Texas based programmer Hamza Khan was in for a rude shock when he received a curious job offer. The recruiter claimed he had seen Khan’s website and decided to send him an in-depth critique of it, and then tried to blackmail him into working for him. “He said if I did not email him, he would tell my boss and the rest of team. He is very knowledgable about me. I feel like this is a friend who is trolling me, or someone from this group, but i can’t be sure.”, Hamza Khan says.
The email is from a supposed architecture engineer called Jacob Worstell working at the anti-spam email company, Sharklasers. The email lists out all the problems with Khan’s website in bullet points, and is peppered with expletives. The approach used on the email seems to be on the lines of “negging”, a psychological dating technique where the person, uses backhanded compliments or mild insults to make the recipient want to prove their value to the deliverer.
Below is the email sent by the headhunter to Khan.
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Hello Hamza Khan,
I wanted to reach out to you about an opportunity at Sharklasers. We are looking for front-end developers that know jQuery and AngularJS. Our company is willing to sponsor individuals that sign a minimum 2 year employment contract with our company.
I came across your personal website in this repo:https://github.com/HackathonHackers/personal-sites. I took a good look into your personal website’s code, your Github profile, your repositories, repositories you have contributed to, and your resume, the companies you have worked for.
PLEASE READ ALL OF THE FOLLOWING AND THE NUMBERED POINTS BELOW: The details of our offer are at the bottom of this email. However, I would like you to know that your website is utter shit. I highly suggest you show this to your boss, or I will. When the company you work for only has 8 people on LinkedIn, it’s easy to let your company know you’re shit. But sometimes we like to hire shit and make those people gold.
#1 it’s a ripoff of a website by UHCodeRED [UHCodeRED/CodeRED-Fall-2015] on Github. I tool a look at your page’s source files to see if you actually know your shit, and all I had to do is search up some of the JS and found that it was the exact same code as that repo. After further inspecting your code it looks like you completely copied their code.
#2 “The Programmer You Never Knew You Needed”. What a fucking ignorant thing to say. Why the fuck would anyone want to employ you with that kind of an asshole attitude.
#3 “As you may have guessed, my name is Hamza Khan”. No shit.
#4 “I am a Computer Science student interested in technology.” You’re not a student according to your shitty resume.
#5 “… the mind blowing Oculus Rift.” The Oculus Rift isn’t mind blowing. Every developer knows it’s a joke how easy it is.
#6 “My Drive” Why the fuck is Drive red?
#7 “… drumming out a quality program”. Drumming? This isn’t band, and the quality of your programs is shit.
#8 “That is my drive.” Why is drive fucking red again? It looks like a damn hyperlink.
#9 “READY. SET. CODE!” Oh my fucking god shoot me now. Why the fuck is this even here.
#10 The fucking shadows in your text are FUGLY AS FUCK. I’m not designer, but wtf is this? 2003?
#11 CodeRed -> CodeRED
#12 “Made in Unity” why is Unity hyperlinked. People fucking know what it is or know how to use a search engine.
#13 “Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset and the LeapMotion Hand Controller.” Again, wtf is up with those hyperlinks.
#14 “… shoot at each other aiming to defeat the other”. Oh I thought they were shooting each other to show affection.
#15 “A Geofence is a point on a map with a circle around it.” No, that’s not what a Geofence is.
#16 “o Find locations near a user, that they never knew existed
GitHub” Why the fuck is this a lowercase “o”? Ever heard of a list? Why the fuck would I hire a developer if they don’t know how to use basic HTML.
#17 “For my part, I will be integrating the Oculus Rift and the LeapMotion devices for gameplay.” You will? So that means you didn’t do it? Also, if you really meant that you DID, you basically did fucking nothing for the project. Both are easy as fuck to implement, a highschooler could do it. Took a look at the commits as well. You did nothing.
#18 “We have devised a complex method of gameplay where the Oculus will only control the direction a player looks in” What bullshit. People in the tech industry aren’t stupid. We know it’s easy.
#19 “So far, the game is up and running.” This is literally the most impressive thing I’ve read on the site so far.
#20 “Currently working on adding Leap gestural support.” Never mind. It wasn’t impressive at all.
#21 “Unfortunately, for unknown reason Microsoft Azure will not deploy the project. Currently only works on localhost.” Why the fuck would you tell people that.
#22 You did 0% of the actual work for the Political Bias Predictor. I took a look at the commits.
#23 Oh and for Hence, you did nothing as well. Github doesn’t lie.
#24 “[email protected]” what a shitty email address. I wonder if it even works.
