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.

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.

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.

Those people don't think they're spamming. They're caught up in their own hype and think they're offering the opportunity of a lifetime -- even though they don't know what they want, exactly.

A good general tip is that every email should begin with a "bottom line, up front" (BLUF).

Tell people what you want, need, or recommend first. Then provide supporting details.

I'll always be grateful to HN because I got my previous job thanks to it and it was the best thing ever, but the spam thing here is absolutely true. I've getting many of ones that send a calendly link for a "collaboration partnership" with a really bogus description and from email addresses that reek to spam farms. They will send you a following email with a "Hello?" a couple hours of so after sending the first one.

The previous month also got a couple from "Mark M, the founder of kinect.io" about a "quick thought about your resume" that just sounded like they will get you into a pyramid scheme or something.

Mourning my dog, unemployed, and all I get is spam/scam emails when trying to get a job, is not nice at all.

By some stroke of super-luck, my entry in the "recruiter spam E-mail list" has my first name wrong! So it's super easy to tell which unsolicited "opportunities" are fake. They all start with "Hi, [incorrect name], I am reaching out because..." And yes, for the last 2 years or so, 100% of these unsolicited E-mails include my fake name.

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

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.

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:!"

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

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.

Here's my personal filtering for emails like this https://github.com/evanpurkhiser/gmailctl-personal/blob/5eff...

I've yet to experience OP's anecdote but I've had analogous experiences with employers. I don't do the HN threads so this is all from my Github with considerable side project activity albeit nothing serious; I don't even have the stars to show for it. Their template is

"Dear <name derived from GH profile>,

I've seen your recent activity on <project which does indeed have a lot of recent activity> and it has caught my interest. I am a bigwig at a company specializing on developer-experience for the Go toolchain..."

It's all downhill from there. At that point, I would either realize that, hey, the project you mentioned doesn't use Go. Heck I don't use Go. Or, if the second sentence was still relevant, the next few sentences is nothing but either a thinly-veiled attempt to make me use their product or answer a survey. I really wouldn't have been opposed to this if only it was actually relevant to me; unfortunately I don't think you can come up with a boolean search query that better qualifies your leads.

Ten-ish years ago when I got cold emails because of my GH activity, it was at least a lot more relevant to me.

As OP said, it's not really a big deal but it compounds. My worse was three such spam in a week and it made me contemplate taking the project private.

I get lots of spam/scams after posting to Who Wants to be Hired. Posting here is not really going to fix it, it's just bots. I use a new temporary email whenever I post in those threads so I can tell my mail server to reject them.

(But honestly I don't think I'm going to bother posting anymore since I haven't gotten a single non-spam lead at all from those threads.)

Marketers ruin everything ;)

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

Laughed way too hard

Sorry you're going through this Ilya. I hope things improve for you and your family.

As an aside, I'm kinda curious what the intent of these spammers is. Do they really think they're going to get a rockstar employee using these tactics? They must know these methods aren't effective.

Yeah I received a couple of those telling me that my CV "is making recruiters read you as broad full-stack read" and that they'll "be glad to talk through your resume and see whether I can help".

I'll need to figure out a filter for these.

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.

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"

I've made a couple of friends from similar positions in that thread talking about projects and have been the occasional good samaritan reaching out to those whose resume / site is down or locked for some reason. It's not all bots, but it certainly is annoying. Actually, HN has had the highest signal to noise ratio I've seen so far for employment.

I heard it is whole next level of hell if you also had a kid at this point. Burn rate is way higher, and giving up is not an option.. because you know, kid.

Spam is one thing, another is scammer trying to access my machine (btw the same one hacked axios later)

https://trysound.io/try-not-to-get-scammed-while-looking-for...

AI and their armies of agents has been making the job search much much worse for both employers and employees - the reason is simply, spamming becomes extremely cheap and easy - sometimes it's literally one prompt away.

Find offline channels to connect with potential employers in person is your best bet, IMO. Good luck job search!

Automated outbound is a real problem now. I think LinkedIn actually has a pretty good model in which it costs money to send a message if the other party does not reply. Lucky for them of course! Nice to be able to collect 100% of the value of a needed incentive structure!

the particularly cruel part you're targeting the people who explicity said they need help, then using their hope against them. the cost of sending is zero. the cost of recieving isn;t

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

If your only motive is profit, then the cruelest actions are the most efficient, because you don't have to compete with people interested in morality.

