One of the major reasons why applying for jobs sucks so much is that companies are flooded with more garbage applications than they can process.
So hurray for the tragedy of the commons, I guess. It was nice knowing everyone.
On a personal level, I consider the practice espoused by this article of flooding the world with automated messages without care for how it impacts anyone else to be narcissistic and morally reprehensible, not admirable, but whatever floats a person's boat.
Exactly. It’s funny someone would be so self-unaware as to brag about doing this in a blog post
It doesn’t matter though. The way to get actual good jobs is to be poached. And to get poached, you need to build real projects of your own that get peoples’ attention. Resume spamming is for the plebs.
Yep, the glee of the author reminds me of my younger days when I had a lot of edgy, but truly shitty development ideas. Luckily I never saw them through and can't be embarrassed by them today.
This all makes me glad I am not actively looking for a new position. I always keep an eye on the job market though - I've noticed anecdotally the amount of applicants on any LinkedIn position have really amplified the last couple years. I knew the LLM driven application process was coming, but it doesn't make it suck any less.
While agents and HR may be looking to match the bare requirements, the hiring manager is likely also looking for “alpha” the stuff that escapes formal requirements. My hires are usually those that passes the base reqs and provide that unique something that the cover letter seems to reveal.
> The irony? I got a job offer before I even finished building it. More on that later
Nothing succeeds like success. If you are on n attempt, and you are geared up for what you will do for n+2, usually the problem surrenders its self on n.
It will be interesting to see a SaaS that applies to jobs come up.
I wonder if the application process will switch up in the near future to people posting their profiles for then company recruiters/AI to reach out and contact since if they post a job they just get 10k automated applications.
- scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result
- take the responses with "positive sentiment" and then contact the linkedin person
Service is now connecting people with companies that already thought their generated CV was close enough to what they want. Call this a "recruitment agency".
I mean scrape it for candidates as well as jobs, generate CVs for the candidates, apply to the jobs with the generated CVs, contact the candidate after a positive hit. And yes, I expect that's completely against their terms of service.
One of those cases where the act of building the system serves as sufficient qualification in itself, even when the results of the system are mediocre.
I've thought about the optics of talking about my own automatic job application system or including it on my resume, but I thought it'd be risky given the topic (like how listing your own startup is frowned upon, if I'm not mistaken?). Is it normally considered a bit risky or taboo?
well, it was during the technical interview, and it was just a couple of engineers doing the interview. I was just geeking out on all the problems I was solving (and creating).
and to be honest, I was too nerves to think about if it was risky or taboo.
Depends. As a Hiring Manager, I love cover letters but only if it is not a generic copy paste. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind a Cover letter that may have some generic stuff about you but you must add something specific about the role/company that you are applying for and why you will be a good fit. This will get you miles ahead of others in the queue.
how would you rate this?, this email was written by the system from the article.
Dear Hiring Manager,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is David Dodda, and I am writing to express my interest in the Software Engineer position at WIA Software Systems Inc. I am a Senior Software Developer with extensive experience in full-stack development, and I believe my skills align well with the requirements outlined in your job posting.
With a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication and over 5 years of professional experience, I have honed my capabilities in various programming languages and technologies, particularly in React, Node.js, AWS, and SQL. At Black Beard Development Group, I led the development of a privacy-focused AI platform and played a pivotal role in establishing CI/CD pipelines that improved efficiencies across our team.
Your job description emphasizes the importance of developing software solutions by studying systems flow, data usage, and work processes. In my previous roles, I have consistently evaluated user feedback to improve system designs and have successfully executed the full lifecycle of software development. Additionally, my involvement in agile methodologies and my proficiency in AWS aligns perfectly with your requirement for cloud and DevOps experience.
Furthermore, I have experience collaborating with teams to coordinate the development and integration of computer-based systems, ensuring optimal functionality and performance. My recent project involving a fantasy sports DApp required me to coordinate with various stakeholders, manage expectations, and lead technical efforts, making me well-equipped for the responsibilities at WIA Software Systems Inc.
I am particularly excited about the hybrid work arrangement offered for this role, as I believe it allows for both collaborative in-person engagement and the flexibility of remote work, which enhances productivity.
Thank you for considering my application. I have attached my resume for your review and would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background, skills, and enthusiasms align with the goals of WIA Software Systems Inc.
Honestly, this is a typical generic one where may be you just edited the pargraph a bit about "Your job description emphasizes the importance of..". I would rather have you give me concrete examples. Instead of saying "I have consistently evaluated user feedback to..", give me an actual example.
It's highly dependent on the manager I'm afraid and impossible to guess who's on the other side of that.
The process outlined in the post also isn't a path to writing a good cover letter. You don't want to just go over your resume again you want to either talk about things that wouldn't be there (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because you need money to feed yourself) or expanding on how something on your resume uniquely qualifies you (I worked on this project that's very similar to what your doing)
If it's lining up your resume to the job description (you want someone who can write Scala, I have used Scala in my past 3 jobs) a resume is a better format for that. But that's all the LLM has context to do.
Oh yeah, ideally you'd also tune your resume to the job too.
> (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because you need money to feed yourself)
In 99.9% of jobs in the world, there are zero applicants for who this truly holds. You might be working at a company hiring for a job that's part of the 0.1%, not sure. Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to lie as blatantly as required.
> Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to lie as blatantly as required.
That's a pessimistic way of looking at it, but I'm not going to claim it's wrong. I think my phrasing made it very clear that in most cases I expect if someone includes something about this their interest is going to be ahem embellished.
All the same look at it from the hiring managers side. Say you have two candidates, who appear to otherwise be equal. One seems to think the job is just like any other. The other actually seems genuinely interested in the details of food brokering, knows of your companies involvement in <big name>'s success and has thoughts on how they can apply their background in data analytics to the challenges you face.
Which candidate do you hire? Or do you really just toss a coin?
I just find it very unlikely that you really have two candidates who appear equal after 10 minutes of talking to them.
I guess it depends on how much freedom an HM has. Where I've worked, the answer has been "more than enough". Which means you can easily ask e.g. a philosophical question. Ask something unrelated to the job, see what kind of person they are. Chance they'll both respond the exact same way is negligible, and you'll very likely come out preferring one of them. Only few people lie when you give them a good question that doesn't sound like it has a "wrong" answer that would get them a minus.
Does this mean you'll necessarily get the best candidate? No, but it's better than selecting on a proxy for willingness to lie, that's how you end up with people far too good at political games, to detriment of the org.
In places where the HM has little freedom, I guess there's little choice indeed. But even then, I'd try to go with whorver sounds most happen and genuine, rather than most interested in the company per se.
> I just find it very unlikely that you really have two candidates who appear equal after 10 minutes of talking to them.
We're talking about a cover letter, no one's been talked to yet. The HM has 100+ candidates who have done web applications with Python or whatever qualifies one for said job, and literally doesn't have time to talk to them all. They also can't ask them random clarifying questions about their life. There's 2 data points, cover letter and resume.
I suggested two ways to make your cover letter more than a rehash of your resume and your latching onto one of them.
Here's the thing: you'll notice in my example I didn't suggest you write "I'm deeply passionate about food brokering" (an actual company I've hired software engineers for). That's not likely to move the needle, it obviously nonsense (Even the owner is didn't meet that description), and much like saying "I've got a deep mastery of Python" it's just empty words without something backing it.
Instead I suggested learning about what the company does, thinking about what the job entails beyond just "writing software according to the tickets" and what it actually accomplishes and expressing what about that interests you.
Is that person's interest going to end up exaggerated? Sure probably. But they're actually interested enough to put in the effort to think through that, and that effort, like it or not is a signal. Even the most pessimistic view means at least they were willing to work harder at it.
But look, maybe your applying at a subprime lender or something equally parasitic and are either so desperate that your doing it anyway or just cynical enough to not care, yet still have some moralistic hangup about this. Then don't. I suggested other things you can bring to your cover letter that don't fit on a resume. But if you make your cover letter your resume but in paragraph form (which is all the AI can do, since that's the only data it has), then you've reduced those data points the manager has to decide if your worth talking to from 2 down to 1. You might as well have skipped the cover letter entirely and at least saved them some time. (Actually that's not true, because often a cover letter is expected and they'll ding you for not having it, but including a bullshit rephrasing of your resume for that reason is no less performative than the expression of interest your already bothered by)
When I worked as a recruiter, I’d make candidates write two paragraphs of prose to summarize what they could do. Much easier to read than picking through a CV looking for clues.
I have no clue in general. When I go through applications, I go through all the material and anything else I can find about the candidate, and cover letters are sometimes helpful. Put yourself in my shoes:
- If the cover letter is a rehash of your resume, it's a waste of your time and mine. It certainly isn't helpful to your application, and if I have too many well-qualified applicants then it might be harmful.
- Poorly written cover letters suggest that the applicant doesn't care much about this specific opportunity, it's some sort of AI/oversees/... scam, or the applicant can't write well. They're very helpful for me when there are already other data points suggesting identity theft or similar automation (nail-in-the-coffin material). Otherwise, they're not necessarily a negative, but it's rarely advantageous to advertise a lack of some skill, and it does disqualify applicants from some roles.
- Some cover letters are especially compelling. Suppose your resume just has you as a pizza delivery driver, but your cover letter goes over the app you wrote and the data science behind it to optimize your hourly earnings. Suppose your work history is in web tech, but you're actually better at low-level optimizations and are applying here because you think that skill set is a good fit. I prefer varied backgrounds anyway, so you'll probably get some form of screening interview unless there's enough other evidence that you aren't qualified (e.g., junior experience for a senior role) -- I try to bias toward giving everyone a chance while not wasting too much of anyone's time, and I'm fine having a busier calendar to make that happen.
