term H1B coworkers from less-favored nations, I guarantee you there's a heartbreaking story they have to tell you if you ask.

I work with a super high-performing guy with a Masters degree who has been at my company for 15 years and gets treated super poorly by the company. He still is probably 10 years away from getting a naturalization interview and has no hope of switching jobs in the meantime (and has children that are citizens...).

The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".

The country had a collective temper tantrum. They didn't stop buying food, though...

More like living costs would balloon. And farm workers would become middle class. Which IMO makes sense, since it’s a damn hard job.

Land price would also balloon.

Or local farming would collapse and 99% of food would be imported. But massive import taxes are more likely since this is national security question.

I don't know about the rest of the nation, but in the American Southwest, there's a distinct socio-economic class of "migrant farmworker" with a long tradition. And it's a Hispanic cultural tradition.

There would be basically zero chance of anyone in my urban high school, or circle of friends, to turn around and say "I'm going to be a migrant farmworker when I graduate!" and it's unclear whether any non-Latino could even achieve such a career. GP indicated that urban/suburban living wouldn't be possible. You'd certainly need to move around, and you'd be an outcast if you didn't speak Spanish, if you weren't nominally Catholic, or celebrate holidays like a Hispanic. Your children would come to learn Spanish and cultural customs, but they'd still be outcast because of racism. You'd have a weird relationship with the overseers, because they'd be more like you, so neither side would really accept you.

(Sub)urban White kids are usually groomed to go to college and get a white-collar or office job, and the dropouts do some kind of tech vocational path, or end up doing clerking minimum-wage to get by. So you have a spectrum of white/blue collar, but there's no path to "migrant farmworker" or other sort of laborer, because my people Just Don't Do That. It's unthinkable.

Even agrarian Native American communities have a huge problem with "brain drain" there, because the opportunities on the Reservation are zilch, unless you want to work at a casino? So young Natives dream of leaving at the first chance, going into the city, and assimilating, losing their culture, because it's a survival thing. Their agriculture isn't sustainable, no matter how you slice it--what are they going to do, hire from outside?

Since the 80s we've had White people who said that migrants come to steal our jobs. Or they say they're taking jobs no American wants. But realistically, even if American wanted those jobs at those wages, they couldn't have them, because of the ethnic hegemony in certain industries.

I see. Yeah, that's tricky. It's less of "I don't want to" moreso than "I literally* cannot move". I'm paying off a house and moving to another state to pay rent on top of that mortgage ruins the point. For 200k, sure. But I know that's not realistic even if I was the best farmhand.

*Okay, I can "literally" talk with family about selling the home. But I do just need some steady work during the downtimes. I'm not at a point where I feel I want to uproot my entire lifestyle, career, and livlihood just to do blue collar work.

Great idea. Do you also want to address some more root problems of job postings:

* done for optics, to look like growth or doing well, or just to have their name out there.

* to fill the pipeline for future needs

* to assess the hiring market, for planning

* (for reasons mentioned in article) to light fire under current employees, or see how replaceable they are

* only for a serendipitous unicorn hire, not commodity developer

* for training in their hiring process

I know all these are things that happen in general with startup job posts, though not necessarily on HN.

None of those reasons preclude "responding", but responding doesn't solve the real problem, it's only a PR sugar coating on it.

An example of disclosure on the unicorn hire one would be to simply state the truth about it. That's fine, so long as you're not pretending to grow. It could even be good optics, about hiring standards.

Disclosure of some of the other intent would preclude it (e.g., probably nobody is going to state the goal of threatening or replacing current employees). Maybe those posts shouldn't be done at all, or maybe they can at least say that this is a speculative post, not for a currently open position.

I'd say job posts have to be truthful, and it's by default implied that they actually good faith intend to fill the position as described, in a timely manner, and that interviews will only be conducted in good faith. If the default isn't true, they should disclose that.

> It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments

All due respect: if an employer posts here offering for people to apply, that the employer in question is bad in some way, I don't see why that's considered "off topic." If a company sucks, we owe it to our fellow engineers to get the word out until they improve. A perfect example being the sorts that don't have any intention of filling the jobs they post.

In my mind the only sort of company that would avoid posting here due to the potential of being criticized by the HN userbase are exactly the sorts you don't want posting, so that seems like a win/win.

Just my 0.02.

Two questions: 1) How would the feedback loop work from users who do not receive a response? 2) Are you concerned about a possible "chilling effect" for startups that don't want to post for fear of being spammed?

As an aside, been browsing HN for years and always wanted to say that you're doing the Lord's work.

