Signal to noise

part one
my frustration with the ‘recruiter’ side of the career search has reached a boiling point. i am getting really tired of being contacted by people who are only filling quotas and aren’t actually doing any independent thinking.

i received an email today from a recruiter, the gist is: “Thanks Bill! I’ll check on this and get back to you if I can set you up with a phone screen.”

my name happens to be Christopher, so i can of course see where the confusion came in, because my last name happens to be Bills. so, sure… perfectly understandable, if someone at 7-11 said ‘nice to see you Bill’ after glancing at my ID for cigarettes, i would roll with it.

but a recruiter is supposed to know as much as they can about the potential candidates because that is kind of, more or less exactly, their job.

how can i trust that you read through my resume and realize i have two bachelor degrees and seven years of professional linux administration ability? how can i trust that you know anything in depth about me, so you can judge where i fit best in your company?

if you can’t even be bothered to get my name right?

spam combat
when i worked at bay mills indian community, i did a lot of work combatting spam. it was really the only fun thing to do in the job, because the demands and stress level was so low. i still insist i hated working like that, but considering i was able to make enough money to get by and have the things i wanted, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be bored with work.

i did a lot of mitigation of poorly configured external mail servers, that caused issues with my customers. a customer would complain that an email hadn’t made it through, so i would refer to the logs, attempt to find the email in question and why we had blocked it.

most of the time it was thanks to a corporation having configured their outgoing mailserver to identify itself as ‘localhost’ or ‘localhost.localdomain’ and so forth. i’m not the only email provider on the planet that refuses mail from these misconfigured hosts. the reason is simple; if you allow these poorly configured servers to get away with successfully delivering mail by breaking protocol and generally considered best practices, you are a part of the problem.

i would add those hosts to our mail white-list, send a new email to the original sender, asking them to please re-send their original email, i had temporarily resolved the problem. then i would contact the point of contact i could find for that company, using whois or the website’s listed contact info, and inform them of the problem, and ask them to resolve it.

when adding the entries to the whitelist, i kept a date, so when i referred to it again, i would know how long we’d been allowing mail from a shit host, and remove it, to see if they had fixed it.

if they hadn’t fixed it, i wouldn’t whitelist them again, and wait for them to contact me.

i added some spam poison links to our homepage which would make web-robots crawl down an infinite path of links to an infinite supply of bogus email addresses. the addresses sometimes went to a honeypot to work to identify spammy hosts and email patterns, and improve spam detection.

i was noticing lately how, in gmail, i will get a slew of spam of one type, but as soon as i ‘delete forever’, that particular ‘pattern’ goes away, and the spam coming in is dramatically reduced. i was thinking that this probably means that gmail is intelligently using your decision as a user to delete-forever to indicate that they were correct in flagging that message, and could fully implement the heuristics the machines had learned about it.

i also presume this kicks back to the community as well, in addition to directly helping you. and i thought that was a really clever way of dealing with the problem of spam. once enough people flag a detected pattern as true spam, noone else will get it either.

why, when less than 5% of the spam is responded to, do we spend so much time worrying about and tackling these problems?

because those 5% or less respond to spam. the real percent is rather shocking, i’d wager it is close to 0.01%, and those people make spam so profitable, making it a pain in the ass for the rest of us. making us spend money and time to solve the problem of spam.

how is this different from recruiters spamming candidates?