[drewcrawford]

I did not say that the hiring thread is a total waste of time for all involved, as it is clearly not. But when you solicit "So how has the hiring thread worked for you?" you are not within a mile of a representative sample.

One can make the very same argument that you made about this thread--the sort of people who are interested in the hiring thread are vociferously interested, as either employers or employees, their very livelihood and life satisfaction for years may substantially hang on a comment in that thread. If we are talking about articles that are colored with commercial self-interest or bias, that is the very definition. I would posit that there is a silent majority who are relatively satisfied with their current employment, who read a few comments to see if anyone is hiring to do orthographic drawing theory or NLP in Erlang or topology or [obscure area of research interest] and failing that alt-tab back to Vim to work on arbitrarily less exciting yet still interesting projects.

I don't necessarily disagree with you that it wasn't a particularly high-quality article, that we can do better. But I would not hold out the hiring thread as the example we should follow.