[fyfy18]

One thing I always wanted to ask if why do job ads not allow comments? I'm guessing its to prevent negative comments/trolling (we get plenty of 'this will never work' on Launch/Show posts), but at the same time I feel like comments on job ads could be a good way for the founders and existing employees (tell us why you as a meager developer are excited to work there!) to interact with the HN community.

[dang]

What _-___________-_ said. The short version: job ads are boring. The long version:

If job ads were threads, each thread would be a generic referendum on the company. Worse, it would be the same referendum over and over.

Job ads are boring, so there wouldn't be anything to discuss other than how one feels about the company, and that's boring except to people who have strong feelings on the topic, and strong feelings on the internet tend to be negative, so the threads would fill up with negative generic comments.

I believe that the hivemind resents boring things, such as submissions where the only new information is "X is hiring", so it gets cranky and fills the vacuum with indignation, basically as the only way to amuse itself in the absence of anything interesting to discuss. It doesn't want to, it just doesn't know any better way to have fun in a vacuum. In practice, what this would look like in a job thread is "I applied in 2015 and never heard back", plus—if there has ever been a negative story X about the company—every variation of X, X, X, repeated increasingly snarkily.

Actually, it's worse. Building a business is a long hard slog. One needs to hire more often than one has scintillating new information for the community to have fun discussing. Therefore, each successive job ad would be even more boring than the previous one, leading to monotonically increasing resentment. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity.

Launch posts don't suffer from this dynamic because by definition, the startup is new, so there's something new to discuss.

[_-___________-_]

Job ads in the "who is hiring" threads generally only attract comments of one of a few types:

"I applied to this place and they never got back to me"

"Thanks, I applied"

"Please add salary/remoteness/interview process to your job ad"

"You have a typo in your text/email address/website URL"

[h0h0h0h0111]

The latter two comments seem pretty useful feedback though

[bryanrasmussen]

number 1 is pretty useful feedback for me, if they don't respond to people who apply I don't intend to take time to make a good cover letter and adapt my CV to highlight how I would be a good fit for the job.

[laumars]

As a hiring manager I can assure you that is not always practical. If someone makes it to an interview, even if it's just a first stage telephone interview, then I'll readily give feedback. If some sends a CV and then asks for feedback then I will also happily provide feedback if time permits). But recruitment is a heavily time consuming process already and some positions can receive dozens or more CVs so I don't have the time to reply to every single candidate and explain to them "Thank you for applying but unfortunately we've had better CVs through." Likewise I've never expected that when applying for other jobs either.

[bryanrasmussen]

ok, but I would think like this:

looking for a job is a heavily time consuming process, and going to a new job is a risky process. I'm too well-situated to take that time or risk on any thing that seems off. I would have to be desperate to change that calculation.

If a company does not reply I assume there are potential reasons:

1. company is disorganized, just as a company would penalize me for seeming disorganized I will certainly do the same with a potential employer. The point of a company is in some ways to be more organized than individual humans; it is, after all, an organization. If it can't or won't be organized I won't have anything to do with them.

2. Company is rude. Treating someone badly when you have no power over them is a warning sign never to let the company have power over you.

3. Company does not have good tools setup to automate responses to people whose applications it has decided not to go further with - which is a subset of company is disorganized.

So I guess there is a mismatch between our goals and needs in the requirement process.

[dsr_]

#3, especially: if your company has sane mail tools, it can autorespond to every single application with a variant on this:

Thanks for applying to $COMPANY.

We will get back to you by $(TODAY + 7) if we want to start a conversation.

Sincerely,

A. Robot

[dang]

But not interesting.

[laumars]

[edit: before you read on bare please in mind I'm not advocating comments be enabled (like many others have assumed).]

I think it's a little redundant making a distinction between "useful" and "interesting" because either way the comment has value. However I do agree with the points you made in your other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767319) and that the examples given of useful/interesting comments by the GP doesn't offer a high enough value to justify the inevitable negative and other low value comments. Which I think is the real crux of the matter. Much like why political discussions are generally banned on here, the signal to noise ratio just isn't worth the few valuable comments a submission might receive.

[411111111111111]

Nobody is stopping anyone from providing that feedback through mail, so still no need for comments.

[laumars]

I don't understand why you're downvoting me when you're ostensibly making the same point I was. Did you actually read my comment to the end or just made the assumption I'm wrong because I replied to dang? Because I was actually agreeing with him for the most part.

[stevekemp]

And posting in any of the "Who's looking for work" threads mostly just results in lots of people sending you emails:

"We saw you post, would you like to join our platform ..?"

Lots of upwork knockoffs; I've started sending them GDPR Subject Access Requests to see what the companies have scraped and held about me. Next step is obviously data-deletion requests. Fun.

[dang]

They're not supposed to do that, as the rules at the top of the thread make clear. Perhaps we should build some kind of 'flagging' feature so people can report bad actors. Then we could add a warning that bothering HN users illegitimately will land them in the bad dog box on HN.