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I have been constantly harrased by accounts with pretty girl pictures on LinkedIn, wish they could do something. Why did I know they are fake? One, I'm not ha

I have been constantly harrased by accounts with pretty girl pictures on LinkedIn, wish they could do something. Why did I know they are fake? One, I'm not handsome, neither do I work in those high status companies, why did they reach out to me? Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit.

mbg721 4y ago
Those are just the auditors; the audit firms send charismatic and attractive people around so that the people whose work they're checking will let their guard down.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  Also pen test teams will use halo effect when it's an option.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Not really, the title is usually something like a tech consultant with completely BS educational and career experience. But I do agree it could be red team but they are annoying as hell. Actually lemme show you one: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/ellie-fang-411900257 https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/ellie-fang-411900257
  - papercrane 4y ago
    That headshot is of a Taiwanese actress. You'd think they'd at least use a more believable headshot. https://ent.ltn.com.tw/news/breakingnews/2357875 https://ent.ltn.com.tw/news/breakingnews/2357875
    - 998244353 4y ago
      One common explanation to such things is that it is a filter: if a person doesn't notice something like that, there's a good chance they won't become suspicious later either.
    - winReInstall 4y ago
      Low effort pig butchering scams for lonely workaholics..
cwkoss 4y ago
Linkedin+Glassdoor lets you target marks based on approximate salary.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Oh that's nice to know...but to what end?
  - pixl97 4y ago
    So you don't waste time targeting the poors?
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Bingo. For example, if you watch Youtube from a very poor country, you might not see any ads.
      - checkyoursudo 4y ago
        "Buy our vpn service in $low_income_country and ditch your youtube subscription!" arbitrage opportunity for someone?
        dmurray 4y ago
        This is definitely going on already. Here's a VPN company advertising "a VPN server located in a region that offers cheaper games, in-app purchases, products, etc." and if other VPN providers don't explicitly advertise this benefit, they know some of their customers are using their product for that reason. https://www.vpnunlimited.com/help/solutions/saving-with-regional-pricing https://www.vpnunlimited.com/help/solutions/saving-with-regi...
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    I'd imagine they're trying to monetize your eyeballs in all of the ways spam usually does: mostly scams and advertising.
dijit 4y ago
I have noticed that a lot of tech recruiters are conventionally attractive women.
- ikiris 4y ago
  - jollofricepeas 4y ago
    Whoa there buddy. Your statement is both downright offensive and untrue. 1. Great recruiters work long hours around others’ schedules 2. Recruiters deal with tons of rejection that most developers don’t have the stomach for 3. Female recruiters are often overworked, harassed, mansplained to and disrespected in our industry as they deal with fragile male egos, imposter syndrome, interview anxiety, etc To build a real career as a realtor or recruiter requires perseverance in the face of rejection, work and networking skills. They are worthy of our respect.
    - csomar 4y ago
      Are you sure we are getting contacted by the same recruiters? I'm pretty sure most recruiters are not like that; and we would be better without them. Recruiters exists because companies wants to save on $$ (it would make more sense to let developers do the recruiting, and not someone with no technical knowledge). Of course, this has the opposite result which is why the hiring market is such a sh*t-show.
      - Consultant32452 4y ago
        I'm a whore and the recruiters are my pimps. They only like me because the johns hire me. The world makes more sense through that lens.
        dijit 4y ago
        This whole thread is shameful. Recruiters do a valuable job; I don't pity them and I do not envy them. The number of bad recruiters I've interacted with are high, but that's largely selection bias: the ones that reach me are not paying attention enough to realise that I'm not going to move. I've worked closely with recruiters and their job is tiring and thankless; in the end though they can go home peacefully and it's easier to plan their day. I can't speak to the reason I noticed this phenomena (of conventionally attractive women being overrepresented in recruiting), but I could believe that it's possible that men are more likely to respond to pretty women reaching out to them with kind words and making them feel wanted and valued; thus conventionally attractive women tend to be more successful in the industry, and thus we sort of have some kind of survivorship bias at play. I don't know if that's true, but I could believe it quite comfortably.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Lets face it. The "pretty girl profile" strategy works on a wide enough fraction of men that with probability close to 1 you can establish a legit connection to at least a few legit people at the company. Once you get that far, you can start getting recommendations for other people you "might know" and have enough of an "in" to get a glimpse at the entire org chart of the place. From there your a short jump away from being added to internal slack channels and whatever. Not that I've ever done this. I always respect and obey the computer fraud and abuse act of 1986 vis a vis the section on unauthorized access to a computer system.