[toni]

So a while back I was cold-emailed by a recruiter at source{d} (the makers of this library). He wrote that after analyzing my Github profile, he has a great opportunity for me in Country A. I responded back by sending him my private phone number and showing interest in talking to him about this opportunity on the phone.

Usually At this point, serious recruiters will do call you. But instead, he wrote that before going any further, he would like to ask me "a couple of quick questions" and requested if I could email him back my answers.

The kind of questions I was supposed to answer were pretty amusing: for example, one of the questions involved telling "If I live near Country A."

But he could easily find this out by looking at the country code of the phone number I just gave him in the previous email. My location is also public on my Github profile, so he could have easily found out that I live in Country B. which is around an hour away from Country A. The rest of the questions were also showing the recruiter's minimal knowledge of my actual Github profile.

At this point it was pretty evident that I was corresponding with a bot. They were running different set of algorithms against different set of people, trying to analyze the results.

[eisokant]

Hey Toni, Founder of source{d} here. First of all my apologies for the bad experience. This should have not happened. We're a team of developers ourselves (no recruiters) working on making sure that these kind of situations don't happen to any developer (we started this because we were fed up with the bad practices in recruitment). We're definitely not a bot, I can promise you this. Every email gets read by a developer themselves (our team: http://sourced.tech/about) and personally answered. If you send me an email ([e-mail]) I'll personally figure out what happened here.

[stevekemp]

FWIW I've also had what felt very much like automated mails from your company. I've started marking them as spam after the first two.

[orf]

Same, I got one asking if I was interested in a job the other side of Europe. Nope. Interesting idea for a product though

[Liru]

I got one saying my experience with Go would "be a good fit" with a company.

My Go codebase at the time, on that account, consisted largely of hacky products, no tests, no web-server stuff, high coupling and complexity, and below average documentation. If that indicates experience with a language, I'm almost afraid to ask what WOULDN'T be a good fit.

That, and their stated "real-time" requirements for said company's product made me laugh.

[swalsh]

This is actually a really cool idea, like I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of using custom attributes / aspect oriented programming using C#. I don't expect to ever be contacted by a recruiter for purely that fact... but if they saw my code... they might. That's cool.

On the other hand, i'm more of a consumer of open source software than a producer. I tried submitting a pull request once, it got rejected, and I decided it wasn't worth the time.

[eisokant]

Our analysis of code is algorithmically (hence we created go-git, to analyse every git repository on the web). We're doing some cool things here, everything from feature engineered models based on extracting attributes from code to turning code into vectors using deep learning.

However, when we have a conversation, it is never a bot speaking, always a real developer. This actually helps train our system (we are humble about being wrong) and makes sure that every developer has a good experience working with us.