#ycomb

Sometimes no matter how smart you are. You end up still making bone headed moves. 

For example Andrew Chen well accomplished and talented entrepreneur as you can see here. What!? He's so great. What could have he possibly done that was so bone headed? Well he isn't the only one guilty of this; just the straw that broke the camels back. Sorry Andrew.

It's become fashionable to hate on Hacker News as of late. Most regulars attribute the decrease in quality to the increasing popularity of the site. The more people read and post, the lower the quality of the posts becomes. It's just law of averages. That's another story. Still a great site don't get me wrong.

However, how do you reconcile solicited bacn from people who don't care enough to get your name right.

Now the past couple of weeks I have been receiving emails from SV saying different things like Found you via YC News and googled for you- what are you up to these days?

Good question: But what I am more interesting in answering is WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I know what you think you are doing, getting the attention of talented and invovled developers. 

Here is the latest email that started this blog post.

Hi mahdiyusuf,

You have a new message from Andrew Chen:

Found you via YC News and googled for you- what are you up to these days? (a quick intro from me: I'm based in the Bay Area and was most recently an Entrepreneur-in-residence for Mohr Davidow Ventures, a $2B venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley: http://andrewchenblog.com/about/) I'm starting up a company in Palo Alto, CA with a YCombinator alum, and backed by Marc Andreeesen (creator of the internet browser) and the investors for Skype/MySQL/Heroku/etc. I'm putting together a team here, and I wanted to know if you'd be interested or if there are any developers that you'd recommend we speak to? We're wanting to talk to talented people from all over and have done visas, relocation, etc., to make it work. (The idea is related to a new form of blogging- we're on a Rails/MySQL stack and doing some really interesting metrics and A/B testing work. Happy to talk more about it) Should we talk more? Or any recommendations for people we should speak to? Best, Andrew

Did the email make me feel noticed? No.

Did it make me want to work for you? No. 

Did it get my attention? Yes.

In a positive way? No.

Will I pass this on? No.

People who are looking for talent, need to take a step back and ask themselves, would someone they think is talented respond to a clearly automated email? How would thier current developers feel about hiring tactics? Take a second to think what they would react to. Interest in who they are and what they are about. I recieve alot of email from people online. If they are sincere and asking for something I am more than welcoming. But not like this, you didn't even offer me a complimentary sexual enhancement drug.