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Back in the MySpace (Bebo also maybe?) days, I met a programmer who harvested womens' profile pictures from social media for the AdultFriendFinder.com adverts on porn sites. He didn't consider it unethical because "you'd have to be really really stupid to think that women are posting their face on a site like AFF". I kinda thought exploiting the really stupid was still unethical, but his response was given that I worked in adtech, I wasn't really in a place to judge. Which was hard to argue against, tbh, as I spent a lot of my time then either making popunders work again after Firefox released a new version that broke our old approach, or figuring out how to store our tracking data better. But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505.
  - flooo 4y ago
    How about the women whose profile pics he “harvested” (stole)? Isn’t there a huge ethical issue there?
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      I think so. > But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505. I don’t want to put words in the other dude’s mouth, but I think he thinks so too.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
dehrmann 4y ago
> they look more like models than software engineers I worked with someone (she was on the sales team) who looked like a model. Her mom was a model--go figure. So while unlikely, it does happen.
- verdenti 4y ago
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  I remember filtering programmer resumes about 20 years ago and one listed modelling as a prior job and her packet included a headshot. We flew her out and interviewed her and she aced the written test and interviews; we made her an offer but she had multiple to choose from and our starting salary was not competitive.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    > one listed modelling as a prior job We had the near opposite experience. We were looking to hire a "Modelling and simulation developer" for Matlab. And some ladies would somehow only see the "modelling experience desired" part and ignore the other technical requirements and flood us with their portfolios of various photo shoots. I'm sure the hiring guys hated it.
    - 998244353 4y ago
      Sounds like people applying to thousands of positions based on only keywords to stay competitive.
    - stevenwoo 4y ago
      I distinctly remember thinking - this is odd, but whatever, we had to look at so many resumes we had to concentrate on looking at grades and outside projects and anything else to distinguish between candidates to get to the phone screen stage, it was just me and a senior producer (might be called product manager nowadays), I cannot remember everything but we were looking at new grads for a couple of years to expand a little.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danwee 4y ago
You mean female recruiters? For some reason, all the female recruiters I know (on Linkedin) are rather attractive. Maybe there is some logic behind it.
- walthamstow 4y ago
  My brother and his girlfriend are tech recruiters here in London. They are both very conventionally attractive people, but it's not their image that makes them good at their jobs per se, IMO it's having the confidence and charm of a person who has gone through life always being attractive. If a less attractive person had that confidence, charm, charisma, whatever you call it - and some do - they would also be successful.
  - danwee 4y ago
    I wasn't talking about been successfull or not, but I agree with your statement indeed.
    - walthamstow 4y ago
      Ah, yes, apologies, I had merged your post with another sibling post in my head
teux 4y ago
> Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit. Can I push back against this? It’s toxic as fuck. Being a woman in tech blows. You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow. You can’t be ugly or you’re treated poorly for that. It’s a loose-loose. What does a software engineer look like to you, then?
- mnky9800n 4y ago
  can i push back on that? as a guy, girls texting you randomly on any platform is almost always a bot, scammer, <insert something other than what it appears to be>. i completely agree with you, a software engineer looks like a person who writes software. but that doesn't change the online experience that i have had as a man, which is namely, if a girl texts you, she's not a girl, and she certainly isn't your friend.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  Are you a woman in tech? The reason that I ask is that your account is pretty new and this seems a little bit like stowing up discord on social media. Regardless. There is a difference between a beautiful woman that can code (these are actually getting more and more prevalent) and the trashy looking profile picture that all of us instantly know is some kind of spammer or scammer in our DMs or our inbox. The fact that they're portrayed as woman has more to do with the loneliness of many men in tech than anything else and pretending that this type of behaviour is non-existent is childish when it's clear that places like LinkedIn and Twitter could do a lot more to detect it and prevent it.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
  - teux 4y ago
    Yes? I just migrated from reddit. Read my comments. I have been discussing my job in Europe and my work with vectorised optimisations. Seems like a lot of work for sowing discord, but you make the call.
dopidopHN 4y ago
One of my coworker looks like a barbie doll. Also for some reason she looks 30 when she’s mid 40. She also really, really good at her job. Her profile on LinkedIn looks like what you describe.

