Show HN: Help programmers from Syria get jobs elsewhere

by whoishiring • 13 years ago

155 58 13 years ago

So... where are all the Syrian programmers? This website says none are available.

wslh2• 13 years ago

I think he is just starting the site and obviously you need marketing to promote it. Upvoting the news and keeping it in the HN homepage is a good idea.

The HN community from Syria can also share their contact information in this thread.

djm_• 13 years ago

It's a chicken and the egg situation I think; I believe the purpose of this site is to connect people and probably stemmed from the Ask HN thread the other day [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6300923

ibrow4• 13 years ago

Yesterday my wife and I were discussing the UK vote on intervening in Syria. It is such a horrible plight for people trapped in the middle of this, that both options of going in or not going in are equally awful.

The conclusion was that we don't know what the right answer is, but there must be some better way. We've got to stop thinking that military action is the only alternative.

We need to seriously do some bigger, different thinking. Possibly the UK granting opening it's doors to anyone who wants to flee this hell? I don't know.

Initiatives like Hire Programmers from Syria are a great start to thinking differently. I have no idea if it will be successful at achieving its goals or not, but I still applaud the effort.

Well done, and good luck.

devx• 13 years ago

The right thing would be to convince Assad to offer a truce, step down, and allow a democratic election to happen. He'd have to be given protection, too, otherwise he'd never agree to stop, because he'd fear too much for his life.

Of course, even if they do convince Assad of that, it doesn't mean things will go smoothly. The "rebels" might still be upset if they lose the election, which is why it's so important UN or whoever needs to guarantee fair elections. It's the least they can do to appease the rebels, so they don't want to start the civil war all over again. They could even guarantee some sort of remuneration from the state for all the people who lost a family member in the war.

This is the least violent, and best solution for everyone involved.

ibrow4• 13 years ago

But then you look at Egypt. It once seemed so hopeful and now it appears to descending ever more into violence and civil war. What's to say that even if they do have fair elections unrest will continue.

speeder• 13 years ago

Democracy is.not a solution for Syria. Mind you, about 60% of the population there belong to a group that hate the other 40% and would happily vote to kill them all. This is why Assad has so many people in Syria on his side.

riggins• 13 years ago

The right thing would be to convince Assad to offer a truce

According to Juan Cole (who IMO has a pretty good feel for the Middle East), Assad has the backing of ~50% of the population.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/bombing-unlikely-effective.h...

this is not a war by an outside force like the Serbs of ethnic cleansing against a neighbor, but rather it is a civil war. The Alawis, Christians and secular-minded Sunnis in Syria are afraid of the rebel forces and either support or are neutral toward the Syrian government; together they may well come to half the country. That isn’t exactly a mandate for outside intervention.

I don't think its just Assad driving this.

rdl2• 13 years ago

IMO the right thing to do would be to solve just the chemical weapon problem, and solve it in the most limited way possible.

Have Assad escrow his chemical forces with the Russians at the Russian naval base in Syria (Tartus), on the basis of "you may have lost control of your forces; they must be kept safe so there will be no unauthorized use."

Other than that, focus purely on helping the civilians. I dislike both Assad and the rebels (the AQ/etc. groups), and don't want either to win. I also don't want them to fight forever, because it is killing civilians.

We should provide secure IDP facilities within Syria (either camps or protected cities), with real force (so we never again have another Srebrenica), or just focus on providing what infrastructure we can (free internet/phone/tv/etc. from Rivet Joints and UAVs and cross-border, medical supplies, etc.).

Taking sides doesn't really help.

(Letting Assad step down and go into comfortable exile in Iran or Russia would be fine, too, but making regime change a requirement to deal with chemical weapons seems to be an overcomplication.)

shimon_e5• 13 years ago

Assad isn't rational anymore.

shimon_e5• 13 years ago

One solution mentioned in the house of commons during the debate was arming the rebels with chemical weapons as a deterrent against the Assad regime. I kid you not....

ibrow4• 13 years ago

Well, if it works for nuclear?!

Bonkers.

frank_boyd4• 13 years ago

Btw, if there was a chemical attack, there are 3 possibilities: a) Assad, b) Rebels (who may already have got access to some chemical weapon), c) CIA doing business as usual.

And as always, we'll never learn the truth in time.

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

It doesn't even make sense, since CW are much more effective against the general population than troops. ie: It is much easier for troops to deploy countermeasures that negate or reduce the effectiveness of a CW attack. OTOH, in unlucky environmental conditions, a CW attack can wind up harming the rebel attackers and surrounding innocents as well, while the troops sit in their anti-CW gear and wait it out. Arming rebels with CW is just about the dumbest, least effective, most dangerous way to use CW; and ought to be a war crime in its own right.

rjsw• 13 years ago

I guess the Syrians need to go somewhere, even if all fighting stopped today.