None of that helps you get the job though; it helps you get an interview. If your experience is that you're well qualified and usually land the job once you get into an interview, and if your cover letter has some information your resume lacks, you should definitely add one. If you normally struggle through the interview process, it'd be surprising for you to have an honest cover letter which would help you land the job in the first place, so I probably wouldn't bother.
In most cases, they are not important. All the offers I received asked for a cover letter, and I always submitted a one-line PDF that said I would discuss my work history and why I'd like the job only in an interview.
At the bigcorp where I work, I don't see cover letters. Applications comes through some crappy platform, I just see resume files and autog-extracted versions of them.
Might be worth putting a little summary / objective in the resume file itself because of that.
This is some next level bs spam. I know job search in IT is difficult these days but this kind of automation will not make it better; if anything, the opposite.
The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews next.
So you end up using technology to de-evolve society back to tribes.
Still, at least we are other people who are creating this AI technology and all of its application ... so we see the pain up close and we can start to steer it in a better direction that's more healthy for society.
Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing.
The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues.
I get that the market is bad right now and there are lot of people looking for jobs but auto submissions and flooding job sites wont work. Not for the ones that matter anyway.
Bunch of services that can do captchas now. It’d maybe lessen the load on employers but then job seeking becomes pay to play. The candidate who can afford one of those services + automation beats out those who can’t. It’s already an arms race of sorts.
Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI, interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an industry, but it’ll be 10 years from now and most people can’t wait that long.
I can’t speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-paper better qualified.
It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters. But from the hiring side, truthfully, there’s no end in sight.
My 5 year plan is to move to the EU, but it's a process. You're not going to be doing it as your next job hop from the US if you haven't been planning for it.
The trick is to get a masters or MBA in the country where you want to live. Germany and Netherlands are excellent for this. You can find lots of jobs with no local language requirements.
The fun part is that I went the security engineer route instead of SDE/SWE. It has some pros and cons, but seems like it's one of the "high demand" roles that gets more traction looking at others who have moved abroad.
I also have friends and family in Netherlands, France, and UK who help me keep tabs on how things are going in various places and where might be better locations to target for an American with a technical background looking to just up and leave the US.
The issue is, if you're looking for only one hire out of a thousand applicants, you need a 99.9% accurate AI. HR isn't that good, so it'll be mildly difficult to train an AI to be that good.
What’s our alternative? It doesn’t seem to be “carefully consider and apply to a handful of highly relevant postings”. I don’t see the downsides for candidates to play the numbers game.
Hiring and placement agencies that do prescreenings and provide CVs in standardized formats to employers and them getting paid according to how much salary the hire will get.
win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last two jobs in Vienna
Yes but now you need these agencies to prescreen for you which is a very expensive and time consuming process. Also, I have used some before and not all agencies are worth the time or money. Most of them are glorified Keyword scanners.
I work in an industry where this practice is universal. That said, why don't more of these companies complaining on this thread try that model? I know the reason: Cost. Instead of wasted hours of their staff's time, they are faced with a realistically large bill that most managers would like to deny. For me, head hunters find me on LinkedIn.
Don't look at it as us vs them. Recruiters are part of your (future) team. Maybe not your direct team, but once you get bad people in your team you'll want them to do a better job.. Chicken vs egg.
Apply where you actually want to apply and trust that the recruiter does his job.
The downside is that if all candidates are thinking like you, you are now hoping that the hiring team can sort through 100s of garbage Resumes to may be find you who may be a good fit. Your odds of being called for Round 1 is now much lower due to all that noise. Doesn't matter whose fault it is. Your probability of being called for Round 1 just went down significantly and this hurts you.
I’ll turn it down if further research shows I don’t want to work there? Why upfront my research if I’ll be ghosted anyway? Turning down interviews because “circumstances have changed” is hardly unusual
Ghost jobs on one side, ghost applications on the other. Some people will just send automated applications everywhere, every day, and check for responses. That leads to ghost responses, and the cycle continues.
Responding to someone to say you got their message but have changed your mind isn’t ghosting. Job hunting would be less miserable if rejections happened in a reasonable time frame
The hiring teams are employed. If they aren't in a position to fix the dynamics then nobody can. HR enjoys a vaulted position under which their suffering KPIs allow them to point their fingers at the market and shrug the blame from their shoulders . It isn't like they are going to suddenly band together and boycott AI. We've all had our sip from the fountain of eternal laziness and now we all want more.
But this is a classic prisoners dilemma then... If I don't do it and everyone else does then I am only hurting my own chances.
Based on what you're saying, the only way to actually fix this is to fix the underlying systematic problem. No idea how you do that, but seems like the only logical way I can think of
I haven’t seen the power of referrals for 10 years now. At work I can give you a “referral” by uploading your resume to our ATS. That’s it. It receives no more consideration than if you were to click Easy Apply on LinkedIn as far as I’m aware.
That type of referral indeed is mostly worthless (it might get you actually looked at by a human instead of rejected before that). Useful referrals are the kind where you go chat with your friend, figure out what they want in a job, then go find the hiring manager and tell them about this amazing ex-colleague who's a perfect fit for the role. That gets the candidate treated seriously. Sometimes it doesn't work out, but definitely gives the candidate a fair shot.
At a former employer, I sort of hated the referral ambassador or whatever it was called thing (with financial rewards attached I think). I always felt it encouraged quantity over quality. I actually sent a couple people I knew off on their merry way and suggested a couple others just go to the job site. On the other hand, I got several jobs through people I actually knew and had worked with in some manner.
I referred two friends at my former employer and the process has changed in the span of 5 years; first one needed at least a short recommendation, second was pretty much fire and forget (and hope for the bonus if they get hired)
I wonder if we might see the rise a broad but weak "yes that's a real person" referral system as opposed to "I know that person will be good for the job" referrals.
Referrals in my company basically just guarantee that the resume isn't immediately thrown in the trash, doesn't really help anyone's odds otherwise. I suspect in most companies it's similar, if they even get that much of a benefit (unless you're upper management (aka nepotism) I guess)
Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I guess it doesn't have to be. But I've definitely gotten several jobs through senior managers I had worked with which largely bypassed the whole HR system where it existed.
Betting currency is a terrible solution, especially at the junior level when people are trying to start their careers. On the other hand, forcing candidates to invest time and in exchange guaranteeing their application will be reviewed could work well.
Candidates aren’t going to apply until you can actually guarantee that their application will be reviewed and given due consideration. And that will never happen because the fakers will invest an unlimited amount of time, so your review process will fall over.
Huh? The problem is getting to the point where the company is able to have a candidate invest time and then review their work. If the candidate doesn't have the application fee, there could be a secondary market of people who would back the candidate if they were confident they could get the job and the escrowed application fees.
Absolutely. I mean I remember 20y ago when someone's solution to spam was paying a small fee. Not what you want, but it's gotta be somewhere there. There has to be a cost to it, but it probably shouldn't be directly monetary. Submission delay might work.
Requiring applicants to pay a fee will mean that the positions that I have to apply for that either do not exist, or are opened "just in case", or are market research, or the COA positions to push internal candidates, or any one of countless similar positions, will require me to pay out of pocket. Not exactly fair from my perspective.
Agreed, while paying to reduce spam may work in other contexts, in this setting the incentives don't align. Imagine if Linkedin got paid every time you applied for a listing, the pile of ghost jobs would be practically infinite.
Some of the listing services actually do charge employers per applicant, unless they are rejected within a certain amount of time (usually 48 or 72 hrs).
The critical distinction here is that the employer pays, not the applicant. This direction works, that's roughly how all job boards work if you squint, but if it was the applicant paying, the incentives would be opposing.
Isn't a better solution to create a reputation score just for email addresses? You start out very low, and sending emails further lowers your score. However, every email that is read (and not marked spam) increases it a little more. If reputations start out just marginally above the "straight to spam" tolerance level, then spam accounts can only get out a few emails.
How do they contact you? Email, social media, or LinkedIn? If LinkedIn, it is definitely not free. Recruiters pay a hefty fee for the right to contact people outside their network.
We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs.
Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real people.
I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not online job postings because it's basically impossible right now with the automated resume submission companies.
And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.
It seems that many processes, from interviews to real work, are increasingly manipulated. I've noticed a pattern with candidates employed by certain consulting companies, especially in Texas and New Jersey. These companies often recruit low-cost labor from India, craft fake resumes, and submit them to platforms like LinkedIn.
During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally unskilled.
Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while profiting $4,000–$5,000 per month from the arrangement.
We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving simple LeetCode problems, in person.
Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a landscape?
I've done this. It can be hit or miss. Get a great team with a strong lead and you'll love them. Unfortunately there's quite a bit of opportunity over there so once you've trained them up, they're always looking for their next (better paying) gig with their new skills. It's rare if folks last past a year on your team.
There are so many incredibly talented software engineers in India that want to stay in India for family/cultural reasons. The best setups I have seen have one very reliable senior person who experience working in EU/NA, then returned home. They can help with the cultural barriers with more junior hires. Further, if you pay 20% more than your competition, you can get way better candidates. My experience is also pretty similar with offshore teams in China, but their English skills are worse (on average).
I keep holding out hope that one day my totally genuine, slightly rusty, slightly nervous, takes all 40 minutes to solve the Leetcode medium style will be seen as so refreshing and honest I’ll be an insta-hire.
They are taking advantage of the incompetence at the workplace you're at. That's just what business is and has always been. If you're a fool, you'll be separated from your money.
Unfortunately so many people lie about experience that you need to so some sort of whiteboard test just to see if the candidate really is fluent in the language they are claiming 5 years experience with. It can be a really simple test.