I think it's going to be hard to enforce that, unless you go through ycombinator.com/jobs

But I agree that's fair to expect from companies. Yes, they have potentially hundreds of applicants, but writing "We're sorry to inform that you have not been selected to interview" probably takes less than a minute, so spending less than an hour rejecting every applicant seems in line with the time I'd expect each candidate to spend preparing and submitting their application. Plus you can always automate a list of emails to send rejection messages to...

It's also a nice way to differentiate the Who's hiring? from all other job boards out there

Maybe make the "flag" feature work for users to "report" non-responsive employers. On repeat offenses, reach out to them saying they've been repeatedly reported? Just brainstorming

Perhaps the monthly postings should be handled via ycombinator.com/jobs and the thread here is just a dump of this month's new openings with links to applications there but not direct posts by companies?

I think the rule should be something kind of like, do not post a job ad unless you actually intend to fill the position.

And then if a company posts the exact same ad for an excessive number of months and their headcount hasn't changed, they're clearly breaking the rule.

Everyone? Applicants are using AI to mass apply for jobs. Not everyone deserves a response.

Why not: Please only post jobs if you are committed to interviewing and filling the position in the next 3 months. Accounts posting the same job opening for 6 months may be banned.

In this market if it takes 6+ months to find someone there is a fundamental problem with the opening.

At the very least it should be: "Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to all qualified applicants."

What if the new rule required a company to link to their last "who's hiring" posting if it was within, say, the last 3 months?

That makes it easy, within HN, to see if a company is just doing copy/paste spam, or if they're posting new/updated info each month. It also has the advantage of being easily verifiable (and enforceable? not sure what the enforcement actions would be...) here on HN versus random anecdotes of "I applied but never heard back", which I doubt would have enough weight for anyone to do anything about.

Users here could help police/moderate by simply replying with a link to last month's posting if there is one and the posting omitted it. That would somewhat-gently "call out" the company for not reading/following the rules, without users leaving negative comments on the thread.

(Just thoughts from a user skimming by, I'm not in the market for a new job at the moment so I have little skin in the game)

I don't love this idea. I feel like it's just going to force even more busybody work into the process - now companies will need to "respond" to every applicant, no matter how irrelevant, so that response isn't going to be high-information anyway.

Someone else suggested a good idea - make companies link to their previous request. Or even better - don't allow companies to post the exact same listing for months in a row. The actual behavior you're trying to root out is a company listing a position that isn't real - so just don't allow them to list the same not-real position over and over.

I don't know if that can be enforced, though it should be easy to script up something that checks this. But you're not going to enforce anything anyway, and I think this gets closer to actually what we want to achieve.

How about mentioning in the who's hiring post that people can email HN if they think someone posted in bad faith. The slight inconvenience should turn off people who complain just for the sake of it, and other readers won't be discouraged by seeing the complaints. The downside is extra admin for you, of course.

I think that's a great start. I mean for me, I'm realistic - if it's a pre-first round or first round exit so to speak, I don't expect anything substantive, a canned response is acceptable. I get that it's a pain when you have hundreds of applicants, but it should also be trivial.

It is nice to expect something a bit more involved if it's a final round thing, but still. No-one likes the ghost.

What I would really like to see is for employers to give actual feedback to the rejected candidates at any stage of the interview process. I am sure that employers can find a way to share constructive feedback without the fear of any legal implications. And I am sure most candidates will really appreciate a meaningful feedback instead of an automated rejection email. This would also have the side effect of having only serious candidates and employers engage in the process and should go a long way of getting rid of these ghost jobs. I would love to see a job board which only post jobs where the employers promises to share a feedback with any candidate they interview. I am sure it will be a hit.

The problem isn't that the rules arent well specified enough. The problem is that too many agents with the most power in this exchange (ie employers) just violate people's trust. Dishonest agents need to be visibly held to account, and right now the only way that happens is by calling them out. But since that's forbidden, there's a conundrum.

I like the idea! Possibly add an additional rule that they should stop advertising the same position if they didn't fill it within, say, 4 months.

Another potential way to at least surface dodgy behaviour perhaps: Automatically append to a poster's comment links to all their previous comments in Who's Hiring threads in the past twelve months.

I can foresee posters then creating throwaway accounts to avoid this, but the green username would be a give-away (or restrict new accounts from posting on these threads).

I would suggest that there be a way to report bad-faith job postings in some way or there are consequences. anyone can claim they applied with no response. Someone who reports actual evidence like "this account has posted this exact listing for the last 4 months and the company size hasn't changed a bit" may justify e.g. removing listings.