I have read an analysis that Syria doesn't have enough water to make cement/concrete to rebuild all the damaged buildings.

susi22• 13 years ago

Please consider making the font color higher contrast. Not everybody has a super bright LED display. It's hard to read for me.

Nrsolis2• 13 years ago

Why are Syrian programmers the only ones worthy of help here?

agumonkey• 13 years ago

A little lack of distance in this website, but I guess HNers may have better knowledge and network to help programmers. That said, I wish for a hireawarrefugee.org to pop up.

noloqy• 13 years ago

The website or post in no way implies that this is the case.

One reason to choose Syria is that the situation may be more acute than it is in most other places in the world at the moment.

One reason to choose programmers could be that this is also the industry that the founder is active in, perhaps making it easier to approach potential customers.

Nrsolis2• 13 years ago

I'm going to clarify my question here:

Why are Syrian PROGRAMMERS the focus?

It would be just as easy to divide up the population into any other constituent subgroup and select only those for help.

Any of these would also be a valid goal according to the effort being proposed here:

Syrian auto mechanics Syrian bakers Syrian musicians Syrian nurses

You are presupposing that you can ONLY easily help programmers and furthermore, ONLY those Syrians with programing skill SHOULD be helped. Taken to it's logical extension, you end up helping people based on Ethnicity or Religion.

Why not instead focus on trying to help the greatest number of people in the most expedient way possible: by working to END this terrible civil war. That's CERTAINLY possible given the assemblage of talent reading these words.

You're setting your sights FAR TOO LOW.

engrenage• 13 years ago

Why is that ever a useful question when someone is motivate to help someone else?

level092• 13 years ago

A. Because there is a war going on right now in Syria, People don't really know how much time is left for them as the bombing is occurring everywhere.

B. Because Syrians never had equal access to knowledge as other nations (they were punished by US and other countries)

http://www.sanctionswiki.org/Syria

this means No hosting is allowed, no paypal, no ecommerce, no Google services, No Source forge , I remember we couldn't even download java ..

C. Because it is okay to help others.

emiliobumachar• 13 years ago

You seem to be incurring in the Nirvana fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

monk1991• 13 years ago

help to make better situation there rather than.. displacing people from their country.

icoder2• 13 years ago

Yes, well, that's probably what many would love to do. Please tell us how.

In the mean time, let's go for the alternative that seems less ideal but concrete and doable.

m0skit06• 13 years ago

I bet you can vote in your country. Learn to use that.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

And what about those who didn't choose to have programming as a career?

wslh2• 13 years ago

This is HN and there are many initiatives to help Syrians.

dado_eyad• 13 years ago

The email on the website didn't work.

nsp• 13 years ago

Emailing helpout@ failed permanently. Via your mail to link, just a heads up

_p6xs• 13 years ago

helpout@hireprogrammersleavingsyria.org instead of .com. Fixed. Thanks!

beshrkayali• 13 years ago

This is great, but I've been trying my very best to get hired in a decent web company in the US for the past year or so, and all my attempts have failed many times because of visa issues or that the company wasn't interested in candidates from outside the US.

frank_boyd4• 13 years ago

And when you'll succeed, I'm not sure you'll feel like being in some kind of "Land of the free": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/us/fbi-sharpens-scrutiny-o...

m0skit06• 13 years ago

Why only programmers? What are you, "professioncist"?

benjlang• 13 years ago

Israeli startups want to hire Syrians. Here are startups that are hiring: www.mappedinisrael.com

zakelfassi• 13 years ago

AWESOME. Huge Kudos for that Matt !

level092• 13 years ago

Thank you very much for this, I'm Syrian (programmer) and seeing this makes me feel really happy and grateful.

I know this could possibly be a life changer for a lot of Syrians (I will try as much as possible to spread it across my friends and colleagues are still alive there)

For a Syrian, living abroad means a lot, it means having basic human rights, equality, freedom of speech, and easy access to knowledge etc .. those privileges are taken for granted by most western people.

Unfortunately, We are victims of a geographic accident and we have to go through a harder way to have those privileges.

antocv• 13 years ago

We need this for every profession. Seriously, lets just take out all the civilians from a conflict and leave the place to those who willing choose to die for it.

Open all the borders. Revolutionary, radical, but consider the thought before you trash it.

seldo• 13 years ago

The idea here is apparently that there are people living in a war-torn country ruled by a murderous dictator who will gas his own people and the only reason they haven't left is because they can't find a good programming job. As if they're sitting there on Monster.com as the bombs rain down, desperately refreshing for a job with benefits.

The degree of disconnection here from the reality of the situation in Syria is so enormous as to be insulting, even though that was not the intent.

Show HN: Help programmers from Syria get jobs elsewhere

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