In my two decades of experience, I've never seen another software engineer implement a linked list or even use a linked list. There are better, and more interesting, questions to be asking.
I personally wouldn't expect someone to implement one (end cases easy to mess up if they are stressed), but writing a function to reverse one (foreach, pop front, push front) is enough to catch the liars. You can argue about how often a std::list vs std::vector is a performance win, but I'd run a mile from any developer who wasn't highly familiar with the basic data structures provided by any language they are claiming to be fluent in.
The only real requirements to "never use a linked list" are a) use a language where some kind of contiguous-storage-based sequence (array, vector, whatever you want to call it; Python calls it a list, even) is built in (or in the standard library); plus b) not ever need to remove O(1) values from the middle of a sequence in O(1) time while preserving order.
But arguably, a candidate who hasn't ever had to contemplate the concept of "linked list" but can derive the necessary ideas on the spot given the basic design, has some useful talents.
>A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs.
I mean when I write a cover letter I take the cover letter I took the last time and change a couple of names and that's it.
Why do I want the job? I want the job because I do work for money, I don't have some idea that your SaaS is really giving me anything that any of the others I've worked at in the past didn't give me - no company means anything to me aside from having reasonably interesting problems to work on and hopefully not onerous working environment.
Agreed. Both sides are bad. Most of these "bots" are useless and do a terrible job. I have seen that side as well. Many years ago, I was applying at IBM (don't ask) for a role and the recruiter told me that the online portal will reject me anyway. But not to worry because he knows what buttons to click to get me the interview because I was a really good fit.
Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6 rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral" interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up with that.
What do you think of https://wonderful.dev? You get notifications when candidates are interested in your jobs, then you can choose to reach out to the ones you want to apply.
I'm at a point where I'm almost willing to ignore the first few days of applicants. They're all spray and pray junk. A week or two in and the applicant quality is significantly better.
Really good point. But the issue is that some job sites (indeed for example) wants you to pay to play. If you reduce the sponsorship or daily cost, the resume count also goes down. But regardless, I have seen the same. 1st few days are nightmare. I am 1 week into the job posting and have 500+ resumes. This after I have rejected at least 100 already. Madness.
Hiring agents have been spamming potential job seekers for years with garbage and then came up with the abomination known as ATS, which makes it very difficult to argue that job seekers should not use automation.
Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating.
Only sort of. Lots of employees are only looking for any job and the adverse selection nature of hiring makes the typical job seeker pool look worse than average.
On the company side, only some people in the organization are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean more work.
More than that, the incentives are inversely aligned - companies want to hire a "good match" for as little as possible, and applicants want to be hired at the maximum possible rate.
There are recruiting agencies who have tried this method: "Use AI to match the most relevant candidates to the job spec you gave us."
Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no tomorrow. And they all find the same unqualified candidates.
If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified, non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency recruiters value their personally built candidate networks for a good reason.)
As a hiring manager, I've chosen to opt out of this system altogether. Instead of public postings, I just poll my network and post job announcements in private channels in my professional community. Much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Yeah, a lot of people here hate this but the few jobs I've gotten in the past 25 years or so were always directly through people I knew. The resume was pretty much pro forma.
But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.
>But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.
The lesson people should take from this is you need to cultivate your network through your career. Sadly it seems most people would rather complain about how broken the system is.
Advice from an old guy that went through this after moving to a new area and loosing my phat California income eventually. If you aren't working, pickup consulting gigs. They will probably suck and be high stress low reward, but it will help you build connections locally. Look for ones that don't just need a body but that really need help so you are in a position where your work is visible. Heck once I got in most of the 'come in and clean up our mess' jobs wanted to hire me to manage their teams/projects. Not ideal but it paid well and I have a pretty limited pool of bog standard dev work (or worse, internal IT dev) where I live anyways.
I am with you on that. applying for jobs indiscriminately is bad. but right now llms have got to a point where they are pretty good at pattern matching job requirements with skills in my resume. it's smart enough to not apply for php heavy projects/jobs when given a MERN stack developer resume.
I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is based both on number and quality of your leads.
With automated hiring spam and our industry's tenuous grasp of basic integrity with actual HN posts proudly boasting of their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs, several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies have already returned to "on site" interviews to cut down on the proverbial chaff.
The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.
A candidate who wants that job will figure out some way to have ChatGPT help them in a way you can't detect, even if it also has an impact on their ass health.
If you are dumb enough not to hire someone who is able to integrate ChatGPT from analbeads into a conversation while looking natural then that is on you.
I’d be absolutely fine going in person to interview for a remote job if I thought I had any reasonable chance of success with your process. We are talking about where I’m going to be working for at least the next few years. That’s kind of a big deal.
Yeah, it's not about the in-person trip, it's about the trip multiplied by the probability that your application will be seriously considered as a near finalist.
Yeah I get that. My friends (the hiring managers) are in relatively large tech hubs (Austin and Seattle), so from what I understand 90% of the applicants have been "locally sourced". It'd be another story entirely if you had to travel a significant distance just for an interview.
> The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.
Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.
I mean.... IMHO self titled "solopreneurs" throwing together a for-profit web app that runs in the background to feed an applicant answers from ChatGPT just so they can cheat en masse on an exam feels like a far cry from old school phreakers building blue boxes in their basement to stick it to Ma Bell.
What I find most infuriating is that people just don’t care, even when faced with enough evidence that their strategy of mass applying even when they are not a good fit is failing. It just makes it harder for everybody else as you said.
It all ends up being a nasty feedback loop. (Especially) junior people in a somewhat tough market for tech end up spamming resumes so companies respond with pretty crappy algorithmic filters which basically somewhat randomly toss most of the resumes into the bit bucket. Rinse and repeat.
But per downthread comment, applicants don't care if their actions make things worse for the market as a whole. And it's not clear if they should as a one-turn game. (As someone else remarked, Prisoner's Dilemma and all that.)
There's actually a solution around this: name and shame! Just like bad companies get called out on GlassDoor, companies should create a reputation system for prospective employees (e.g. a professional credit score). This already exists for potential tenants, so I don't really understand why it doesn't exist for potential employees given they occur at about the same frequency and have a similar amount of money trading hands.
Applicants have long sprayed and prayed even when it involved sending physical letters. Some of the current systems have decreased the effort per company applied-to but, for entry-level employees, it was rarely a carefully-targeted thing for new professionals. It was always a numbers game to some degree although admittedly the scale and tools involved have changed.
The smaller scale in the past made it so managers either knew (at least by reputation) the person submitting the resume, or it was not too expensive to find out. Nowadays, jobs are getting 100x as many applications, most of which are far lower in quality.
University admissions has followed a similar trend, going from 5–10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to 20–30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't increase as much because (1) each application costs money, and (2) most universities expect a cover letter. It still costs quite a bit to filter the applicants, but the fee helps pay for that.
The "solution," such as it is, is that companies strongly bias towards referrals and managers towards people they personally know. And, from some conversations I've had, that is exactly what is happening. With the result that it's tough for junior people with no real networks (OK maybe their school is a signal) because companies really don't want to sift all the junk they're getting and I don't really blame them.
I'm not sure what other solutions look like: Gatekeeping of various forms including institutions and certifications, letters of introduction like essentially the US service academies, standardized tests, informal networks, etc.
There's two distinct reasons why more qualified candidates might get skipped over:
1) There is too much noise occluding their signal.
2) There is a form of gatekeeping going on.
Gatekeeping only really works in exploitative systems (e.g. "me and my children are the masters, and you and your children are the slaves") or when the noise is so high that companies wouldn't gain much from not gatekeeping (e.g. Harvard admissions in the late 1800s).
So, if you don't exist in an exploitative system, providing more signal is going to both benefit deserving candidates and punish gatekeeping companies. I don't see why a reputation score would increase gatekeeping.
At the end of the day, every applicant could be ranked on their ability at the job. Wouldn't it be best for everyone—companies and prospective employees—to know where they rank up, so they don't waste time applying to hundreds of jobs or sifting through hundreds of applications?
The only people who are hurt are the hustlers: people who spend far more time hustling for a position than gaining the skills needed to do well in that position. Their goal is the extreme limit of noise, where success rate is directly proportional to how many applications are filled out, and I have no sympathy for the destruction of the commons (that I have to live in).
For a lot of things, hustling is probably at least as important to me as a hiring manager as rather amorphous "skills needed to do well in that position" at least as an entry-level employee. Of course, I don't want someone who has none of the skills needed for the job in most cases but they probably don't know most of what they need to learn anyway.
Weak signal: you only went to class and did OK in them.
Strong signal: you had an internship, or undergrad research experience, or part-time employment as a TA/tutor, or have a completed project to show off, or some kind of non-trivial community/group/club/fraternity leadership.
Really strong signal: you published a paper with someone I know and they recommend you to me.
Absolutely, it's very rare for an undergrad to be on a paper. But that's what makes it such a strong signal: it shows they had the grit and maturity to contribute to a research effort to completion, in a team with people more experienced than they are. In an interview, it gives them something non-trivial to talk about and be proud of. That's very likely a strong junior candidate.
There are a ton of things you might look at for a newly graduated undergrad beyond grades: research and other academic projects, sports teams, editor on a newspaper, etc.
The weird thing to me is that I don't see this happening at the large FAANG companies - referrals don't seem to move the needle whatsoever anymore, and not just for me but for quite a few of the people in my network.
On the flipside I'm not finding good resources to find startups to apply to that don't have hundreds of applicants already. There's no good answer the market has come up with as far as I can tell, so everything just gets worse for everyone as a result.
They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but also prohibited by law in many places because of their widespread abuse.
There’s also a more general idea in competition law that companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory to this.
Define the objective metric that you would use to assess a candidate's work ethic or reputation credit score. Would LinkedIn issue it, as if it were a popularity contest?