#25 “hamzakhan.org” wtf is up with your domain. Why the fuck is it .org? You’re not a fucking organization.
#26 I had to literally search your site for a resume. Why is it in the fucking contact section?
#27 “Bilingual” What languages? I want to know. I give no fucks that you’re bilingual unless the languages you speak are useful.
#28 “Computer Science graduate seeks entry level position”. Bad grammar, and holy fuck you scream “I’m a noob who wants to do nothing”
#29 “UHD – Houston, TX” UHD? 4K? Was your education just watching a fucking TV? I had to look it up to actually know what university it was.
#30 “[email protected]” this is a different email than the one you have on your site. What email am I supposed to reach you at?
#31 “Created content specific pages for website” How vague. You probably did nothing.
#32 “Redesigned aspects of the website” see #31
#31 “Revamped entire website” Oh you did? How? Using what? The entire site? See #31.
#32 “Created modules to increase customer sales and retention” wtf is a “module”? What modules? How did they increase sales and retention? By what percent did they increase? 0.0001% is technically an increase.
#33 “Web Developer” a.k.a. I have a high-school freshman level IQ and I know HTML, CSS, jQuery, and how to install WordPress plugins!
#34 “C++, C#, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java” Let’s be real, you probably don’t KNOW C++, C#, MySQL, and JavaScript. I see no good examples of knowing them in your Github repo. If you interviewed with our company (or any company), we’d test the shit out of you to see if you’re lying or not.
#35 “Web Frameworks: AngularJS, Bootstrap, jQuery,” jQuery isn’t a fucking framework. It’s a library. Know the fucking difference. Also, why is there a comma at the end? Proofread your fucking resume.
#36 The design of your resume is so terrible it makes me vomit in my mouth a little. Just make a fucking traditional resume or use a template.
#37 Oh and the design and content of your personal website actually made me vomit. If you can’t fucking design, then don’t. I’d rather read plain text than the shit you’ve created (from stolen work).
#38 “[email protected]” is the email on your Github. Thanks for letting the world know you’re lazy.
#39 I took a look at the SSL.com Org you have listed on your Github profile. LOL you’ve literally done nothing.
#40 I could go into your code on Github and tell you how shit it is, but I would rather not. It would be a complete waste of my time.
People like you are the reason Houston has such a shit developer community. My company keeps looking for people in Houston and we just get depressed as fuck. That’s why we mainly hire from Austin, the Valley, and New York. If I had to hire you for real, you’d get paid $2.40 an hour compared to my normal engineer’s salary of $45 an hour. There’s factory workers in China that are underage and starving that make more than you.
I looked up up on Facebook as well. In case you didn’t know, there’s a fuck ton of recruiters and company owners in Hackathon Hackers and its subgroups. We see the shit you guys post, and we keep two lists of names. Those worth hiring and those we avoid at all costs. I’ll let you guess which list you’re on.
All it took was enough searching on Facebook to find the posts you’ve made, and wow you shit-post a lot. Oh and hey! You shit post during business hours as well! I bet your boss loves that! Oh and look, you tried to actually help your company! Wow 50% off SSL Certificates! Except when I read the comment, you can’t answer basic questions and you can’t argue a point. One of your co-workers had to step in and actually explain the BASICS.
Like I said we are giving you an offer. It is after this last wall of text.
I hope you enjoyed my feedback, I expect a response within 4 hours. I will send this exact email to your boss whenever within those 4 hours. You can stop me if you reply quickly enough and don’t piss me off.
If you do not respond within 4 hours, I will send this email (possibly with more on it) to your support team and the other members of your company that I have found via LinkedIn. No company deserves paying shit for shit work. Go work for McDonalds if you want to be lazy. I hear Walmart even pays $12-14 an hour now!
So, I’m willing to give you an offer. You’ll make minimum wage, and we’ll provide free food and housing for two years. We’ll put you through a bootcamp (probably MakerSquare in Austin) for free, and we’ll fly you out to our HQ in Dallas, TX. If you do well, you’ll make up to $40K your first year, with opportunities to make up to $90K afterwards.
Looking forward to hearing from you hopefully within 4 hours,
Jacob Worstell
Senior Architecture Engineer II – sharklasers.com
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While Hamza Khan doesn’t intend to work for this bizarre head- hunter, he’s working on the feedback, if harsh, in the missive. Khan also admits that the man is right on some points.
Not sure if the offer is real, but all recruiters were to head hunt using this technique, if not the candidate accepting, will make for a great constructive feedback exercise.