7 ms·
A recruiter sent me a message in code. I fixed it
- TamDenholm 10y agoThis feels to me like when you're a teenager and your parents try to be cool around your friends but it only makes you more embarrassed and want nothing to do with them.
- dcsommer 10y agoThere's a great German word for this exact feeling: fremdschämen.
- mastermindxs 10y agoIs that pronounced "friend shaming"?
- dcsommer 10y agoFremd actually means foreign, referring to the external source of the shame (schämen).
- kafkaesq 10y agoˈfʀɛmtˌʃɛːmən, or if you will: "FREMT-shay-men". (You need to gurgle a bit, or at least hint at gurgling, when doing the 'R', now). However you pronounce it -- I find it hard to have any kind of empathy at all for recruiters (internal or external), and hence, can't quite imagine myself "feeling a sense of shame for them in their place" (per the generic translation).
- superplussed 10y agoI don't see an 'R' in there?
- praptak 10y ago"Clever" messages in code were clever back in... actually they never were.
- mysterydip 10y agoThat might be part of the use case, though: removes non-techy people from the use of code, and removes techy-people-who-dont-need-me because it's a lame attempt to be clever, helping to narrow the recruiter's net to people more willing to work with them.
- gshulegaard 10y agoJust curious, but why does capital "If" make you think of Python?
- riebschlager 10y agoHmm. I said the snake case made me think of Python. The capital "If" just made me think "Microsoft Outlook really insists that you capitalize things." Edit: Oh! I just re-read that sentence. Yeah, I can see why you thought that. I'll fix it. :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deckar01 10y agoI believe `If` is Visual Basic syntax. ;)
- tyingq 10y agoTried fixing it so it would run, and the hardest bit was recognizing that the double-quotes weren't actually double-quotes, but rather these two characters: “ ”
- Tempest1981 10y agoSmartquotes... some word processors do that automatically. http://smartquotesjs.com http://smartquotesjs.com
- throwaway2016a 10y agoMore annoyingly, Skype does it. Nothing is worse than when I just want to send a small snippet of code to a colleague and Skype changes all my quotes.
- gizmodo59 10y agoDo something like this in skype: {code} printf("Hello World!"); {code}
- shortstuffsushi 10y agoI may have asked this here before, or perhaps elsewhere... but why do these characters exist? "Smart" quotes end up breaking things for me so frequently, I've never actually wanted them in any case I can think of. Same goes for en/em dashes. I literally spent a day and a half trying to track down an issue less than a month ago, only to realize as I got to the point of inspecting bytes that I wasn't looking at a regular dash (and incidentally that the SDK I was interacting with doesn't support extended characters).
- tyingq 10y agoI don't agree with the premise, but here it is: http://smartquotesjs.com/ http://smartquotesjs.com/
- 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- throwaway2016a 10y agoMore accurate title would be "I code reviewed it"... I don't see a working fixed script anywhere. Edit: I stand corrected. For some reason I thought that was the only file in the repo. It's been a long week but I have no excuse.
- kevan 10y agoThere's more than just a readme in the repo: https://github.com/riebschlager/linkedin-recruiter-email/blob/master/recruiter-email.js https://github.com/riebschlager/linkedin-recruiter-email/blo...
- benders_game 10y agoIt's there. Look at "recruiter-email.js" in the repo.
- amorphid 10y agoWhen I was a recruiter learning to code, I posted a personal's ad written in SQL on Craigslist. Ended up going out on a date with a DBA :) She was a falconer, and we took her hawk out to hunt crows.
- hekker 10y agoStrong story.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWow. It is hard to do that in a way that doesn't come off like... this thing.
- amorphid 10y agoIn grad school I took a class on creativity from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi[1]. He described a creative idea as something that stands apart from other ideas in the same basket. Think of a large pile of plain ol' red bricks. Now show that pile ask 100 people who know nothing about bricks the question "what can yo do with this pile of bricks?" If 99 people say "build a worker computer by <brick-to-computer-process>", and 1 person says "build a house", then "build a house" is the most creative answer in that sample. Writing a SQL ad that was basically just a simple query using SELECT, FROM, WHERE. If 100 SQL writers wrote an ad, I don't think mine would have been all that creative, using the definition mentioned above. But as the only SQL-flavored ad in the personals section, it stood out as creative :) [1] https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-Invention/dp/0062283251 https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-...