And come to think of it, actually, credit scores can be gamed. It's well known that when companies and territories get credit scores they are largely a con game, as in based on the conifdence the raters have on your future performance, and not objective reality.
Likewise, credit scores can be juiced and tools exist to help you improve them and track them. But a bad credit score doesn't always mean fiscal mismanagement. It could be loans from a predatory lender or due to a medical expense or something completely outside the context the credit check is to be used for. Credit scores tell you if someone has lots of money first, and if they are smart with their money second. People with financial means often have good credit scores but can be as likely to default if their circumstances change. Perhaps more likely if the amounts of money at play are greater. People got those subprime mortgages with great credit scores, somehow.
So... Yeah, credit scores for loans are a form of outsourcing of responsibilities. But the point is somewhat well taken. The equivalent in hiring to a credit score isn't to ask banks but to do reference checks and ask a network or former manager about a hire.
Credit scores can easily be discriminatory as much as criminal charges (without due process, at least) and other unfair systems. We just normalize it because it works for most people. We poke fun at it when other countries try to come up with e.g. a social credit score, though.
Just like how many companies have methods available to them to remove bad glassdoor reviews (or make fake 5-star reviews), this system is even more rife for abuse.
Credit scores seem to be pretty robust? Maybe this kind of system would work:
1. A third-party assigns everyone a hidden score, and gives them a cryptographic signing key.
2. They can sign off on one-time lookups to companies they apply to. Every time their credit score is looked up, it decreases to disincentivize "spray and pray".
3. Companies are incentivized to go directly to the third-party (to ensure truthiness), and not divulge the score to other companies (since they are in a competition).
4. The actual algorithms used to determine scores should stay hidden to avoid manipulation. However, how do you also ensure accuracy? Maybe have several dozen reputation companies, and apply Shapley values based on hiring decisions. To avoid correlation, you should only update a reputation's weight when the hiring decision didn't query it.
You also want colleges to signal to their applicants, not force them to also signal for their alumni. The two will naturally be correlated, but you can do better by specializing.
Maybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview, etc, etc.
If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes after submission that claims "after careful consideration..." then of course I'm not going to spend any more time than that applying to any jobs anymore. Prove a human actually took the time to review my resume and I'll actually apply to your company like a human.
If I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute writing each person a personalised no sorry, that’s 20% of my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually reviewing the resume).
I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written).
Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.
This. Just as doctors or lawyers or civil engineers can't do their jobs before being vetted by their own professional bodies it's time we do the same for software engineering.
If all you did was an entry level "bar exam, it'd be pretty much useless. A newly graduated CompSci student, is really just an apprentice, who may then (if they continue to work hard, and are given challenging work) go on to become a master craftsman/journeyman over the next 5/10/20 years.
The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
Doctors go through residency after passing their exams, we should have the same for engineers. Civil engineers have layers of seniority and designs of junior engineers have to be reviewed and approved by senior engineers, we should have the same.
I don't assume it "wasn't looked at", but I absolutely do think that a lot of the time it "wasn't understood" because the recruiters reading it only have very simply "keyword lookup" ability, instead of actually reading the resume.
I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".
A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."
Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
> but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer time spent on screening alone. That’s not a good use of time when most of the resumes are a straight no.
I’m assuming your writing style is different in professional environments, but if it’s not, and I saw even like 10% of the snark you’ve put here, I’d instantly dismiss you unless we were hiring for a principal into fellowship IC role and you were a 100% match.
If you’re writing your resume to be read by software engineers or sysadmins, you’re writing for the wrong audience. That’s not their fault for being “incompetent”, it’s yours.
I don’t really put any snark into my resume, so I can’t tell you how successful that would be.
I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.
I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.
God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well.
Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback at first.
A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.
So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.
If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.
> A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me.
This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.
Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.
But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates will feel like you didn’t properly consider them.
The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.
See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2 months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so common
I think there's something wrong with a hiring process where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long - they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and if good will be snapped up.
The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.
I think part of it may be they're not saying no until someone else is actually hired just in case they need a fallback, so everyone else gets to wait however long it takes for the role to be filled, most likely...
> So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.
Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)
I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has happened a few times. I've been given technical questions in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer pretty much tells me that I'm wrong.
For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.
I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"
The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.
So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."
We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".
Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.
Not sure how the dialog went irl, but if the conversation was that adversarial and with as little diplomacy applied, I'd not hire the person nor accept the role if I was on either side of it...
I think people are just upset when they submit a resume, or even go on an interview, and get NO response at all .. I don't think most people care about feedback - they just want a response. A one-line auto response would be fine.
Yep. As an undergrad, one of my first "proper" interviews was with Mozilla for an internship. I was obviously super excited since I actually cared about their products. I spent a lot of time carefully preparing for the two rounds of interviews, just to get ghosted! Sent a follow-up email a couple weeks later -- no response! I was crushed!
Not the person you're responding to, but if you give any kind of specific feedback, then you're effectively saying "Reason X is why I didn't hire you".
Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.
Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.
Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.
That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.
> 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies have created
Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.
When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.
I think their main complaint (or at least mine would be) is the laziness in many companies recruitment strategies. As an applicant in the software space I used to only apply to roles where I fit 70% or more of the qualifications but there is no difference in how often I get an interview compared to blindly applying to anything in the web space. I have 0 incentive to take the time to only apply to jobs I'm qualified for.
This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
>When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.
Then why not send the automated responses (or nothing) to the obvious spam appliers and save the feedback for the clearly more legitimate applications? If the argument is that so few applications are legit, then it should be proportionally few emails to send.
Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.
The weird part is that your response to being ignored as a unique person is to treat companies as though they are all exactly the same. The relationship is not assymetrical. I also wonder whether the signals we interpret from the application process have much correlation with whether the job is actually worthwhile?
I also find it hard to sympathize. This is an industry that is notorious for emailing software developers with irrelevant job offers.
We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a problem if individuals do that in reverse?
> it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves
You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.
Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
Alas, in this case it appears that unchecked competition and automation have led to a divergent outcome, creating worse outcomes for everyone.
Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and individual candidates usually can’t afford lobbyists.
I’ve been hiring for teams for a few years now, and I’ve heard people lament these things like you are. In practice I’ve not seen any of these “smart” scanning techniques used, it’s a recruiter comparing resumes to a checklist I gave to them (5-ish years experience, maybe a degree role dependent, or something that you think is super relevant, one of c#/java/kotlin, hiring for a mid level role so we expect some amount of experience at being self sufficient) and they filter the hundreds down to 10-15 that they screen and pass 4-5 on to me.
We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us their consulting services. That’s before you even get to “are they lying?”
Sure - that's how things are meant to work, with recruiters providing a valuable filtering service, but it does seem that many companies are now using (poor quality) AI screening, as well as a slew of abusive application practices (the ghosting. etc), and it seems any mutual respect between hiring company and candidate is disappearing. I don't know what the solution is.
My point is that that had been my experience hiring in a 10 person company and a 30k person company, and that the “suggested” AI screening isn’t happening - it’s probably that your application is the same as the other 300 applications that went in.
I haven't experienced it myself (haven't applied for a job in a long time), but there are lots of reports here on HN of people getting online applications rejected withing minutes, or late at night - definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes. This has been going on for a long time - it's not just a recent "AI" thing - resumes used to get rejected for not having the right keywords on them.
> lots of reports of people getting online applications rejected within minutes
Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone and pc is my work email. It’s probably prioritised wrong, but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an application that doesn’t meet the tech stack or YOE requirements when I have 20 who do, I’m just going to reject them.
> or late at night
ATS let you schedule emails. I used to send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK
> definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes
I don’t doubt it, but I doubt that it’s rampant to the degree you’d believe on this site. I’d instead that it’s far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter, is spending about 15 seconds looking at “does the tech stack match, how much experience, and how many other candidates are there that I think have an edge”. The people on this site are a small minority of very smart folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a topic you are an expert in, you’ll quickly realise that you shouldn’t take everything you read on here as absolute.
Another suggestion - Reach out to two different recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might need to pay them to do it). You’ll get two totally different responses. Both might work, and neither might work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria. Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the past 5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold to fix that problem was snake oil.
What's the time frame here, what's your sample size for applying to jobs yourself, and what's your sample size for doing hiring (ie how many different companies)? I'm guessing that your personal sample size is extremely limited - not just in quantity but also in geographic area.
Of course my guess could be way off, but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
> AI screening
There's been aggressive keyword filtering since long before LLMs exploded.
I’ve been hiring in anger since 2018, applied for 1 job (sent about 10 applications) and hired over three companies. First was an 800 person company that grew to 2000 while I was there, second I was hire number 2 for a startup and I hired the full 15 person engineering team, and a decent chunk of the non engineering product/test roles into. 50 person company . Third (current role) I’ve been involved in hiring about 8 people in the last 6 months that I’ve been here. It’s a 45 person company, but a subsidiary of a 30k multinational whose hiring practices we use.
> but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
As an anecdote, I posted on who’s hiring here, and we used a separate job requisition for HN, (this was my last job where we went from 2 -> 15 people). We got about 30 applications in the 7 days following that on that req, and of those 30, only one came even remotely close to meeting the requirements on the JD - we were looking for someone with a few years experience in a Java like language, in a Europe/US time zone. Most of the candidates failed both of those criteria, hard. My point being that people who are frustrated with their situation are likely to be more vocal than someone who isn’t.
I’ve spent enough time on HN reading about topics I know a lot about, and seeing people confidently claim how X is easy or if they just Y, and they’re totally wrong. I know a decent amount about working on the hiring side - it’s been a core component of my job for the last 6 years. I’ve worked with recruiters both internal and external, spent far more time with greenhouse than any engineer should ever have to do.
