Complaints About "Scraping" Websites: How legitimate are they?

Ever since I started doing my research on identifying software candidates by going to websites listing their emails, I've been getting accused of 'scraping'... even though I was collecting addresses by hand and calling each of them individually on the phone as well. I then decided that it would be smarter to automate the process, since I was going to get accused of this 'sin' anyway. Products like "HiringSolved" are quite powerful and enable this process to be accelerated.

My question is: Given that Software Developers (who ought to know a thing or two about software security) have left their addresses out in public, frequently with details about what kind of work they do, and the websites they have left them on were designed by other software engineers, who apparently had no concerns about security and never even made any effort to make their sites 'unscrapable' in the first place -- How legitimate is it of them to complain that someone actually went to the trouble of looking them up and contacted them, using public information that was easy to access?

To me, it doesn't sound like a legitimate complaint... Maybe I'm too cynical. Personally, if I left my bicycle unattended, unchained, in some busy area frequented by many people, I would not start complaining about "theft" if someone took my bicycle and then peddled it back to my house, and then left a note saying: "I think that this is your bike that you left unprotected for the past six months, and by the way, I think I have a job opportunity for you..."

I guess that those particular software engineers haven't studied much Wittgenstein, because they sure seem to think that they speak a language that only they can understand...

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Permalink Reply by Maureen Sharib on December 10, 2014 at 3:29am

I used to think this way too and I believe it applied to SWEs ten yrs ago but today's SWEs - I dunno.

I'm thinking the ADD drugs have taken their toll and most of them have their minds corroded to the points where they can't think rationally anymore, holed up wherever they are with their shades drawn and their doors bolted.

People like you and I have known for a long time how to take an email address (or info in a posting), extrapolate a place of employment, find a phone number, dial that number, speak to a Gatekeeper, ask for a person, extract whatever info you can from that Gatekeeper about that person (and that person's team) for as long as you can from that same Gatekeeper before she grows wary (or weary) of you, be transferred to that person, hit that person's VoiceMail, listen to that person's VoiceMail patiently for the information it contains, record that information and repeat the process again maybe on the same day or the next, or the next, or the next, if necessary until you reach that person on the phone.

It may take one more call - it may take thirty and when you do reach them today it takes far longer than it used to; they're far weirder than they used to be and they're not answering to the same siren calls they once did.

What seems illogical today to us (your bicycle complaint analogy) seems logical to them it seems.

Maureen Sharib

Phone Sourcer

513 646 7306

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Permalink Reply by Nicholas Meyler on December 10, 2014 at 5:29pm

I'm pretty sure that most of the complaints come from mentally ill people. Software engineers have 5x the rate of mental illness of other engineers (data from the NIH website).