I like this idea. Perhaps let them self select if they will respond or not, but they have to advertise in the posting which path they chose?

Wouldn't any company unscrupulous enough to advertise a job opening without a genuine intention to hire simply disregard such a rule?

Thinking out loud:

* What if there were a bit more restrictions to posting on Who's hiring? Perhaps a counter of how many times a profile has posted, with a max of N posts allowed per M months, or something.

* Would also be nice to have some feedback from HN profiles on outcome of the job posting. Add a link to the job posting to your about page:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=##### NOREPLY|HIRED|OK

... this way you can attempt to disregard the feedback if the profile posting it seems bogus. Posters wouldn't want to hurt their own reputation by lying about the quality of a job posting.

Anyway, maybe something like that would be out of scope for HN, but just thinking out loud here :-).

I like it! Frankly, it should be something that hiring companies do anyways.

Perhaps extend it to something like everyone who applies, or responds to your comment”

Practically speaking, enforcement will be difficult/impossible for actions off HN - if someone claims a company isn’t responding, or using a templated email, how would you verify that?

By enforcing the same rule for a job thread, there’s a very clear location where the behavior of the company can be observed.

If companies receive comments saying i never heard back (at least they need to generate an email saying application was received and later your not a good fit, if not) and they keep posting this same or similar job. Well then they should warned about losing their HN job listing priviligies. Put them on a list that a bot notifies you and or downvotes them a lot.

Those who comment and are to be taken seriously will have a certain amount of karma and or history on HN.

What about all of the YC companies posting comment-free ads for founding engineers offering 1/2 market wages and next-to-no equity in person in SF?

Honestly it's practically a joke to look at and it starting to make YC itself look bad. Seriously there is no value prop to these postings unless you are jobless, desperate and living in your car.

This is a bigger, longer term thought, but…

perhaps upvotes and downvotes can be subtly weighed by karma? This would give proven contributors more trust. In the case of job posts, it would enlist them in zapping the spam they recognise month after month?

And beyond that, beyond applicability to job posts, perhaps voting can be a collaborative filtering bubble instead of absolutes? This makes spammers and voting rings end up in an echo chamber? And perhaps for normal posts instead of there being an early top level comment that gets to the top and stays there and monopolises the conversation, you get more variety and people more easily find the conversation they come for?

"Dear [applicant name], thank you for sending us your application.

We have decided not to progress your application further.

While making our decision we've noted your extensive experience at [previous company] and feel that your skillsets are highly valuable in the industry and hope you find success in your job search soon."

I actually received that from a major tech company, unfilled mail merge aliases included.

Tangentially-related: I see postings for jobs specifically in states that require pay transparency (posting the pay range in job announcements), but they do not include a pay range in their announcements. While this is primarily an issue for companies that are illegally posting announcements without the required pay range, it might be helpful to include a statement in the rules at the top of the page. This statement could remind posters that if they are in a state with a pay transparency law, they need to include the pay range in their job postings.

That's two reasons! (1) It's offtopic, which is especially bad given that the threads are so comment-heavy; and (2) it's too easy to exploit.

I suppose exploit is not the right word, because a lot of it is people posting their grudges or bad feelings that they probably have perfectly legit reasons for, and yet are not the full story. We're not going to get the full story, or even a fair assessment, from a distracting back-and-forth in the middle of a job ads thread; and that's ignoring the point that most people posting to Who Is Hiring aren't in a position to respond to such complaints in the first place.

It seems to me easy to see that if we allowed it, there would be no limit to it, and the end result would be a bad scene indeed.

Not much—but see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011089

Maybe; I don't want too be too cynical about it, but I suspect many people don't really read it in the first place, and if you're the sort of person posting fake jobs then I don't expect you're really deterred by this.

In principle yes, but I just can't handle many more emails. Also, it's not clear how we would respond. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011354.

I had a little side project I was working on a while ago that would ingest "Who's Hiring" posts every month through the HN API and analyze month to month when each one came and went, in order to call out the companies posting the (according to some heuristic) same ad for months and months, never actually hiring anyone. I was going to snarkily call the tool "Who's Not Hiring?"

Obviously a company -actually- hiring the same kind of person month after month would be a false positive, but I thought it might help to catch some of these companies abusing "Who's Hiring"

ycombinator/jobs would presumably not be the right venue for an open job board but yes we could build software to better support Who Is Hiring threads. I've always resisted doing so but maybe we eventually will. I'm not sure how that would help with the ghosting problem though...