Are there some bad actors in Who is hiring?

I went through 8 interviews and a take home only to be told I had been the best performer, but they weren't hiring for that role anymore. I baited them, and they quickly admitted they were lying and they wouldn't give me any actual feedback. They proceeded to hire somebody a week or two later.

Sucks. Sure do wish we had some sort of collective bargaining power to prevent this. Oh, but that one guy over there is really good at Leetcode, so never mind, every man for himself.

I had one recently who revealed half an hour into the interview that there was “no cash compensation for the role”. Sure would’ve liked to see that written in the post.

> every month for the last year have stood out where they are taking every candidate through the whole interview process as an exercise to train their current staff on interviewing with no actual intention of hiring candidates

how do you know about their intention? Why they would waste time on their employees training if they don't want to hire anyone?

> Has anyone had similar or shared experience like these?

I hardly ever respond to those, but I did get a bad actor the time I commented on its companion monthly post, for people who were looking for work.

Some startup was scraping the HN post and putting up profiles for all the people on their own site, with the appearance that the people had put the profiles on the site themselves. I guess probably to bootstrap a user base.

(I like to imagine that they had investors who lost all their money on this team, as negative feedback for funding people with no intuition for ethical behavior. Our field certainly could use more such negative feedback.)

I view Who is Hiring as more of an advertising page than anything else.

long long ago one would write their own tools to do things. If one could write a generic tool for others to also use it was wonderful. With the internet it became more or less the default mostly because tools grew into bigger more useful things one couldn't just quickly write alone.

Posting job openings is just a posting. It seems a fun tool to develop out of it an interview process (or part of it) If you are a programmer everything should be examined as if a programming problem.

You do something or you don't do it. If you chose to do it you try to do it well. Access to a huge audience, unlimited programmers willing to work for free (on the tool). This doesn't sound like a very challenging service to build?

Asking money for job listings isn't strange. $2000 per listing seems a good price for how high profile the website is. Employees aren't cheap.

Applicants must be qualified, YC picks 1-5 applicants per listing. YC does supervised remote interviews. You basically take charge of the interview. If the applicant performs poorly or makes unreasonable demands he is replaced. If the employer makes unreasonable demands the opening is closed without a refund.

If the employer wants to fire the employee within 6 months a new interview between them is set up to examine where things failed or they won't be allowed to post a new listing. If the applicant lied about qualifications the new listing is free.

I have some very anecdotal experience.

I've inquired about some openings over the 14 or so years I've been around here- I think I had one good experience out of a few in terms of an interesting interaction. When I was looking for a new position I never got anywhere through HN. I've posted once (using a "work" account) and my post got downvoted and I don't think we got any applications, the post was real, in good faith, tried to adhere the best I can to the standards. I've stopped doing that.

I think initially (~14 years ago) when I saw this (Who is hiring) I thought- this is great. It's a community thing. But I think just like much of the Internet, things are not what they used to be, and the HN "community" while sometimes still comes through here and there is not really a thing (or maybe it used to be but isn't anymore).

EDIT: Worth noting I am in Canada so maybe if you're in SV you have a different sample.

Writing suggestions... First, lead your post with the problem, such as:

> Two companies that have been prolific on "Ask HN: Who is hiring?", posting every month for the last year have stood out where they are taking every candidate through the whole interview process as an exercise to train their current staff on interviewing with no actual intention of hiring candidates.

Also, elaborate on why this following one is a problem [edit: clarified which quote I was talking about], and how much you're speculating (e.g., suggests they aren't interested in hiring, and are building a corpus of ML training data, or content for some site, or content they can pass off as their own for scamming):

> Another company in particular are very thorough in their process requiring prerecorded video presentation of what the candidate has designed in the past, slides, two take homes and a "pair programming" exercise that's just a shared inbox - very minimal actual human interaction involved.

Then either ask for more information or suggest a solution.

Also, an HNer shouldn't phrase a headline as a question, since it's a local meme that the answer is "no".

Since your account is a throwaway, could you name these companies? I'd like to avoid them if possible

> Has anyone had similar or shared experience like these?

Personally, I haven't encountered any bad actors. Aside from maybe 1-2 companies that seem to have evergreen postings on Who's Hiring.

If there are bad actors, I'm guessing they're so few in number that only a fraction of us will notice.

I'm sure there are some bad eggs. But jumping from that fact to a recommendation to use separate posts or changing platforms not only seems like an over-reaction... I don't see how it would solve the problem?

A lot of companies are faking hiring right now for resume farming and the government is blatantly spinning or lying jobs numbers.

Unfortunately until interest rates drop, we won't see any improvement.

I once took a meeting with a "founder" from HN in the feedback widget space who was supposedly interviewing to hire a senior engineer role. He went through the motions but was only interested in information. There was no job. Beware meeting bullshit artists you don't know, move too fast, and don't have the right paperwork.

One thing I've noticed is that the admins are super ready to ghost/delete/dead people who respond to companies with harsh critique.

It's the similar way Ycombinator-sponsored crap has no commenting at all. A good portion of them are basically 'clone Uber and cut out bureaucracy illegally', 'we scan your eyeballs for shitcoin', and similar grift.... But you can never say anything about those.