This time round it can also directly harm you, despite your self awareness of the most significant public issue with what you're doing, as shared black-lists for known spammers significantly predates LLMs.

Unless you become extremely prolific, blacklists work on matching some kind of resume info like a name or more likely an email or phone number.

Those can be rotated. I specifically use a different email every job search wave just due to the tremendous volume so I would just need a new phone number and to use my middle name or something.

But you are right, this is a risk.

I’m guessing either you’re not American or you don’t actually do this and are just trying out an argument to see what happens.

Like sure, you might make it through the interview with your fifth rotated name and deepfaked voice, but then someone from accounting is going to ask for your social security number so they can add you to the payroll. And if your SS# isn’t assigned to the name you applied with… well, best case you’re fired, worst case you become very interesting to the FBI.

I don’t take hundreds of jobs and social security numbers aren’t submitted with a job application. There are far more companies than my capacity to quiet quit at jobs.

So are you just submitting job applications and then not taking the job offers if you succeed? Or are you taking the offer and when they ask for your social you reveal that you applied under a fake name? Or is your social associated with a different fake name in each company’s payroll? I’m not a lawyer, but it’s starting to sound like you might be committing some flavor of actual fraud (that is, if you are in fact doing the stuff you’re posting about).

And this doesn't bother you morally in any way?

What is he doing that seems wrong, or immoral?

Genuine question.

I think the morality he's speaking to is the scalability of using that strategy. If everyone does it, then the system overloads and breaks. If only a few individuals do it, then those individuals willing to arrogate more resources to themselves "win". What makes those individuals so special to society?

I'm using the word "morality" to mean what is beneficial to society, within reasonable definitions. Please allow me to just hand-wave that away for now.

It's thinking about what are the ramifications of your actions on others? Why should you benefit and not others? Because you thought of it first? Because you're better at using this technique? Is this the kind of behavior that society wants to promote to achieve its goals?

We tend to use "morality" as a shortcut for meaning "not actively destructive to others." ... or something like that. I know we have to agree on which goals does society have, does society actually have goals, etc.

Or can we just let individuals pursue what they think are their own goals and hope for the best? And what best are we hoping for? Are we hoping that the system stays the same enough so that you personally will move toward your own goals? What if this pursuits prevents others from achieving theirs? What mechanisms do we have for changing things if we detect pathological behavior that will lead too far toward a place that everyone would consider to be "bad" (e.g., no food being produced).

Dog eat dog OK with everyone? What if this behavior ends up being so destructive that it affects even those who were initially excelling? What obligation do we have to others to keep the system working for them? Do we only think about that in terms of the eventual benefit to ourselves?

Morality's a big topic. I've probably mucked it up, but I'll leave it there.

There’s a lot to talk about here for sure and I read all your post it was very thoughtful.

I think the tools he is using is available to everyone. So it’s not like the others are at a disadvantage inherently but are choosing to be at a disadvantage. Should there be some sort of award for not using the tools? and if so, why?

I think your example about the system collapsing is dead on. But that’s proof of a bad system and not the questionable morals of the ones contributing to the collapse.

Also I would agree there is some social destructive dilema that occurs when you take shortcuts to get ahead of others. I spent my childhood growing up in low income areas of nyc, and the saying was as long as you get your piece, meaning whatever you need to do to survive is ok because at the end of the day you gotta feed yourself and your family. Think like selling illegal drugs for income. Sure you can feed your family with that money but the damage you are doing to your community will come around to affect you or your future family at some point. Where do you draw the line of bearing a responsibility to others?

I would argue that if they feel the need to sell drugs or are allowed to is a failure of the system as a whole instead of putting the blame on the person for working around the constructs of their community.

You should not be allowed to graduate from a software engineering program without taking a course on ethics.

Do you honestly think that would do any good with someone who has decided to hack the system for their personal benefit no matter the consequences to everyone else. I'd suspect that this was a troll except that it's an account that's been around for a while and a lot of people actually do think this way.

If it makes you feel any better though I'm unconvinced that mass spamming applications is actually very effective though it does carry collateral damage.

Yeah what I've heard I've heard about it is that recruiters hate it and have moved away from cold applications. Networking and working with recruiters is way nicer and a lot less work in my experience.

And I of course think they're an ass hole, I just think I'm general there's a pattern of scammy behavior in software that I don't really perceive in other industries. My education was not in computer science originally and one of the books I read was To Engineer is Human by Petroski. The professional standards are just higher in fields like aerospace and civil engineering. You might say that software doesn't kill people when it fails but I think that's underselling the powerful role software plays in our society. I think it's completely reasonable to push for higher ethical standards in the field even if it means some undergrads are annoyed they have to take a humanities course.

Ethics is a cultural problem. You can't teach it in a college course.

Talking about it can't hurt

I did take several courses in ethics. I internalized several key lessons.

1. People who stand up for what’s right get fired and blacklisted. Perhaps killed.

2. People who get caught get second chances or never even lose their ill gotten gains. Enron fraudsters have rebuilt their wealth becoming new executives and public speakers on ethics. This is in addition to any wealth they hid away. Boeing has killed many people before the 737 max for similar sloppiness. It didn’t matter then either.

3. Low level fraud virtually never gets prosecuted, yet alone unethical behaviour. We had plenty of cases where we studied some embezzler who got fired. The penalty for ill gotten millions is being fired? That’s just the day in the life of an employee in the world of regular layoffs.

Here’s the problem with every ethics class I have taken. Who won in the end except in the most extreme cases (Madoff)? Usually the crook.

Considering the kinds of companies that so many software engineers end up working for and to what ends, that's sort of laughable. How nice your shiny ethics might feel glued to your chest while you in any case go help the major tech companies do everything in their power to squeeze as much revenue out of users and every ounce of personal privacy too, among other things, including parasitic dark patterns, intentional user manipulation, blatant dishonesty, industrial scales of data theft and so forth..

That's a reason in favor of teaching ethics