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYes. However, there is a difference between creative and good: Most recruiter emails don't look like what OP got. But that doesn't make that one good. Yours seems to have been good.
- Mathnerd314 10y agoClearly you shared some common interests. Was there a second date?
- KirinDave 10y agoI think the nested while loops are trying to capture the logic that they won't leave you alone without trying at least twice. Sadly the do-while loop structure is largely lost on modern developers.
- AdeptusAquinas 10y agoSpelling mistake on line 43 of the revised code: 'and' should be 'an'. That's just sloppy. I am working with a french developer right now (English second language) who is really good, but peppers his code with minor grammatical or spelling errors. He is slowly driving me insane and doesn't know it :D
- riebschlager 10y agoFixed! Man. Having my code looked at by HN (even if it's a joke) feels like one of those dreams where you show up to school in your underwear.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoI'm barely a developer, and I'm in highschool. I'm so used to getting told I'm an idiot that I don't even react anymore.
- sqeaky 10y agoThe secret is that we are all idiots. Some just refuse to recognize it and act like jerks because of it. None of us actually "know" most of what we know. It's unprofessional to start calling names. It's generally uncouth to even start the argument unless you have really strong evidence and can back off when that proves insufficient. Don't be bothered when they don't have the evidence to back it up, but when they do have the evidence fix whatever caused them say it and keep some evidence.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoExactly. My rule is that if someone calls me out on being wrong, I'll argue, and do my best to support my point. If they provide a better argument, than I'll concede. Because if you can't admit you're wrong, you'll never learn anything.
- quinnftw 10y agoYou would think someone that works at LinkedIn, a company that likely employees hundreds (thousand(s)?), of engineers would have this proof read before sending it off to potential applicants. This is a real turn off.
- riebschlager 10y agoTo be clear, this was a recruiter ON LinkedIn, not a recruiter FROM LinkedIn.
- quinnftw 10y agoOH! Haha my mistake, that wording is naturally ambiguous.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoSheesh. If you've got it, don't be afraid to show it. But do so cleanly. Not with something like this And if you don't have it, than don't bother trying: you're trying to hire those who do: doing this doesn't make you look smart. Also, use \<newline> to keep your code at 80 columns. I actually don't care if it's exactly 80, but excessively long lines are a pain to read.
- TheCapn 10y agoDidn't he miss a closing brace with the While-While-If structure and only ending with two closing braces?
- Fjolsvith 10y agoYes, I noticed that too.
- MichaelBurge 10y agoGoogle docs will capitalize keywords in your code if you don't disable it. I haven't tried it, but I imagine they ruin your indentation too.
- vinayan3 10y agoIt could be the code was sloppy on purpose to illicit a response from you.
- riebschlager 10y agoThat's a good point. Maybe this was a test. Maybe he'll write me another message saying, "Well done, you passed. You may now have this entry-level developer position that is completely wrong for you and matches none of your skills or interests."
- dabber 10y agoIf any one wants a bunch of emails from curious HNers the domain the script addresses the email to is unclaimed. supertechcoderhirepeople.com
- taurath 10y agoWhen does someone make RecruiterEmail EnterpriseEdition?
- andrewvijay 10y agoThey better recruit him
- mrkabuki 10y agoWhat a shit piece of code. Recruiters should stop trying to be cool
- mrkabuki 10y agoWhat a shit piece of code. Recruiters should stop trying to be cool
- bryanrasmussen 10y agojokes on the coder, that's actually written in recscript, a little known scripting language with a sort of C like syntax targeting Microsoft's old ActiveScripting framework. The Document object is one of the 7 special objects available in the language (others: Resource [every other special object is an instance of Resource], Sheet, Calendar, Sound, Presentation, Database, Browser). Since there isn't any use of the Create Document statement before usage I'm guessing this is after version 2.14 of the language in which Create was dropped as unnecessary (a bit of syntactical sugar). Anyway Document instantiates a Microsoft Word object and saves it to recscript Documents folder automatically, all text inside of it is indexed, so you can also do stuff like Resources.find("you’fe killing me! Contact me because I desire this"); By the way the recscript code editor which provided an advanced code execution environment to develop in (something like JsFiddle only years prior) also supported open and close parenthesis. IIRC the open and close parenthesis had special semantic meaning in the language.
- foota 10y agoWow, really? I wasn't able to find any reference to this online.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago...Poe's Law strikes again.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago"How do you do my fellow developer"