GitHire Swamped After Promising 5 Hire-Worthy Programmers for $1k

GitHire is the sleaziest, scammiest spam setup I've come across in a long time. It shocks me that it's treated with legitimacy by the New York Times. Additionally, it saddens me to see so many people uncritically praising the idea as if it was anything other than a spam house.<p>GitHire does nothing more than scrape GitHub profiles and spam users with unsolicited junk mail -- regardless of the users's qualifications or desire to be recruited. It's spray-and-pray spam and companies wishing to keep their respect among developers would do well to avoid them. Any company willing just resort to spam is neither a company I'd want to work for nor a company I'd wish to be a customer of.

They were practically begging my co-workers and I to interview. They were offering $10 Amazon gift cards for an interview, which was just insulting. It wasn't even the amount; it turned what could have been a good fit into a cheap business transaction.<p>Here's how I saw it: If I invited you to dinner, it would be considered a nice gesture. But what if I offered you $10 to come to my house for dinner? It changes everything.<p>I feel bad for the company, who we blamed for the "stunt". Turns out, the company had no knowledge they were doing that.

These guys are spammers, there is no way around it.<p><a href="http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githirecom-is-spammer.html" rel="nofollow">http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githirecom-is-spammer.html</a><p>Here is my post about an HN post that they <i>deleted</i> after people started ripping into them:<p><a href="http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githire-spam-again.html" rel="nofollow">http://lookfirst.com/2012/01/githire-spam-again.html</a><p>Please make them go away. Mark all emails from them as spam. Do not buy their services. Do not respond to their emails.

Seems like hype. This page <a href="http://githire.com/job_board" rel="nofollow">http://githire.com/job_board</a> shows only 19 job requests and only 3 intros made so far. Also if these intros are made by programmatically scraping emails on github, then they could be in some trouble for violating spam laws.

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Sounds like businesses can smell a deal a mile away.<p>I thought normal recruiter practice was some percentages (10%, 20%?) of a hire's first year pay. So, like $10,000 to $20,000.<p>If you can get an interview with a potential employee for one <i>tenth</i> of that... <i></i>and<i></i> you know these people are famous in some nerd circles (buying your company more geek cred)... it's a deal.

Seriously how badly are they using the gitHub API, or scraping. Because if I find my profile. (I'm not listed in my area "Edinburgh", even though people with a lower score are.) and on my profile the projects are so severely out of date it's embarrassing.<p>Update: In my opinion, even though its not for "Hiring", <a href="http://coderwall.com" rel="nofollow">http://coderwall.com</a> does a way better job. Perhaps they should up their game and do what gitHire is doing - but properly.

The quote at the end made my hair stand on end:<p><i>"Top programmers are like a race car. Once you get them you don't want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can."</i>

A snippet:<p>“Top programmers are like a race car,” he said. “Once you get them you don’t want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can.”<p>It is a little off topic, but I think comments like this give me an idea of what it feels like to be objectified, like a woman might be in American media. I'm only now realizing that's why the "rock star" or "race car" label makes me feel so shitty. From Wikipedia:<p>"Some feminists and psychologists argue that such objectification can lead to negative psychological effects including depression and hopelessness, and can give women negative self-images because of the belief that their intelligence and competence are currently not being, or will never be, acknowledged by society."<p>Now, I know this is only my career and not my body, but in spite of myself I get intimidated by all these C-suites looking for such hyperbolically able and single-minded individuals I start worrying about if I can cut it. If I will be recognized for anything except my ability to program.<p>I'm not comparing this problem to objectification of women in scope, and I'm not saying this is all-consuming my life or anything. It is far from that, but something about the "race car" statement brought this into focus for me. I don't want to be collected like race cars or Pokemon by some dipshit.<p>This was not intended to troll, I just wanted to share my realisation about being compared to expensive/flashy stuff.

This article is in the print edition of the New York Times with the headline "<i>A New Resource for Hiring Programmers Has Become Entirely Too Successful.</i>"<p>GitHire must have some good PR.

And this is surprising how? Great to hear they are being successful though. $200/lead is probably an order of magnitude too low though.

Did they get permission from Github to scrape their website for the content they have put up?<p>From the terms of service:<p>4. You must not modify, adapt or hack the Service or modify another website so as to falsely imply that it is associated with the Service, GitHub, or any other GitHub service.<p>5. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Service, use of the Service, or access to the Service without the express written permission by GitHub.<p>Although I guess if the GitHire guys never used Github they aren't bound to those terms.

The NYTimes and the WashPost are probably gearing up to get Congress to raise the guest worker quotas again, after the election. They need a lot of "supply and demand and capital mobility don't work anymore" stories. Just raise wages and labor adjust to the incentives. Most of this new stuff is not a labor supply problem, it's a vision and management problem. "If I could just hire the best engineers for real cheap , then ...". yeah yeah right.

I have no idea why companies that suddenly become wildly successful without press, start to go out and make themselves public, hence waking up every smart guy in the game. Keep a low profile and milk it, maan.

Here is what I do not get:<p>1. Recruiters expect me to spend my free-time at their disposal to use my dev contacts for them? My dev contacts remain my dev contacts because they know that if I ever turn over a contact to a 3rd party I do some review of the opportunity to see if its a scam or recruiter bs first and only turn over contacts to that 3rd party if they are a founder, cop-founder, or the actual ,manager the person will work under.<p>2. To me relationships are formed over a good meal and a good drink, no offense to you HN'ers but that is what it comes down to. If someone wants to recruit me than consider taking me out for a meal. Its not necessarily the cost of the meal, its the fact that you took sometime to spend on forming a relationship with me.