Comment by AndreyErmakov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndreyErmakov | Hacker News Reader

Because hiring is akin to dating and therefore it suffers from the same problems:

1) It's mostly about subjective impressions and often weird ideas of what a suitable date/candidate must be. There are no official rule books or guidelines about how to proceed. It's not about hard skills and efficiency, it very much revolves around soft skills, presentation abilities and invisible chemistry.

2) More often than not both parties in dating/hiring aren't serious about conducting a transaction and getting to a serious business. It's about meeting new people, hanging out, checking the pulse of the job market but no more. Misrepresenting oneself, one's abilities/features and intentions is the norm with both dates/candidates(companies), which leads to a lot of frustration and bad feelings, keeping the success rate of activities in the both fields rather low.

Different industries, similar problems. And for the both of them no technological/software solution in sight.

P.S. See how "candi-date" is linguistically just a particular case or subset of "date". Just another validation of the point.

> P.S.

I expect this is a joke, but even if this were true, I don't think it'd be a valid 'validation of the point.'

Incidentally, "candidate" is not a subset of "date." It's from Latin candidatus, "white-robed." Date is ultimately from Latin datus/dare, "to give."

It's not that much of a joke, more of a curiosity, if you choose to look at both words from a certain angle. I realize that their etymology might be different, but in the end of the day their spelling has become close and the concepts they denote have also developed certain commonalities.

lol, so true.

I'm living polyamor for about 5 years now. This has forced me to really dive into this whole "how do relationships really work" thing. More fluctuation, more partners etc. I learned so much.

Suddendly, after a few years, I also found that "work" is like having "relationship".

Sad thing is, I found most parallels with monogamous relationships and not so much with polyamory.

Anyway, the biggest thing I learned was, that employers are like potential partners. They have some wishes about the job/relationship and these are (globally seen) completely arbitary.

Some partners pick by attractiveness, some by child-wish, some by long-term support. Some even just by sexual preferences. But most of them by stuff they heard somewhere. They don't even know what they really want and end up in years of relationships with people they don't really like.

Same goes with employers. They want you because you can solve some dumb puzzles or because you're cheap, or whatnot.

Point is, if you're not in a hurry to get a job and are not bound to a place (or can work remote) you will eventually meet someone who thinks it's okay to give your money for your work, haha.

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