
A recruiter sent me a message in code. I fixed it - riebschlager
https://github.com/riebschlager/linkedin-recruiter-email
======
TamDenholm
This feels to me like when you're a teenager and your parents try to be cool
around your friends but it only makes you more embarrassed and want nothing to
do with them.

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dcsommer
There's a great German word for this exact feeling: fremdschämen.

~~~
mastermindxs
Is that pronounced "friend shaming"?

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kafkaesq
_ˈfʀɛmtˌʃɛːmən_ , or if you will: "FREMT-shay-men". (You need to gurgle a bit,
or at least hint at gurgling, when doing the 'R', now).

However you pronounce it -- I find it hard to have any kind of empathy at all
for recruiters (internal or external), and hence, can't quite imagine myself
"feeling a sense of shame for them in their place" (per the generic
translation).

~~~
superplussed
I don't see an 'R' in there?

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amorphid
When I was a recruiter learning to code, I posted a personal's ad written in
SQL on Craigslist. Ended up going out on a date with a DBA :) She was a
falconer, and we took her hawk out to hunt crows.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Wow. It is hard to do that in a way that doesn't come off like... this thing.

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amorphid
In grad school I took a class on creativity from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi[1].
He described a creative idea as something that stands apart from other ideas
in the same basket.

Think of a large pile of plain ol' red bricks. Now show that pile ask 100
people who know nothing about bricks the question "what can yo do with this
pile of bricks?" If 99 people say "build a worker computer by <brick-to-
computer-process>", and 1 person says "build a house", then "build a house" is
the most creative answer in that sample.

Writing a SQL ad that was basically just a simple query using SELECT, FROM,
WHERE. If 100 SQL writers wrote an ad, I don't think mine would have been all
that creative, using the definition mentioned above. But as the only SQL-
flavored ad in the personals section, it stood out as creative :)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-
Discovery-...](https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-
Invention/dp/0062283251)

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Yes. However, there is a difference between creative and good: Most recruiter
emails don't look like what OP got. But that doesn't make that one good.

Yours seems to have been good.

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bryanrasmussen
jokes on the coder, that's actually written in recscript, a little known
scripting language with a sort of C like syntax targeting Microsoft's old
ActiveScripting framework.

The Document object is one of the 7 special objects available in the language
(others: Resource [every other special object is an instance of Resource],
Sheet, Calendar, Sound, Presentation, Database, Browser). Since there isn't
any use of the Create Document statement before usage I'm guessing this is
after version 2.14 of the language in which Create was dropped as unnecessary
(a bit of syntactical sugar).

Anyway Document instantiates a Microsoft Word object and saves it to recscript
Documents folder automatically, all text inside of it is indexed, so you can
also do stuff like Resources.find("you’fe killing me! Contact me because I
desire this");

By the way the recscript code editor which provided an advanced code execution
environment to develop in (something like JsFiddle only years prior) also
supported open and close parenthesis.

IIRC the open and close parenthesis had special semantic meaning in the
language.

~~~
foota
Wow, really? I wasn't able to find any reference to this online.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
...Poe's Law strikes again.

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AdeptusAquinas
Spelling mistake on line 43 of the revised code: 'and' should be 'an'. That's
just sloppy.

I am working with a french developer right now (English second language) who
is really good, but peppers his code with minor grammatical or spelling
errors. He is slowly driving me insane and doesn't know it :D

~~~
riebschlager
Fixed!

Man. Having my code looked at by HN (even if it's a joke) feels like one of
those dreams where you show up to school in your underwear.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I'm barely a developer, and I'm in highschool.