It sucks.

Targetted automated spam, most likely written by an LLM you say. By any chance do you see the text "agentmail" anywhere in the headers/body of that email?

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

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

Data mining is a perpetual race to the bottom. Undoubtably the LLM generated messages come from backdooring chipotle bot

Hacker News points-to-karma ratio (746:173) has been feeling pretty broken for a while

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

I have recently begun starting emails with "human here"...

The Internet will be the Internet. Expect it to get worse if anything.

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.

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

It's just spam.

I once made the mistake to reply one of those threads with a public email address, it's now an incubator for AI-generated spam. And not just slop text: now we're getting full vibe-coded HTML UI..

Example: https://bsky.app/profile/francoisbest.com/post/3mhq6znfcxk2d

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

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.

Best of luck to you, I hope you find something soon.

yes, i got an email as well for a guy who built like a platform and honestly I'm not interested in wasting my time in your project.

I got an email yesterday morning that sounded like a lead. The usual, "we're impressed by your profile, would like to talk about an opportunity, blah blah blah"

Scheduled a meeting, expecting a recruiter call. Got a salesman trying to pitch me an automated application service, that charges $50 per application and something like 10 weeks salary on placement

Told the guy to pound sand

Another company that does this is ladders. You'll see a posting, use it to apply, and then they'll black hole responses to your application unless you pay up. They'll also spam the ever loving shit out of your inbox

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.

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.

I got a very similar email too.

Good luck, Ilia. I understand what you are going through, but I think that there will be an exit from this (not sure, though, because I don't know the whole story).

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.

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.

Bots are rampant more than ever. I got my own share of spam asking me for a job.

I used to have in my profile "contact me at $USERNAME@example.com" and I started getting emails from AI companies selling their slop, to address username@example.com

"Internet is not dead yet, it just smells funny"

This is not the place for this.

Also, grow a thicker skin, I mean that in a compassionate way. It should take you much more than an email to wear you down. Things of the things that you have that have value, instead, that helps people go through hard times.

It's just the state of the market. Everyone is hustling, even the hustlers. The big corporations sucked all the money out of the market, didn't pay right taxes and we are just left to fend for ourselves.

This happens when governments stop regulating, enforcing the laws, start colluding and corruption investigations are not even on any agenda.

Do employers even read that thread? Genuinely curious.

The product need here is an LLM 'answering machine' that accepts emails, determines if the email is spam or a valid email or something in between. If It's in between it could say something like 'Hello, I am [user]s email filtering service. I think your email might be automatically generated, can you please tell me why [user] would need to see this? and make a judgement based on the response.

No spammer will manually reply to that, some AI spambots might, but it should be apparent to the LLM that's what is happening.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Hey Ilia! I don't think these emails are going to go anywhere. People who have decided to take on these jobs are not going to be dissuaded by your post. That being said, there is worse. There are predators out there who will hunt people in desperate positions (ie: ask for money to place you in a company, offer a fake job, etc..), so it can always get worse.

I'd focus on getting any job/reducing expenses and figuring out the debt angle (interest keeps running). Good luck.

Name and shame.

> been unemployed for 6 months

Slightly unrelated, but years ago I went in similar situation, and at around the same months I was in the same mindset, anxious and frustrated, but months after that while still unemployed, something snapped in my brain and I just stopped caring, kinda fuck it all, despite start getting offers and employers are reaching out, I used to ignore some and replying late to others, and when I got the offers I was being too critical about them.. eventually things went back to normal but I have no idea what was that, the confidence and the risk taking were off the charts!

Just hang in there, it will get better, that’s how life works, like a sinusoidal wave, ups and downs.

Honestly, HN has been horrendous for hiring.

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

I have a bunch of free tools I'm building to try to get another startup off the ground: https://deepbluedynamics.com. I'm not evil or wrong for putting it here or other places. I'm just as hungry as the next developer, and will do whatever it takes to make this work. All of that is not to say I lack empathy, but instead just say that empathy on the Internet is a very odd thing indeed.

I very much hope you find your passion soon and here's to great success with robots and cooking!

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.