People checking in code they've never looked at.

People employee-referring other people who they've never worked with, and don't even know at all on a personal level.

Ya'll are fucking crazy.

It was, it was just hard to do at scale by a lot of different people.

LLMs and other automation tools make things that used to be annoying but uncommon to a steady part of life.

It was, but in a different form. This is the first I've heard of a random recruiter bonus.

Companies often work with more than one job search agency but there they hired people to find someone - and they often found the same people. There was some incentive to find a good candidate as a bad reputation means you don't get hired to find the next.

I did have recruiters yell at me because I applied for the same job via multiple different recruiters. As if it was my problem to figure that out.

Finding a job when you don't know someone already there has always been a mess for both sides.

I wouldn’t personally refer anyone I’ve not worked with. What’s the point? Someone being smart isn’t enough, they have to be actually sane and normal to work with. You can be friends with people you wouldn’t want to work with. Someone I’ve not met would be a totally unknown quantity.

A referral used to mean "I read your thesis." Now it means "I have twenty tokens." The bonus didn't change, so of course the behavior did.