My feeling is that there’s far less sophistication going on, and the dearth of human responses (which is problematic) lets people make up their own reasons as to why it’s not working when the reality is that there’s just a hell of a lot of applicants for every single job.
> If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it?
Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.
Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.
> I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
Doesn’t work that way, in my experience. The people who game their way through the application process don’t suddenly switch to honest and high performing employees after they start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how little or how low quality work they can get away with.
The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant and loyal employee isn’t realistic.
> Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions.
Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.
Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.
>This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.
Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring side, you often never see the applications of many of the people genuinely applying because your stupid automated filters determined they weren't qualified.
As a side note, for a person with a decade of experience in IT, its currently taking roughly 1500 applications per pre-screen interview to give you an idea where the market is at today (and over the past 2 years with the mass adoption of AI).
Less than 1/100th of 1%.
You should also see what I had to say about the history of slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched; salt the earth strategy for finding labor.
What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working (given the current environment) to even get to the point where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize them for the value they could potentially provide? If you pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what that first role provides? The economics of things are important.
You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations (delusions) back to some more close to reality.
> Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.
Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to, that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).
I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or more applications.
Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills, but there is a difference between interview skills and engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career without having to heavily interview before (senior IC level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.
So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't have a strong background and work ethic.
Responsibility needs to be taken on the hiring side. Some companies post jobs with no intent to hire [1]. 70% of hiring managers surveyed say this is a morally acceptable, 45% of hiring managers have said they’ve done it.
This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.
Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.
If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.
It's certainly a mutual escalation issue. Even a few bad-actors on either side can catalyze more bad-actors on the other, especially since most of the badness involves abuse of scale.
For sure, I’d hire this guy. He’s solved a challenge with a technical solution. He’s proving his qualifications by punching back at a system that could be made much less painful than it is with automation.
Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.
'We can use automation tools to just throw away your resume, but heaven forbid the average person does' isn't a take average people care about.
I look forward to the day the average person has the same level of access to agents to counter all this. Oh, Wall Street Journal you want to make it difficult to unsubscribe? You want me to call, waste time on the phone, etc. OK, I'll just have my AI agent call and take up your calling agents time, increasing your costs.
... my AI agent goes through phone tree... finally connected to agent...
WSJ Support Person:'Hello, Wall Street Journal support'
My AI Agent: 'please hold as I connect with my human'
hold music plays...
My AI Agent: 'sorry, we are taking longer to connect than normal, please hold while you are connected'
hold music plays...
I've had situations where a reapplication to the same spot (with the same resume/details) I got auto-rejected from would yield an acceptance.
I blame all the ASTs and companies that fail to give any feedback whatsoever other than a generic "We went another way". If you can't give people the 5 minutes of effort of looking over their resume, why do you expect them to respect your time instead?
I am sure it’s tough for you, but imagine being someone looking for work when you probably don’t even realize the massive amounts of noise on the employee side. I get friends asking me for input on whether I think that a job listing may be a fraudulent or scammy listing, and that’s from the top job board sites. People have zero trust in the system because the corporations have created this toxic hell of commoditized humans where you are now all the sudden competing with the whole rest of the world in this poss as t-American transitional hell we are currently in.
There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500 jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply, let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is needed.
You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven’t been replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more savings.
Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the problem.
The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.
The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.
The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.
The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.
I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.
> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max
Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?
Yes we can. Resume spamming is not a new phenomenon. Ten years ago we were already struggling to sift through the nonsense at the big co i worked for, llms just expanded the “tam”.
I don't understand why more companies don't leverage in person events. It's something my state does for government jobs and as an applicant, it's so much easier to chat up an agency rep about what they're looking for and schedule a formal interview.
It’s used by every single big co and a lot of smaller ones too. It just doesn’t scale well when you need to hire hundreds of engineers every year. I never actually seen public job postings bring in many leads that actually convert to offers. It’s one of the worst channels which is why candidates are getting such crap experience going that route
Public job board listings have been spammed by fake jobs called ghost jobs. Candidates must overcome that to find real jobs, and the boards in general do not remove said postings. Candidates are forced to identify characterize and remove listings on their side (extra work and cost), through strict OSINT background searches. Businesses have forced candidates to bear increasing arbitrary costs just to find a job and this is a longstanding trend (half a century). Comparisons could easily be made of a slave master in uncivilized times, where mental coercion and torture has replaced physical torture.
What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.
Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of cooperation among companies in various little things they have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over decades.
The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing power, not even increasing).
The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves in many respects. Companies care far more for short term profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise as you call it).
Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no we can't have this.
(The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landis)
Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.
Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out, and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind people are today.
Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good amount of time.
Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.
When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in the first place by the actions taken.
You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed, larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when in a downturn there may be nothing wrong.
Its completely irrational when these people then say they can't find talent. The brain drain is real.
Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent candidates which your HR departm...
The inquisition being as bad as you think it was was mostly protestant porn/propaganda. Protestant countries burned far more people and for centuries after the catholics had stopped.
You are very mistaken, and it shows you haven't studied enough to rationally discuss the subject matter.
Of course later, in time, countries impacted more people. Population grows with time, and any rational comparison along these lines would need to be normalized against population, but the truth in the ambiguity of the latter phrase doesn't make the former phrase true.
The inquisition lasted quite a long time (1478-~1820), it has been attributed to the collapse of Portugal/Spain as a national superpower of the time (which was dependent on sea power), the brain drain from fleeing refugees (mostly Jews) was also quite impactful (for France), and it was self-financing. The events became less about heresy, and more about seizing wealth domestically, while creating an environment of persecution for cover. The impacts of it are still felt today in those localities where it was worst.
In terms of the many domains important for measuring the health of a country, these events dramatically impacted the state of things towards the negative across multiple critical domains, as well as their neighbors.
Its improper to discount, minimize, and nullify (through fallacy) both events and their effects, that have been well established by experts without providing some proper basis.
Characterizing it solely as propaganda in isolation isn't a valid characterization. Many people died, or were imprisoned and abused, and the surviving records show this.
Population levels are not the same, this comparison is without basis.
You also assume the formal documented executions are the only deaths where people were killed and died, they are not.
About 5 minutes of 'proper' research based in method, will establish that you are mistaken and don't know what you are talking about. This is the problem when you try to have an AI think for you, you get it wrong, and potentially become delusional.
The inquisition lasted almost three centuries. At its height, Spain had a population of about 7.5 million people. Many prosecutions occurred, but few executions as part of trials. The majority of people died from maltreatment, torture, and executions (absent trials) and these records are sparse in the historical record, but there are credible records to support more died than were executed.
The mortality rate was also significantly higher than it is today, and the families of the accused individuals often died from poverty as a result of fear from guilt-by-association (if you were to include that, most don't). Additionally, the Spanish inquisition inspired surrounding countries to similar acts of terror, and in the Latin America's as well. We are only talking about Spain here. The full global death count as a result of the inquisition is much much higher.
We know this accurately because it was a legal proceeding that left paper trails which can be studied.
Your claim that it led to the collapse of portugal and spain seems quite wild. And certainly doesn't explain why you think it had no ill effect in protestant countries that kept burning people for 200 years more.
Agnostic, and you are quite wrong about a lot of things.
Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.
You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.
Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.
The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.
When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.
Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.
This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.
In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.
There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.
>It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.
I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait until next year to see if I can get that now while still carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new positions.
I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as possible.
There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that increase.
You can't have many of these experiences before you become jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't get rewarded for it.
I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If that means spamming LLM applications for the next position, then so be it I guess.
Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that many people get far more money for far less effort than a Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all levels below where I'm at).
All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the world really works, so can you really blame people for getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken advantage of and be a sucker - do you?
How long has your career been? I’ve been doing software professionally for 20 years and the correlation I’ve seen is huge. Not necessarily inside a single company - but after awhile you get jobs from networking & people you worked with in the past. If none of your ex colleagues want to work with you again, it’ll become a lot harder for you to get hired & promoted.
When I see stuff like that I can't help but wonder if the people who are satisfied by it are the ones who fall upwards and of course say the system is working perfectly.
Maybe I fell upwards. Maybe I earned it. Doesn't matter for the following:
I'm now on the side of the table where I frequently make personnel decisions: hire, promote, offer a new role, offer a new assignment, merit adjustment, expand a successful team, disband or merge an unsuccessful team into another, transfer in, transfer out, put on a PIP, etc. Most of the good things on that list go to people who demonstrate ability and results, and rarely do those results come without effort. Most of the bad things on that list go to people who demonstrate an inability to deliver results, which is sometimes related to a lack of effort.
> But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
Job seekers do not care and should not care what you want. They want the job, you are paid to find the best candidate. Just arriving at a situation where you get flooded with hundreds of resumes, means that you or your organisation has failed with what you were trying to do. You should have had hand picked candidates ready in the pipeline when it came time to hire. You are a hiring manager after all.
>But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
This is just a natural response to the automatic screening methods that have been used by the hiring side for years. Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race started by the hiring side.
Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought about that before screening automatically. This is on you.
Exactly. I've referred many ex-colleagues to a specific position, their CV was perfect but an automated system rejected them so that was that. I can't even as a human being go talk to the director because the applicant status was "rejected" so their hands were tied too.
Too bad, fix hiring. A five interview cycle that takes nearly two weeks which keeps me from applying to other companies who are shitting up job listings with fake or ghost listings is reducing the SNR of hiring dramatically.
The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line of replying to recruiters only to be met with “contract to hire <20% of market rate and you must move to Nowhere, MN” when clearly your profile says what metro you are attached to.
Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my network.
Most (not all) position descriptions for software engineers include requirements for experience with particular tools, applications, or 'frameworks'.