I'm so used to getting told I'm an idiot that I don't even react anymore.

~~~
sqeaky
The secret is that we are all idiots. Some just refuse to recognize it and act
like jerks because of it. None of us actually "know" most of what we know.

It's unprofessional to start calling names. It's generally uncouth to even
start the argument unless you have really strong evidence and can back off
when that proves insufficient. Don't be bothered when they don't have the
evidence to back it up, but when they do have the evidence fix whatever caused
them say it and keep some evidence.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Exactly.

My rule is that if someone calls me out on being wrong, I'll argue, and do my
best to support my point. If they provide a better argument, than I'll
concede.

Because if you can't admit you're wrong, you'll never learn anything.

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KirinDave
I think the nested while loops are trying to capture the logic that they won't
leave you alone without trying at least twice.

Sadly the do-while loop structure is largely lost on modern developers.

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tyingq
Tried fixing it so it would run, and the hardest bit was recognizing that the
double-quotes weren't actually double-quotes, but rather these two characters:
“ ”

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shortstuffsushi
I may have asked this here before, or perhaps elsewhere... but why do these
characters exist? "Smart" quotes end up breaking things for me so frequently,
I've never actually wanted them in any case I can think of. Same goes for
en/em dashes. I literally spent a day and a half trying to track down an issue
less than a month ago, only to realize as I got to the point of inspecting
bytes that I wasn't looking at a regular dash (and incidentally that the SDK I
was interacting with doesn't support extended characters).

~~~
robin_reala
Non-‘smart’ quotes (aka typewriter quotes) exist only because space on
typewriter keyboards was limited. If we should get rid of any double-quotes
then it would be " which has no semantic meaning (unlike “ and ” which open
and close a quotation, and ″ which among other things is the unit mark for
inches).

~~~
AnimalMuppet
" has semantic meaning _in code_ , whereas “ and ” have semantic meaning _in
text_. If you're a coder, you want " and only ". You especially don't want
"helpful" software that thinks you should want text quotes, and tries to fix
them for you.

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throwaway2016a
More accurate title would be "I code reviewed it"... I don't see a working
fixed script anywhere.

Edit: I stand corrected. For some reason I thought that was the only file in
the repo. It's been a long week but I have no excuse.

~~~
kevan
There's more than just a readme in the repo:

[https://github.com/riebschlager/linkedin-recruiter-
email/blo...](https://github.com/riebschlager/linkedin-recruiter-
email/blob/master/recruiter-email.js)

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praptak
"Clever" messages in code were clever back in... actually they never were.

~~~
mysterydip
That might be part of the use case, though: removes non-techy people from the
use of code, and removes techy-people-who-dont-need-me because it's a lame
attempt to be clever, helping to narrow the recruiter's net to people more
willing to work with them.

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qwertyuiop924
Sheesh. If you've got it, don't be afraid to show it. But do so cleanly. Not
with something like this

And if you don't have it, than don't bother trying: you're trying to hire
those who do: doing this doesn't make you look smart.

Also, use \<newline> to keep your code at 80 columns. I actually don't care if
it's exactly 80, but excessively long lines are a pain to read.

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quinnftw
You would think someone that works at LinkedIn, a company that likely
employees hundreds (thousand(s)?), of engineers would have this proof read
before sending it off to potential applicants. This is a real turn off.

~~~
riebschlager
To be clear, this was a recruiter ON LinkedIn, not a recruiter FROM LinkedIn.

~~~
quinnftw
OH! Haha my mistake, that wording is naturally ambiguous.

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vinayan3
It could be the code was sloppy on purpose to illicit a response from you.

~~~
riebschlager
That's a good point. Maybe this was a test. Maybe he'll write me another
message saying, "Well done, you passed. You may now have this entry-level
developer position that is completely wrong for you and matches none of your
skills or interests."

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taurath
When does someone make RecruiterEmail EnterpriseEdition?

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MichaelBurge
Google docs will capitalize keywords in your code if you don't disable it. I
haven't tried it, but I imagine they ruin your indentation too.

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dabber
If any one wants a bunch of emails from curious HNers the domain the script
addresses the email to is unclaimed.

supertechcoderhirepeople.com

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TheCapn
Didn't he miss a closing brace with the While-While-If structure and only
ending with two closing braces?

~~~
Fjolsvith
Yes, I noticed that too.

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gshulegaard
Just curious, but why does capital "If" make you think of Python?

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riebschlager
Hmm. I said the snake case made me think of Python. The capital "If" just made
me think "Microsoft Outlook really insists that you capitalize things."

Edit: Oh! I just re-read that sentence. Yeah, I can see why you thought that.
I'll fix it. :)

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andrewvijay
They better recruit him

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mrkabuki
What a shit piece of code. Recruiters should stop trying to be cool

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akhilcacharya
"How do you do my fellow developer"

