The author of the submitted blog post begins with

"I’m looking for work right now; and I have looked for work in the past. It’s something everyone does, now and again."

There is indeed an ongoing interest in finding paying work among the many participants on Hacker News. That's why I have devoted time and effort (with the kind help of several other HN participants) to writing up a FAQ about company hiring procedures,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

which gives job applicants tips on what to get ready for at companies that use the best procedures.

"It is bizarrely standard, if you’ve decided not to hire someone, to simply never contact them again.

"Don’t accept this. Don’t behave this way."

It's easy to tell other people to do work you are not going to have to do yourself. You have no idea how many other applications were sent in for the same position.

HN participants luu

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4768830

doctorpangloss

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4768999

munin

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4768864

and hso9791

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769295

all have pertinent comments in this thread that appeared overnight in my time zone, at various comment levels.

The key idea is that companies get unimaginably more applicants, some with very poor fits to the advertised job requirements, than most job applicants suppose. I strongly sympathize with the idea that if someone has applied for a job I advertise, I might as well be polite enough to reply. As Winston Churchill said (hat tip to the HN participant who recently mentioned this quotation), "After all, when you have to kill a man it costs noth­ing to be polite."

http://richardlangworth.com/when-you-have-to-kill-a-man

It costs nothing to be polite, but it costs a little to send out a response, even by email. A company in hiring mode is looking for people to respond to its paying customers. It is GROSSLY impolite to ignore a paying customer. When forced to prioritize by press of busyness, most companies devote more time and effort to responding to paying customers than to job applicants who in many cases are taking a shotgun approach to applying for jobs. I assume that all the HN participants here who have recently applied for jobs have done careful research and only applied for positions for which they are a prima-facie good fit and well qualified. But at all the workplaces I have ever worked at, the company has received many out-of-the-blue applications on a cold-call basis, and many responses to advertised openings with an extremely poor fit to job requirements. And meanwhile there may be people on staff whose job it is to HIRE new people who fit, but there is no one on staff who is assigned to have time and resources to answer absolutely every job application that comes in, even for advertised positions. The inexpensive availability of word-processing software on personal computers, beginning in the 1990s, has deluged most companies with many more applications than most companies have procedures in place to answer individually. That's tough on the job applicant, but that's reality. I agree with everyone here who says it's the decent thing to do, and can even in some cases be the expedient thing to do, to answer a job application with a definite result in a polite tone, but all companies have higher priorities, and at least one of those priorities is decently answering actual paying customers.