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Comment by psim1 | Hacker News Reader

At this point when I receive a note from a recruiter, I let them know I need to know the name of the firm (not "top firm in your field"), the full job description, and the compensation range. If they do not provide that, we are wasting each others' time and I will not correspond further. I understand that third party recruiters don't want to give away some information so that applicants won't end-run and apply directly to the firm. But, look at the job market. Games are not going to work right now.

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Recruiter emails are so generic that you can do this automatically! https://blog.waleedkhan.name/detect-recruiter-spam/

It's actually saved me a lot of time and led to several high-quality conversations with recruiters since then, which I would have missed out on otherwise.

Why do you need to know the firm name at that phase?

For me, in case it’s Oracle. For others, they have other companies they’d rather not work for. Some here don’t want to work at Amazon; others not at Facebook; others not at Google…

It also ends the BS of recruiters who don’t have any listings at all and just want to have engineers they can blindly pitch to companies, hoping they can score a low-effort placement.

What is wrong with Oracle? I have worked here for almost 20 years and love it.

Probably ethical reasons.

I can’t comment on how working internally in Oracle is, but between many of its products and how they do business, they tend not to be well liked in the tech scene and people will voice their discontent. See also: Facebook/Amazon and defense contractors.

    s/Oracle/Google

The ethics of all these companies are debatable. As a customer, my relationship with Google sure has burned me the most times (moreso than even any human relationship I've had).

Between the frequent cloud outages, product cancellations and rollbacks, secret government deals (project Maven) and the creepy privacy aspects fundamental to their bottom line. IMO, Big G takes the cake!

My googler friends except those totally cuffed by golden dollars have largely already moved (now xoogers).

(Anecdotally, they also broadly seem happier, less stressed, and more fulfilled post-/gpart-um.)

Everyone has their preferences.

Ours differ and that’s ok.

> What is wrong with Oracle? I have worked here for almost 20 years and love it.

I know a lot of people that work at Oracle, and by all accounts they enjoy the environment and have quality peers. I also have been involved in dealing with renegotiating an Oracle contract at a customer of Oracle's. After that experience not only will I never work for Oracle, I will never again do business with Oracle as long as I live. No other company I've ever engaged with has brought lawyers to a sales conversation, but Oracle loves their lawyers.

Anecdotally, I have heard horror stories of people running up huge sums of licensing fees without realizing it, and they getting charged/sued later.

So I can look into the company myself before I see if it's worth wasting either persons time

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