You don't say what kind of work you would look for, where in the large geography called the Bay Area, or what kind of living standard you expect. So no way anyone can give a meaningful answer, as reflected in the lack of responses.

You probably know that I did not actually feel insulted or attacked. One of the few advantages of getting older: I care less and less what people appear to think about me, or what they say. And I don't think you intended insult. I alert at language using forms of "to be," to the annoyance of people who argue with me.

I understand how my comment can read like a personal attack, and I could have interpreted the OP more generously, or kept my mouth shut. I will try to do better. Something about the "I have too many ideas popping into my head" and "I think too fast" -- posted daily in one form or another, or spouted in co-working spaces, sets me off. My problem, which I will blame on cognitive decline and general feeling that I have reached the end of my road in the tech industry.

> Don't be curmudgeonly.

I feel flattered to get identified as a curmudgeon in company with Socrates, Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, and George Carlin. I might take offense at the implicit ageism but at my age I roll with it. HN teems with unchallenged insults directed at the elderly, grating on us old people, but in line with the HN demographic.

> Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

No one can "be" those things since that implies an identity. One can write in a negative tone. Accusations of rigidity and genericity would require a large sample. No one who knows me would describe me as "rigid or generically negative" so I will let that go as an ignorant judgment.

> please don't cross into personal attack.

Refuting the OP's claims can't count as personal attack, unless we hollow out all argument and rhetoric. I apologize for the Adderall comment, should have left that out.

> That is in no way allowed here.

Ironic given the personal nature of the moderator scolding, attacking my age and identity by telling me what not to "be."

I might feel awe or amazement at what human-made machines can do -- the reason I got into programming. But I don't attribute human qualities to computers or software, a category error. No computer ever looked at me as interesting or tenacious.

No evidence supports your sentiment. Find an example of democracy that arose from citizens "being informed about what's happening." The Athenians limited democratic participation to a small educated elite. The American Founders had the same instinct, excluding more people than they included.

Demoracy dies in front of our eyes right now, in the USA, the most media-saturated culture in history. You might blame that on an ignorant and uncritical population. You might call them uninformed, or misinformed. As Jefferson understood the problem doesn't come from people not reading the news, but rather people not educated enough to understand, think critically, or even care.

Yes. I don't see the point, though. If I can run full neovim inside VSCode what does VSCode add?

> I guarantee if he spent as much time configuring vscode as he did configuring vim he could establish equivalent environments.

Yes, almost. For example you can make VSCode run terminals in tabs like the editor windows. VSCode supports a lot of customizing. But it still runs on Electron with a rather heavy node process on the other end -- a lot heavier than vim or neovim.

I used VSCode for over six months but ended up going back to vim. Nothing specifically wrong with VSCode, I recommend it to people who don't know how to use vim/neovim, or don't want to use those tools. But for those of us who know how to use vim/neovim VSCode feels slow and bloated with features I don't want. Personally I prefer not to use Microsoft products when I can help it, but now with VSCode (and GitHub) increasingly pushy about AI that I don't want I can do without VSCode.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/12/kicking-robots-james-vin...

Nothing on your web site or in your HN post refers to anything other than analyzing git activity. Crunching commits -- artifacts of the software development process rather than the process itself -- seems the core of GitHired.

< Its more about the projects you've built- how complex they are, their architecture, frameworks etc.

While that may have some value it doesn't work for programmers who have all of their work unavailable in company-owned private repositories. 100% of my work, for example, and a large percentage for every professional programmer I know. Even hiring managers and recruiters understand that public repos and personal private repos mainly represent hobby projects and side hustles.

> The whole point is that candidates often tailor their resumes to fit keywords from job descriptions...

True enough, but that happens because of recruiting/screening tooling -- an arms race. Sending out applications, tailored or not, into the automated and so-called "AI" screening/ranking systems describes the least effective way to get a job. Recommendations and reputation work much better, for a reason: a good hiring manager will trust their own experience and instincts, and the opinions of people they trust, more than a dashboard of code commit metrics. Sadly good hiring managers seem even harder to come by than good programmers.

> ...we cut through all the bs to show what they've actually done, not what they say they can.

So a programmer fresh out of boot camp who knows one language and framework will score higher than a more experienced programmer with broader experience? A person who used PostgreSQL for a year gets ranked higher than the programmer with two decades of Oracle and SQL Server?

Programmers don't succeed or fail because of mastery (or lack of mastery) of specific languages and frameworks. Projects and teams succeed, or fail, mainly because of team dynamics, conceptual integrity (as Brooks called it), and management consistency and support. Learning a language or a framework amounts to a necessary but hardly sufficient part of software development, and not even a key part of the process. Domain expertise counts for much more: I would rather hire someone with years of experience in (for example) enterprise logistics and let them learn a programming language rather than the other way around. You can't infer that kind of expertise, or how a person works in a team, or if they can reliably implement requirements, from git repo activity.

I don't blame you for the degradation and frustration of the tech recruiting and job hunting process. Most of the blame falls on the class of managers and executives who don't know anything about managing people or projects, and nothing about software development. Falling back on some sciency-looking numbers at least lets them continue blaming their shortcomings on something else.