Would you hire a statistician that didn't have 'n' years of MS Excel experience, or had never used Pandas?
If I were a statistician with 20 years experience, would I even apply to positions listing those as requirements?
It's an interesting problem, as giving information on the position requirements clues applicants into the game they need to play and also runs the risk of turning some otherwise qualified people away.
What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews candidates who are not selected get not a single honest useful feedback and is treated like human scrap with a soulless rejection. Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy for the corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at my disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don’t care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.
I also wonder how many applications are from people who just send applications to hit the minimum needed to receive unemployment but don't actually want the specific job.
Congrats on your privileged position! I'm glad you are able to retire, but not sure this is the best time to crow about it.
I'm trying to eke out enough money to put in my 401K and hope that when it's time for me to retire in a few decades, I'll have enough to scrape by on and the economy hasn't exploded by then and render my investments worthless.
As someone who automates everything and normally loves this type of thing, my approach for job hunting has been way different. Instead of spray and pray, I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise. Everything 100% manual and focused, no more than 8 total companies.
Maybe spray and pray works if you’re more junior, but later in your career you’ll want to be very picky about where you spend your time interviewing because the roles are long term and have a huge impact on your life.
Agree. You need to see it from the other side. Most likely, they are receiving 100+ applications, so the chance that your application will be seen is too low.
I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).
I think GP means they stop at this point to ensure that they are giving all of the resumes a pretty fair shake by being fresh.
Afaik, any kind of slush-pile reading (including grading, which is probably the best researched) tends to get less fair as the process wears on the reader.
GP isn't optimizing for finishing the pile, but for making the most of what's in it.
I do. Credentials-wise I have BS in one of the STEM and currently enrolled in MS CS with intent to pursue PhD in Maths/CS. I have around 8 YoE and worked from Series B startups to IBs.
I want to give everyone a fair shake (including reading cover letters) and for me, resume fatigue sets in if I read more than 50.
I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise.
Figuring out how to get there means figuring out how not to get ghosted, not just blasting off a quick application and crossing fingers. I imagine that probably means reaching out to people in their network at the company, learning about their hiring practices and how people get hired there, etc.
When was the most recent time you tried this, and for what level of role was it? I believe this could absolutely be effective pre-2023, or for very high level roles. I don't think it's currently viable advice for ~Senior level engineers, who are currently competing against thousands of other applications, many of whom were generated specifically for the given role.
Speaking as someone currently involved in hiring for Senior roles at my company: We have hundreds of resumes, most of which are garbage. We're not seeing a lot of evidence of large numbers of people working hard to tailor their resume to the role, so doing so would absolutely help you in our case.
Even more so, if we got a referral right now from within the company we'd absolutely skip them straight to the interviews. Dealing with resumes sucks right now as an employer, and we want to avoid that stage as much as you do.
I’m not going to get into my specific work history in the spirit of trying not to put more metadata about myself out there, but I can confidently say referrals are still king and I have witnessed those results.
I have a hard time believing that the market is as dire as people say it is at least right now approaching 2025. I see peers who are getting laid off get back into jobs, it’s just taking a few months longer than it used to. It’s just not a magical hot job market like it used to be.
A good indicator is to look at Meta’s employee count. It’s down dramatically since 2022 but they still have more employees working for them than the last day of 2021.
Basically my approach as well. The problem is that your well-thought-through application will get lost in a sea of applicants (many using tools similar to the one shown above). The tools used by the recruiters/HR also suck and can be easily gamed (ie strategically spreading keywords/phrases throughout the resume even if the candidate has no actual experience). The end result is hiring managers cannot find good candidates to interview, and good candidates cannot get interviews.
The core problem is not that the systems suck but that so many people in IT lost their jobs in the last 2-3 years so that they don't have a choice other than to spray-and-pray (in the end of the day you need to put the food on the table).
Things won't improve until hiring recovers (increase in labor demand), and some IT professionals probably will pivot to other industries (decrease in labor supply), as it happened in 2000 and again in 2008.
This sounds like a good and noble pursuit, but I would be able to take exactly one ghosting or premature rejection before abandoning it completely. There are so many BS reasons applications are ignored, I can’t see this approach working well. Maybe if you can network your way to a manager or something
There are no foolproof methods. Shotgunning makes it much harder to get past the recruiter screen. Yes the high touch method leads to larger feelings of rejection but its also more likely to actually work.
So do you network yourself into the companies then to get an interview? Or do you apply online?
I'd like to know more about a manual approach.
I think both approaches are valid. I took the automated approach to online dating, married now. So that worked out.
Taking the automated approach for companies will probably work in a similar fashion as online dating. However, unlike online dating, I feel very strong targeted approaches have a chance of working better as long as you get to the interview stage.
Targeted approaches don't work with online dating as the biggest issue is figuring out with whom you have chemistry. For work, there's no such thing to figure out - not to the extent as it is required like romantic intimacy.
> What would a targeted approach to online dating be?
Courting someone, winning someone over. It's done in the offline world. I haven't thought about it much when it comes to online dating. I should've been a bit sharper on that.
When it comes to dating, I always went for the high volume approach. So I really shouldn't be speaking about a targeted approach. I guess I did because I was trying too hard to draw a parallel to applying to jobs.
So my mind just went:
applying online online dating
volume 1 2
targeted 3 4
But perhaps quadrant 4 doesn't really exist and I really was just shoehorning approaches of applying to jobs online into online dating because I saw this 2x2 matrix.
Is there a solution that doesn’t expose you to the entirety of the internet at one time? Proactive networking maybe? Asking existing employees if they have friends looking for jobs?
It’s astounding that we, as an industry, are so averse to licensing developers. It solves the resume spam problem and the repetitive LeetCode round(s) that every company now wants. We also don’t have to settle for the licensing process other industries have—ours can be more inclusive of alternative development backgrounds, while still providing a meaningful quality filter.
Yep, I've talked about this at length for years. We need to bring back the PE Exam to help guarantee some minimal level of competency in prospective applicants.
But this is one of the most entitled industries in the universe. Even the mere notion of suggesting academic degrees, PE Exams and other forms of "gatekeeping" is tantamount to shouting Voldemort's name through a megaphone.
To be fair, there is a very good case for ignoring applications that list different certifications if you’re hiring. I fear the same would logic would apply to licensing.
Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter, and much gatekeeping has been reduced.
Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes). It is terrible for jobs that require professional taste.
Tell me how you would create a license for a graphic designer or UX specialist.
I actually fail to understand idealists that believe that licensing might even work. Who are y'all?
> Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter [...] Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes).
Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.
Nope nothing wrong about it at all. Some company’s may structure their business in certain ways to take various trade offs, exactly how software devs make certain trade offs. Then of course there’s shady and illegal stuff you’re getting at, but that’s a separate topic.
> Creativity and thought going into accounting ought to be illegal
Our society is poor at creating scales and then selecting a cutoff point for illegality. There are 0b10 types of people: binary thinkers and grey area thinkers.
All-or-nothing thinking (often also referred to as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘dichotomous thinking’, ‘absolutist thinking’, or ‘binary thinking’) is a common form of cognitive distortion or ‘unhelpful thinking style’. People who think in all-or-nothing terms may also act in equivalently extreme ways. They may veer, for example, between complete abstinence and ‘binges’, or between extreme effort and none.
yeah I had a MSCE, I took it off my resume, I think most people with qualifications use it to show they've reached the minimum level. It doesn't show you're in the top 10% or even top 50%.
The paper ceiling is a silly gatekeeping done by those who have made it.
I would be in favor of licensing knowing it would probably exclude me unless of course it does not require a university degree. I was not born into a family of means and being autodidactic allowed me to excel beyond my upbringing.
The best path would be to have journeyman type of pathway.
Basically you find a grad right now and make them do a coding test. Something is broken there.
A degree could include the vocational qualification as a 1 year study, but having the vocation qualification alone would save youngsters a lot of money and reduce the burden on hiring. You could even still interview coding questions but the application process can remove the spam/ai bullshit to some extent. "Can they code?" is answered.
What percentage of what you do as a software engineer has direct linkage to computer science?
My guess for most of us is "not very much at all", several of the best people I've worked with as programmers did not have a CS degree, and I've interviewed people with CS degrees who could not write a function to sum an array of integers in any language of their choosing, meaning "honoring their degree" would have been an unwise choice.
What does solving random puzzles from Leetcode have to do with day-to-day engineering work? IMHO, the emphasis should be on previous experience, CS domain knowledge and systems architecture / design. Maybe degrees need to be fixed to convey more useful knowledge...
In my nearly 20 year career, I have never gotten a job by applying directly. The few times I’ve tried it was shockingly bad. I feel for anyone where that’s the only option they have.
My advice is to invest heavily in your professional network and when you have one, treat it like the special garden that it is. This takes years to cultivate. I also see people try to come at it from a very transactional unauthentic angle which will always fail. The right way to approach it is honestly quite simple: make friends. Be nice. Help people. Mentor. Etc. Don’t expect anything from it. People remember that stuff. Opportunities find you.
In the middle of fruitless multi-month job search, I manually view LinkedIn/indeed job sites daily and look for new positions, going through requirements, making sure I have the skills and experience (also helps with understanding if I need to upskill in certain areas), then look up the company, the industry it's in, etc. By the time I'm ready to apply to the position I know I'm interested in and a good fit for, there's a few hundred applications already (LinkedIn shows the count to the applicants). I'm like, how is this possible, it's only been 3 days?..
well, manual application is also a thing, there are people who literally make it their job to apply to job listings. you can find people offering their services on r/slavelabour. some times they take a flat rate/job application, sometimes they do percentage of your first paycheck on new job.
