Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gumptionary 1190 days ago
I've built one of these before and the devil is so very much in the details, but really even more in the context.

There's the easy stuff: "ninja" for example. Nobody, in the year 2023, should be using that word in a job post.

But then there's the hard stuff that really matters. If you want someone who has experience being a "white hat" hacker, that's perfectly alright, but if you want "white people only" well that's obviously bad. If you don't flag the latter you look like a joke, but if you flag every instance of the word "white" then it feels overbearing and like the tool isn't very smart.

I'm pretty sure these will never actually be useful on a superficial word-matching basis. They need to look at broader phrases and context.

And then there's the real problem that even if the tool helps the hiring manager / recruiter sweep their inbuilt biases under the rug to get better applicants, they're still the ones making the hiring decisions.

5 comments

I wouldn’t consider anything easy tbh, ninja is the name of quite a few libraries that are common enough for experience to be requested
One might reasonably be sharing a ninja-based build system in their tech stack?
Have you ever seen a job posting asking for white people only? At least in America that sounds highly unlikely.
I can already see the tweets of people making up ridiculous job ads which are perfectly "linted" while contain some wildly racist text. That'd be highly damaging for the tool, which is what OP is saying.
This happens far more often than you may want to believe. Either it's explicitly requested or it's somewhere in the recruiter notes.

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/zkh9pf/anyo...

> If you want someone who has experience being a "white hat" hacker, that's perfectly alright

Why is "white hat" hacker inherently used to mean "ethical" or "good"? Most normal people wear black hats.

In Old Western films the hero would often wear a white cowboy hat, the villain a black one.
You should not need to know about Old Westerns to participate in security. This sounds like great terminology to replace with explicit terms.
It's like saying you should not need to know about ancient Greece history to participate in marathon running. And the truth is, you don't. You can easily learn the present meaning of a word without fully understanding its etymology.

There are countless words and idioms that will make no sense when you're not familiar with them. You could consider these annoying, or you could consider these the interesting parts of a language.

I for one very much like words with interesting history.

Fair, but marathon doesn't have the additional association of "white = good, black = bad" which is, to say the least, somewhat insensitive given current events.

I'm aware that I'm moving the goalposts a little bit, or at least making them more explicit. Sorry? Just trying to voice explicitly why my (admittedly subjective) stylistic sense is going "Eh, this one is better off replaced by explicit terms".

Or you need to know the greek alphabet to deploy on AWS lambda. Or the history of lambda calculus.
I mean,one of the core competencies in (certain types of) security is bringing yourself up to speed on obscure technical systems you never heard of before. Familiarizing yourself with unfamiliar terminology is step 1.

If you can't figure out how to google white hat, how are you going to figure out what the FHBTYU (made up acronym) is in your tech stack?

Personally i find the explicit terms really cringy and seem to have been co-opted a bit by marketers. "Ethical hacker" has very different canotations than white-hat, to me.
Good news: you don't need to know about Old Westerns. You just need to know that white hat is good and black hat is bad.
> You just need to know that white hat is good and black hat is bad.

Yeah, anything that boils down to "you don't need to know about X, you just need to know that white X is good and black X is bad" is not a great look for technical terminology in the current context.

Oh. What's red hat then?

Seriously though, if learning the meaning of two (three if you throw in grey hat) terms is too difficult, never mind the rest of the requisite knowledge to meaningfully participate, you may want to consider an alternate area of study.

No ninjas? WTF?! Am I supposed to only hire pirates now? :-O
At least according to this tool, "rock stars" are still fair game. EDIT: never mind, I got it wrong. No rock stars either.
I have often wondered though how many coders worldwide are really comparable to a rock star, I guess in terms of standing out as a super creative outlier. So many rockstar wannabes out there in the wild world..
Linus is the only one I can think of given his level of job security. Maybe Woz, but I don't think he doesn't seem to be a professional coder today. Perhaps Stephen Wolfram. Everyone else seems much more disposable than even B-tier rock/pop stars, relatively speaking. Bill doesn't count given he likely hasn't touched any code himself since the 1980s.

I've heard of multiple language and framework designers who failed to score a job when it really should have been a slam dunk. There might be rockstars among the foot soldiers of tech, but virtually none outside of that.

The number may as well be zero. It's pure marketing crap.

Relatedly, no US Marines have ever defeated a lava monster with a magic sword.

Our David Lee Roth React/Redux guru recent left and we are looking for a Sammy Hagar to fill his shoes!
FELLOW HUMAN WHY ARE YOU YELLING?

NO PIRATES, ONLY ROBOTS, WHO ARE CLEARLY NOT HUMAN AS WE ARE.