That's horrific for people to even think of doing that and I'm sorry that's happened to you. You have my condolences. Too many people in tech are so utterly shameless, unfortunately.

I got one of those too, from "Alya", which seems to be an LLM-based tool the creator describes as his daughter.

Beyond the usual rudeness of spam, that's a little creepy.

I've gotten at least three, and I haven't replied to those threads in a while. Safe to say it's a problem.

So wait, are they trying to sell something to unemployed people?

my sincere(!) sympathies, but realistically this won't reach anyone relevant. best of luck in the job search.

I've been getting a lot of job spam in my email the past week or two, not sure if it's from here or Github mostly.

I got a recruiter that is apparently AI. Get Clera is the name. I already banned their domain to spam.

If you are coming to me as AI, I will ban/mark spam you. Period.

I just started getting a barrage of these last month. They're just scraping those threads. I don't think there's much to do about it. These aren't "real" hn folks that actually participate here.

You can filter a few of these by asking that they include some specific word in the subject. These spammers won't, and you can just delete those.

Name and shame.

As a general rule, if someone ever posts any kind of career troubles on any platform, the only correct responses should contain sympathy or a relevant career opportunity. Anything else is so callous.

Hang in there Ilia, you're not the only one hurting, and don't apologize for venting. Most of us in the HN community are far more supportive.

The primary use of AI seems to be spam. It's so gross.

My email is filled with junk from cybersecurity "experts" telling me that my open source project is "very compromised" and that they will gladly reveal to me what the issue is, if I commit to paying them a bug bounty. I get at least a few every week. I hate them, but I feel like we are well past the point where in any place where there is money to be made, the majority of cold outreach will be from semi-personalized AI agents. You just have to accept that most of the time your get contacted by someone, it is likely not a human.

Have you gotten the "hey, wanna be a North Korean proxy?" offer yet?

Yeah, recruiters already were complete assholes in general, now they can scale their cuntiness..

Not to troll but what is a "forced immigrant"?

Another trend I've seen is what I would term .. bottom-feeder ... services trying to take advantage and exploit people's hardship. AI generated e-mails that then do things like this (and this is only one of these kinds of things I've received):

"Right now, we are running a $35,000 API Hackathon. If you build the best tool on our data, we acquire your codebase for up to $20k.

But here is the real hook for your job search: To get API access, you must pass our Architectural System Design Audit. If your submission clears our technical bar, you don't just get an API key—you get instant VIP access to our job pipeline, and I will personally bypass HR to pitch your profile to hiring engineering leaders."

a) Written by AI [LLM shibboleths all over it]

b) Getting people to do interviews for things that aren't jobs.

c) Trying to get fire-sale "purchase" on people's IP assets / work?

d) Acting like a recruiter, but actually gatekeeping for jobs that... may not exist.

People are using the HN hiring forum posts to produce these.

Be careful out there people.

I was once suggested creating a 'fake job posting' to promote my startup, didn't do it for the same reason you described. Also the reason I have deep hatred for operators trying to exploit jobseekers or the ones trying to scam already indebted people.

Honestly, could just stop at "please don't spam people". Good luck on your hunt OP, hope you find something soon.

Marketers ruin everything ;)

I'm still getting this sort of spam to an address I posted here 5+ years ago. Recently it intensified, which leads me to believe it's automated.

I guess we can officially add a third entry and, keeping the alphabetical order, make it: "death, spam and taxes"

Ordinary, non-elite jobseekers (at least in the US) NEED a job or they will be homeless. If you want somebody to stop asking for a job, give them a job.

Regrettably, Linkedin doesn't let you begin your display name with an emoji any more. I always enjoyed/despaired at the many cold call recruitment messages coming in from obvious bots reading "Hi :beer:!"

A whole lot of bullshit artists and noise out here now and it's frustrating/demoralizing. You're absolutely right to be venting.

Best wishes and hope things work out soon.

> I am naturally an extremely optimistic person, but boy is energy on the low by now.

That's what they are relying on, and that's why they will never stop. You're asking sociopaths to be empathetic at the one time when their sociopathy pays off big - when people are desperate.