Just for your consideration, in my experience Linkedin is pretty much the worst place to look for a job right now if you're a real human that actually knows how to do their work. Everyone just clicks apply to everything just to see what sticks and the signal to noise ratio is absolute garbage. If a company has a jobs section on their homepage, that should always be preferred.
Someone who works at LinkedIn told me that Linkedin measures success by how many times a user opens the app. It would not surprise me if the numbers are exaggerated to make someone look good for a promotion. My take is that it must drive engagement somehow.
In a similar way, recruiters post ghost jobs to gather data and make companies look like they are growing.
A great way to test this is to wait for the email inviting you to an interview.
The emotional rollercoaster of selling yourself on a company only for it not to work out hurts too much. It's also a cost borne only by the applicant. It's easy to want to kick that can down the road until you're sure that you have a shot where some part, at least, is within your own control.
It will never be entirely down to your own performance and actions. Lots of job descriptions out there are for roles without a budget, or at companies with hiring moratoria, or where there's already a successful applicant waiting for a formal job offer.
The effort you put into researching an application, IMO, should be a function of the effort required by the applicant to proceed and the respect given to applicants by employers. The effort for a phone interview is very low. The respect is near zero.
The biggest issue for me was filtering through software engineer job listings, since I wouldn't be interested or qualified for listings using various tech stacks.
I made a Chrome extension for LinkedIn that would filter out listings to exclude certain keywords, e.g. "Rust" or "Java" and find only listings that applied to me. From there I could manually apply and track my job application status. This saved much more time. I had a few macros to paste information which sped up the process.
Scrolling down to the bottom of this post brought up the "please subscribe!" nag screen and also immediately sent me back to the top of the page. The modal has poor contrast on the close button, so it was just confusing.
If you must nag for subscriptions, you might want to try and find a way that does it without interfering with page interactivity.
Every job I've applied to has involved me researching the company, deciding whether I understood it, was right for the role, and wanted to work for them, and then tailoring my resume and cover letter to what that role needed. In my life, I've maybe sent 25 applications, gotten 6-7 interviews, and been hired 4 times. Pretty good batting average, and I'm not by any means especially qualified or accomplished. For me, automated spam has not been the answer, laser targeting has been.
I too would like to know more about @karaterobot's specific circumstances here, because while I understand your sentiment, it's a numbers game for SWE applicants like me. Of course there are some companies I would prefer to work at, but I don't think @karaterobot's experience is realistic right now.
I was looking for work in 2021-2022, and an approach like yours got me a job after interviewing with circa 10 companies. Unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of office politics and had to leave in early 2024.
At the start of my 2024 job search I again tried targeted search, targeting was good enough that I had a circa 1:10 application to interview ratio. It took over 50 companies before I found my current role. The market is much tougher now than it was a few years ago.
I hear there was a time when companies were eager/desperate to hire. Those were good years for job seekers.
It’s the same for me. When I read people say they send hundreds of job applications I don’t understand how that’s even possible. Any time I’ve been looking for a job I usually find maybe five jobs that actually interest me and I think I would be a good fit for, and then another five that I maybe don’t quite meet the all the requirements or don’t seem that interesting but it’s near enough that I might as well give it a go. I usually don’t make all those applications at once because I find managing more than about three applications to be a hassle.
As far as I can recall I’ve never not had an interview from an application.
I do generally use recruitment agencies so maybe that’s a factor.
It’s my understanding that most hiring managers have a similar AI-assisted filtering tools. So there are humans in either side, it’s just a bunch of garbage in between
> Format the response as a JSON object with these keys:{ "status": "success" or "error", ...
Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the generation will actually be successful?
Yes, you are right. Not to be too snide about it but this is not optimal.
You get provably better performance if you let the thing analyze the situation / think through the problem / whatever before letting it commit to choosing a status like that.
This is pretty cool, though it seems more beneficial as a neat demo project than for its actual functionality. First, automated job application submission probably doesn’t endear you to hiring managers. And, moreover, you probably don’t want to optimize your life for job hunting in the same way that you probably don’t want to optimize your life for being very good at first dates. Life is more fulfilling if you can find what you want and keep it for the long run.
It also feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing (getting past the screening for as many job as possible, regardless of fit). I personally felt like the most successful experience I had with job search (and retention) is if I knew someone at the company and just bypassed the initial resume screening altogether and hand-crafted a nuanced resume and cover letter with a strong backing from people that knew me.
I realize not everyone has that luxury but I made diligent effort to network in and out of work and it has mostly helped me filter out bad jobs/fit and save time for both parties.
I'd prefer an application to automatically fill in my data in those junk ATS systems, such as WorkDay, that pretend to parse my LinkedIn profile or a PDF resume and inevitably makes me do all the copy-paste twice.
A couple of years ago it was so bad that I stopped applying as soon as I saw that WorkDay crap pop up, regardless of the company.
If the domain of easy applications is automated entries and copy paste, then Workday is indeed the desired tooling. LinkedIn Easy Apply serves the applicant, but I can't imagine any recruiter loves it.
For Workday, use a very simple resume. No columns, no bullet points (use asterisks), no tables.
There's usually an option to upload another file near the end of the form. After it has filled in the fields using your plain resume, delete it and upload the nicer one.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] threadSo hurray for the tragedy of the commons, I guess. It was nice knowing everyone.
On a personal level, I consider the practice espoused by this article of flooding the world with automated messages without care for how it impacts anyone else to be narcissistic and morally reprehensible, not admirable, but whatever floats a person's boat.
It doesn’t matter though. The way to get actual good jobs is to be poached. And to get poached, you need to build real projects of your own that get peoples’ attention. Resume spamming is for the plebs.
This all makes me glad I am not actively looking for a new position. I always keep an eye on the job market though - I've noticed anecdotally the amount of applicants on any LinkedIn position have really amplified the last couple years. I knew the LLM driven application process was coming, but it doesn't make it suck any less.
I always assumed it's because that's where most job seekers would drop off.
It's how I got a job as an HVAC tech without any trade school exp and how I got a software dev job without any college, bootcamp, or professional exp.
Just some advice for any job seekers out there. The more annoying the job application process, the more likely you are to get hired.
Nothing succeeds like success. If you are on n attempt, and you are geared up for what you will do for n+2, usually the problem surrenders its self on n.
I wonder if the application process will switch up in the near future to people posting their profiles for then company recruiters/AI to reach out and contact since if they post a job they just get 10k automated applications.
- scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result
- take the responses with "positive sentiment" and then contact the linkedin person
Service is now connecting people with companies that already thought their generated CV was close enough to what they want. Call this a "recruitment agency".
That was my first thought when looking for jobs, but maybe I am naive, wouldn't this break their ToS?
and to be honest, I was too nerves to think about if it was risky or taboo.
Dear Hiring Manager,
I hope this message finds you well. My name is David Dodda, and I am writing to express my interest in the Software Engineer position at WIA Software Systems Inc. I am a Senior Software Developer with extensive experience in full-stack development, and I believe my skills align well with the requirements outlined in your job posting.
With a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication and over 5 years of professional experience, I have honed my capabilities in various programming languages and technologies, particularly in React, Node.js, AWS, and SQL. At Black Beard Development Group, I led the development of a privacy-focused AI platform and played a pivotal role in establishing CI/CD pipelines that improved efficiencies across our team.
Your job description emphasizes the importance of developing software solutions by studying systems flow, data usage, and work processes. In my previous roles, I have consistently evaluated user feedback to improve system designs and have successfully executed the full lifecycle of software development. Additionally, my involvement in agile methodologies and my proficiency in AWS aligns perfectly with your requirement for cloud and DevOps experience.
Furthermore, I have experience collaborating with teams to coordinate the development and integration of computer-based systems, ensuring optimal functionality and performance. My recent project involving a fantasy sports DApp required me to coordinate with various stakeholders, manage expectations, and lead technical efforts, making me well-equipped for the responsibilities at WIA Software Systems Inc.
I am particularly excited about the hybrid work arrangement offered for this role, as I believe it allows for both collaborative in-person engagement and the flexibility of remote work, which enhances productivity.
Thank you for considering my application. I have attached my resume for your review and would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background, skills, and enthusiasms align with the goals of WIA Software Systems Inc.
Best regards, David Dodda https://daviddodda.com
Also, a bit too long. Make it shorter.
I receive cover letters with typos, the wrong word used, poor punctuation etc. If candidates could use a spell checking it would be a good start.
It just has zero value. A well written cover letter on the other hand would net you a big plus
The process outlined in the post also isn't a path to writing a good cover letter. You don't want to just go over your resume again you want to either talk about things that wouldn't be there (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because you need money to feed yourself) or expanding on how something on your resume uniquely qualifies you (I worked on this project that's very similar to what your doing)
If it's lining up your resume to the job description (you want someone who can write Scala, I have used Scala in my past 3 jobs) a resume is a better format for that. But that's all the LLM has context to do.
Oh yeah, ideally you'd also tune your resume to the job too.
In 99.9% of jobs in the world, there are zero applicants for who this truly holds. You might be working at a company hiring for a job that's part of the 0.1%, not sure. Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to lie as blatantly as required.
That's a pessimistic way of looking at it, but I'm not going to claim it's wrong. I think my phrasing made it very clear that in most cases I expect if someone includes something about this their interest is going to be ahem embellished.
All the same look at it from the hiring managers side. Say you have two candidates, who appear to otherwise be equal. One seems to think the job is just like any other. The other actually seems genuinely interested in the details of food brokering, knows of your companies involvement in <big name>'s success and has thoughts on how they can apply their background in data analytics to the challenges you face.
Which candidate do you hire? Or do you really just toss a coin?