mbg721 4y ago

Those are just the auditors; the audit firms send charismatic and attractive people around so that the people whose work they're checking will let their guard down.

maerF0x0 4y ago
Also pen test teams will use halo effect when it's an option.
markus_zhang 4y ago
Not really, the title is usually something like a tech consultant with completely BS educational and career experience. But I do agree it could be red team but they are annoying as hell. Actually lemme show you one: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/ellie-fang-411900257 https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/ellie-fang-411900257
- papercrane 4y ago
  That headshot is of a Taiwanese actress. You'd think they'd at least use a more believable headshot. https://ent.ltn.com.tw/news/breakingnews/2357875 https://ent.ltn.com.tw/news/breakingnews/2357875
  - 998244353 4y ago
    One common explanation to such things is that it is a filter: if a person doesn't notice something like that, there's a good chance they won't become suspicious later either.
  - winReInstall 4y ago
    Low effort pig butchering scams for lonely workaholics..

cwkoss 4y ago

Linkedin+Glassdoor lets you target marks based on approximate salary.

markus_zhang 4y ago
Oh that's nice to know...but to what end?
- pixl97 4y ago
  So you don't waste time targeting the poors?
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Bingo. For example, if you watch Youtube from a very poor country, you might not see any ads.
    - checkyoursudo 4y ago
      "Buy our vpn service in $low_income_country and ditch your youtube subscription!" arbitrage opportunity for someone?
      - dmurray 4y ago
        This is definitely going on already. Here's a VPN company advertising "a VPN server located in a region that offers cheaper games, in-app purchases, products, etc." and if other VPN providers don't explicitly advertise this benefit, they know some of their customers are using their product for that reason. https://www.vpnunlimited.com/help/solutions/saving-with-regional-pricing https://www.vpnunlimited.com/help/solutions/saving-with-regi...
- cwkoss 4y ago
  I'd imagine they're trying to monetize your eyeballs in all of the ways spam usually does: mostly scams and advertising.

dijit 4y ago

I have noticed that a lot of tech recruiters are conventionally attractive women.

ikiris 4y ago
- jollofricepeas 4y ago
  Whoa there buddy. Your statement is both downright offensive and untrue. 1. Great recruiters work long hours around others’ schedules 2. Recruiters deal with tons of rejection that most developers don’t have the stomach for 3. Female recruiters are often overworked, harassed, mansplained to and disrespected in our industry as they deal with fragile male egos, imposter syndrome, interview anxiety, etc To build a real career as a realtor or recruiter requires perseverance in the face of rejection, work and networking skills. They are worthy of our respect.
  - csomar 4y ago
    Are you sure we are getting contacted by the same recruiters? I'm pretty sure most recruiters are not like that; and we would be better without them. Recruiters exists because companies wants to save on $$ (it would make more sense to let developers do the recruiting, and not someone with no technical knowledge). Of course, this has the opposite result which is why the hiring market is such a sh*t-show.
    - Consultant32452 4y ago
      I'm a whore and the recruiters are my pimps. They only like me because the johns hire me. The world makes more sense through that lens.
      - dijit 4y ago
        This whole thread is shameful. Recruiters do a valuable job; I don't pity them and I do not envy them. The number of bad recruiters I've interacted with are high, but that's largely selection bias: the ones that reach me are not paying attention enough to realise that I'm not going to move. I've worked closely with recruiters and their job is tiring and thankless; in the end though they can go home peacefully and it's easier to plan their day. I can't speak to the reason I noticed this phenomena (of conventionally attractive women being overrepresented in recruiting), but I could believe that it's possible that men are more likely to respond to pretty women reaching out to them with kind words and making them feel wanted and valued; thus conventionally attractive women tend to be more successful in the industry, and thus we sort of have some kind of survivorship bias at play. I don't know if that's true, but I could believe it quite comfortably.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Lets face it. The "pretty girl profile" strategy works on a wide enough fraction of men that with probability close to 1 you can establish a legit connection to at least a few legit people at the company. Once you get that far, you can start getting recommendations for other people you "might know" and have enough of an "in" to get a glimpse at the entire org chart of the place. From there your a short jump away from being added to internal slack channels and whatever. Not that I've ever done this. I always respect and obey the computer fraud and abuse act of 1986 vis a vis the section on unauthorized access to a computer system.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
Back in the MySpace (Bebo also maybe?) days, I met a programmer who harvested womens' profile pictures from social media for the AdultFriendFinder.com adverts on porn sites. He didn't consider it unethical because "you'd have to be really really stupid to think that women are posting their face on a site like AFF". I kinda thought exploiting the really stupid was still unethical, but his response was given that I worked in adtech, I wasn't really in a place to judge. Which was hard to argue against, tbh, as I spent a lot of my time then either making popunders work again after Firefox released a new version that broke our old approach, or figuring out how to store our tracking data better. But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505.
- flooo 4y ago
  How about the women whose profile pics he “harvested” (stole)? Isn’t there a huge ethical issue there?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I think so. > But now that I've got a few years between me and adtech, I'm totally going to judge you hard, eug1505. I don’t want to put words in the other dude’s mouth, but I think he thinks so too.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago

dehrmann 4y ago

> they look more like models than software engineers I worked with someone (she was on the sales team) who looked like a model. Her mom was a model--go figure. So while unlikely, it does happen.

verdenti 4y ago
stevenwoo 4y ago
I remember filtering programmer resumes about 20 years ago and one listed modelling as a prior job and her packet included a headshot. We flew her out and interviewed her and she aced the written test and interviews; we made her an offer but she had multiple to choose from and our starting salary was not competitive.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  > one listed modelling as a prior job We had the near opposite experience. We were looking to hire a "Modelling and simulation developer" for Matlab. And some ladies would somehow only see the "modelling experience desired" part and ignore the other technical requirements and flood us with their portfolios of various photo shoots. I'm sure the hiring guys hated it.
  - 998244353 4y ago
    Sounds like people applying to thousands of positions based on only keywords to stay competitive.
  - stevenwoo 4y ago
    I distinctly remember thinking - this is odd, but whatever, we had to look at so many resumes we had to concentrate on looking at grades and outside projects and anything else to distinguish between candidates to get to the phone screen stage, it was just me and a senior producer (might be called product manager nowadays), I cannot remember everything but we were looking at new grads for a couple of years to expand a little.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

danwee 4y ago

You mean female recruiters? For some reason, all the female recruiters I know (on Linkedin) are rather attractive. Maybe there is some logic behind it.

walthamstow 4y ago
My brother and his girlfriend are tech recruiters here in London. They are both very conventionally attractive people, but it's not their image that makes them good at their jobs per se, IMO it's having the confidence and charm of a person who has gone through life always being attractive. If a less attractive person had that confidence, charm, charisma, whatever you call it - and some do - they would also be successful.
- danwee 4y ago
  I wasn't talking about been successfull or not, but I agree with your statement indeed.
  - walthamstow 4y ago
    Ah, yes, apologies, I had merged your post with another sibling post in my head

teux 4y ago

> Two, they look more like models than software engineers. Completely bullshit. Can I push back against this? It’s toxic as fuck. Being a woman in tech blows. You can’t be pretty or you’re considered incompetent and shallow. You can’t be ugly or you’re treated poorly for that. It’s a loose-loose. What does a software engineer look like to you, then?

mnky9800n 4y ago
can i push back on that? as a guy, girls texting you randomly on any platform is almost always a bot, scammer, <insert something other than what it appears to be>. i completely agree with you, a software engineer looks like a person who writes software. but that doesn't change the online experience that i have had as a man, which is namely, if a girl texts you, she's not a girl, and she certainly isn't your friend.
3pt14159 4y ago
Are you a woman in tech? The reason that I ask is that your account is pretty new and this seems a little bit like stowing up discord on social media. Regardless. There is a difference between a beautiful woman that can code (these are actually getting more and more prevalent) and the trashy looking profile picture that all of us instantly know is some kind of spammer or scammer in our DMs or our inbox. The fact that they're portrayed as woman has more to do with the loneliness of many men in tech than anything else and pretending that this type of behaviour is non-existent is childish when it's clear that places like LinkedIn and Twitter could do a lot more to detect it and prevent it.
- xwolfi 4y ago
- teux 4y ago
  Yes? I just migrated from reddit. Read my comments. I have been discussing my job in Europe and my work with vectorised optimisations. Seems like a lot of work for sowing discord, but you make the call.

dopidopHN 4y ago

One of my coworker looks like a barbie doll. Also for some reason she looks 30 when she’s mid 40. She also really, really good at her job. Her profile on LinkedIn looks like what you describe.