Hacker News Reader

Comment by gknoy | Hacker News Reader

In an all-volunteer military, I think (based on talking to friends who were in the services) the prevailing attitude is that they want to find people who genuinely want to be there. They don't want to waste taxpayer dollars on sending you to boot camp, etc, only to have you wash out because you can't cut it, or to have you be a Crappy Soldier because you don't believe in the mission 100%.

View on HN

Recruiters literally don't care about this at all, the only thing they care about is making their numbers. Here's a story: recruiters in our command who failed to get any recruits in a given period were stood in front of the group in their dress blues and had powdered donuts thrown at them for "rolling a zero." Like most beauracratic organizations, failure to meet metrics is treated harshly, making the recruiter's goals less altruistic than you imagine.

That said, do you expect Google or Facebook to hire recruiters who don't have sales or recruiting backgrounds? Plenty of software developers end up in their jobs after having been approached by recruiters, why does military recruiting have to be fundamentally different?

Because programmer recruiters are searching for intelligent talented people, people who can walk out if they don't like the job. Military recruiting is capturing suckers, and signing them onto to multi-year contracts.

That's a remarkably bigoted thing to say.

Some of the most remarkable people I've ever met have served in the military. Far from being "suckers" they are people who felt a deep desire to serve the country in some capacity.

I know at least two people personally who signed up in the Army immediately after 9/11 knowing full well that they would likely be sent to serve in wartime. One of them didn't come back. He was in his 20's.

I'm going to suggest to you that you consider your audience much more carefully. I enlisted in the Navy and later graduated from Harvard with a degree in Computer Science. I can assure you that I didn't feel like I got suckered into anything.

Military recruiters aren't looking for suckers. I think you are misrepresenting the kinds of people that enter the military.

That isn't a representative description of most recruits. It sounds like your sample size is too small and not representative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com