This is a side-quest for post "AGI".

By the way it's also the same way around with "Who is hiring" threads, tried posting a job there and my email just instantly filled with all sorts of letter-slop, hundreds of emails which are infeasible for a single human looking for a job candidate to sort out, some of them are just generated to match the job description, but it's completely unrelated experience listed in the CV, some of them are just straight spam promoting some yet another AI shit. They still keep coming to this day, few months after posting in that thread. It's very hard to look for a job, or look for a candidate nowadays by using the public channels where you just leave your email in the open thanks to the wicked automations some highly disrespected individuals are eager to keep setting up. I maybe received one or two letters written by the real people. Who is hiring and Who wants to be hired seems to be perpetually doomed by AI, good luck to you Ilia.

The other side of this isn't sunshine and roses either.

Imagine you're a reasonably talented developer and just can't seem to break into a good job. You've been working delivery or something to make ends meet, and somebody finally offers a tech job. It isn't much, but your kids are hungry. You'll take it.

You show up, and it's everything the cynics here could have told you. Spamming people for money is the least of your worries. Whatever, at least you're actually programming, and maybe this is your chance to break into one of those mythical "good" jobs people keep talking about -- a stepping stone.

In an effort to impress, you figure out how to leveraging the HN who's hiring thread. It takes a bit of convincing for management to give you the time, but you're eager to prove yourself, and that enthusiasm is a bit infectious. Somebody signs off on the project.

It's a total flop though. You get zero conversions, nothing, nada. You've been spending the last week frantically debugging, getting more and more desperate as you realize what this means for your career prospects in a cutthroat environment like the one you're trying to appease.

As luck would have it, you stumble across this post today. Then the weight of your fuckup dawns on you. You spammed the "who wants to be hired" thread instead. Not fully yet recovered from the shock, you hear your boss call you over. "Do you have a minute to talk about something important?" There's a glint of orange on their desktop, and a pit sinks through the bottom of your stomach.

yesterday I got a phone call from a company wanted to send to my employer some k8s shit.

i have no decision power in the company i work for, plus I don't know where this guy took my number

AI agent sales has been a massive failure. Simple issues like its inability to distinguish a low quality lead from a completely wrong lead aren’t possible yet.

This isn’t agi. Or anything in the way to bring it.

We are in mass delusional state.

> Maybe add a skill to your Claude Code called “empathy”?

Laughed way too hard

I accidentally commented in the who is hiring thread rather than who wants to be hired and I immediately got a slew of automated emails (some of which blindly pasted some of my quickly-deleted comment into their greeting) on various time delays. Some multiple times within the month, even though my comment was deleted within about a minute.

This is terrible and needs to stop.

One of them even started blasting their identical message to about 8 different addresses at my mail server (careers@, talent@, jobs@, etc., all of which don't exist and I have never used) with stuff like "Would a 20-minute call next week make sense?". This is such ashamed pre-rejection shit that it betrays a near-zero level of confidence in their own ability. What employer wants someone like that? Employers want someone determined to make a difference, not someone who is groveling to avoid asking too much of you.

The internet will always be a potentially unfriendly place and you need to accept that instead of expecting it to magically change because spammers hurt your feelings. You mention that you are an entrepreneur as well, which makes me believe that you need to learn how to overcome your fear of rejection. Check out the book "Rejection Proof" by Jia Jiang.

Github-based spam has always been a problem but it feels like in recent months it has become worse. I keep getting e-mails about being "hand-picked" for new exciting jobhunting platforms - the e-mails of course are styled just like any page you get when you ask claude to "make me a moden html + css webpage".

The worst part of hustle culture is that what I believe to be 99% of the noise is:

* Stupid things that will never succeed

* From ignorant people just trying to make a quick buck, whom I want no involvement in

Nobody believes in your "spam every github e-mail account" jobhunting site. Thousands have spammed before you. You are nothing but noise.

My BASIC programming discord server gets weekly and sometimes daily "full stack developers" looking to sell their services to us.

It's just spam.