I guess it depends on how much freedom an HM has. Where I've worked, the answer has been "more than enough". Which means you can easily ask e.g. a philosophical question. Ask something unrelated to the job, see what kind of person they are. Chance they'll both respond the exact same way is negligible, and you'll very likely come out preferring one of them. Only few people lie when you give them a good question that doesn't sound like it has a "wrong" answer that would get them a minus.
Does this mean you'll necessarily get the best candidate? No, but it's better than selecting on a proxy for willingness to lie, that's how you end up with people far too good at political games, to detriment of the org.
In places where the HM has little freedom, I guess there's little choice indeed. But even then, I'd try to go with whorver sounds most happen and genuine, rather than most interested in the company per se.
We're talking about a cover letter, no one's been talked to yet. The HM has 100+ candidates who have done web applications with Python or whatever qualifies one for said job, and literally doesn't have time to talk to them all. They also can't ask them random clarifying questions about their life. There's 2 data points, cover letter and resume.
I suggested two ways to make your cover letter more than a rehash of your resume and your latching onto one of them.
Here's the thing: you'll notice in my example I didn't suggest you write "I'm deeply passionate about food brokering" (an actual company I've hired software engineers for). That's not likely to move the needle, it obviously nonsense (Even the owner is didn't meet that description), and much like saying "I've got a deep mastery of Python" it's just empty words without something backing it.
Instead I suggested learning about what the company does, thinking about what the job entails beyond just "writing software according to the tickets" and what it actually accomplishes and expressing what about that interests you.
Is that person's interest going to end up exaggerated? Sure probably. But they're actually interested enough to put in the effort to think through that, and that effort, like it or not is a signal. Even the most pessimistic view means at least they were willing to work harder at it.
But look, maybe your applying at a subprime lender or something equally parasitic and are either so desperate that your doing it anyway or just cynical enough to not care, yet still have some moralistic hangup about this. Then don't. I suggested other things you can bring to your cover letter that don't fit on a resume. But if you make your cover letter your resume but in paragraph form (which is all the AI can do, since that's the only data it has), then you've reduced those data points the manager has to decide if your worth talking to from 2 down to 1. You might as well have skipped the cover letter entirely and at least saved them some time. (Actually that's not true, because often a cover letter is expected and they'll ding you for not having it, but including a bullshit rephrasing of your resume for that reason is no less performative than the expression of interest your already bothered by)
- If the cover letter is a rehash of your resume, it's a waste of your time and mine. It certainly isn't helpful to your application, and if I have too many well-qualified applicants then it might be harmful.
- Poorly written cover letters suggest that the applicant doesn't care much about this specific opportunity, it's some sort of AI/oversees/... scam, or the applicant can't write well. They're very helpful for me when there are already other data points suggesting identity theft or similar automation (nail-in-the-coffin material). Otherwise, they're not necessarily a negative, but it's rarely advantageous to advertise a lack of some skill, and it does disqualify applicants from some roles.
- Some cover letters are especially compelling. Suppose your resume just has you as a pizza delivery driver, but your cover letter goes over the app you wrote and the data science behind it to optimize your hourly earnings. Suppose your work history is in web tech, but you're actually better at low-level optimizations and are applying here because you think that skill set is a good fit. I prefer varied backgrounds anyway, so you'll probably get some form of screening interview unless there's enough other evidence that you aren't qualified (e.g., junior experience for a senior role) -- I try to bias toward giving everyone a chance while not wasting too much of anyone's time, and I'm fine having a busier calendar to make that happen.
None of that helps you get the job though; it helps you get an interview. If your experience is that you're well qualified and usually land the job once you get into an interview, and if your cover letter has some information your resume lacks, you should definitely add one. If you normally struggle through the interview process, it'd be surprising for you to have an honest cover letter which would help you land the job in the first place, so I probably wouldn't bother.
Might be worth putting a little summary / objective in the resume file itself because of that.
The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews next.
So you end up using technology to de-evolve society back to tribes.
Still, at least we are other people who are creating this AI technology and all of its application ... so we see the pain up close and we can start to steer it in a better direction that's more healthy for society.
But you know we have to find our integrity first.
The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues.
I get that the market is bad right now and there are lot of people looking for jobs but auto submissions and flooding job sites wont work. Not for the ones that matter anyway.
Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI, interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an industry, but it’ll be 10 years from now and most people can’t wait that long.
I can’t speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-paper better qualified.
It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters. But from the hiring side, truthfully, there’s no end in sight.
I also have friends and family in Netherlands, France, and UK who help me keep tabs on how things are going in various places and where might be better locations to target for an American with a technical background looking to just up and leave the US.
win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last two jobs in Vienna
The costs will diffuse through a mix of incompetent inhouse HR and already overworked seniors and leads that now need to waste time on hiring.
Based on what you're saying, the only way to actually fix this is to fix the underlying systematic problem. No idea how you do that, but seems like the only logical way I can think of
Apply like a bot, work like a bot.
IIRC "nepotism" is specifically family/relatives, and the larger Venn-diagram circle would be "favoritism."
Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes in escrow pool.
I already saw "work" offers where YOU have to pay them their salary. As in, to employer, for the "opportunity"
There's noise all around happening.
Maybe the problem is that spamming people is free.
Enjoy. It's Nobel prize material.
We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs.
Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real people.
I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not online job postings because it's basically impossible right now with the automated resume submission companies.
And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.
During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally unskilled.
Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while profiting $4,000–$5,000 per month from the arrangement.
We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving simple LeetCode problems, in person.
Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a landscape?
Not yet!
You must work in a super specialized industry, then
But arguably, a candidate who hasn't ever had to contemplate the concept of "linked list" but can derive the necessary ideas on the spot given the basic design, has some useful talents.
I am sure 12+ years of experience should be able to do it easily.
I mean when I write a cover letter I take the cover letter I took the last time and change a couple of names and that's it.
Why do I want the job? I want the job because I do work for money, I don't have some idea that your SaaS is really giving me anything that any of the others I've worked at in the past didn't give me - no company means anything to me aside from having reasonably interesting problems to work on and hopefully not onerous working environment.
...
"Click here to submit to having your resume processed by a bot that will do all the filtering for us"
This might not be you and your company, but it seems to be most of them.
Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6 rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral" interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up with that.
Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating.
How could regulations help?
Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to candidates; yet we are collectively failing.
On the company side, only some people in the organization are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean more work.
Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no tomorrow. And they all find the same unqualified candidates.
If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified, non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency recruiters value their personally built candidate networks for a good reason.)
But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.
The lesson people should take from this is you need to cultivate your network through your career. Sadly it seems most people would rather complain about how broken the system is.
I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is based both on number and quality of your leads.
The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.
For god-sakes, the chess world is freaking out over an ANAL BEADS cheating scandal! https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-h...
https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish
A candidate who wants that job will figure out some way to have ChatGPT help them in a way you can't detect, even if it also has an impact on their ass health.
Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still brute force it." Sure... good luck
Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.
I mean, I don't disagree emotionally, but this is a lot closer in spirit to what the OG hackers did than most of the stuff you see on the front page.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle
hate the game playa ;)
But per downthread comment, applicants don't care if their actions make things worse for the market as a whole. And it's not clear if they should as a one-turn game. (As someone else remarked, Prisoner's Dilemma and all that.)
University admissions has followed a similar trend, going from 5–10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to 20–30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't increase as much because (1) each application costs money, and (2) most universities expect a cover letter. It still costs quite a bit to filter the applicants, but the fee helps pay for that.
1) There is too much noise occluding their signal.
2) There is a form of gatekeeping going on.
Gatekeeping only really works in exploitative systems (e.g. "me and my children are the masters, and you and your children are the slaves") or when the noise is so high that companies wouldn't gain much from not gatekeeping (e.g. Harvard admissions in the late 1800s).
So, if you don't exist in an exploitative system, providing more signal is going to both benefit deserving candidates and punish gatekeeping companies. I don't see why a reputation score would increase gatekeeping.
At the end of the day, every applicant could be ranked on their ability at the job. Wouldn't it be best for everyone—companies and prospective employees—to know where they rank up, so they don't waste time applying to hundreds of jobs or sifting through hundreds of applications?
The only people who are hurt are the hustlers: people who spend far more time hustling for a position than gaining the skills needed to do well in that position. Their goal is the extreme limit of noise, where success rate is directly proportional to how many applications are filled out, and I have no sympathy for the destruction of the commons (that I have to live in).
"School" is quite variable.
Weak signal: you only went to class and did OK in them.
Strong signal: you had an internship, or undergrad research experience, or part-time employment as a TA/tutor, or have a completed project to show off, or some kind of non-trivial community/group/club/fraternity leadership.
Really strong signal: you published a paper with someone I know and they recommend you to me.
Most people are looking at whether you just went to (whatever they consider) a top tier university.
On the flipside I'm not finding good resources to find startups to apply to that don't have hundreds of applicants already. There's no good answer the market has come up with as far as I can tell, so everything just gets worse for everyone as a result.
They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but also prohibited by law in many places because of their widespread abuse.
There’s also a more general idea in competition law that companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory to this.
And come to think of it, actually, credit scores can be gamed. It's well known that when companies and territories get credit scores they are largely a con game, as in based on the conifdence the raters have on your future performance, and not objective reality.
Likewise, credit scores can be juiced and tools exist to help you improve them and track them. But a bad credit score doesn't always mean fiscal mismanagement. It could be loans from a predatory lender or due to a medical expense or something completely outside the context the credit check is to be used for. Credit scores tell you if someone has lots of money first, and if they are smart with their money second. People with financial means often have good credit scores but can be as likely to default if their circumstances change. Perhaps more likely if the amounts of money at play are greater. People got those subprime mortgages with great credit scores, somehow.
So... Yeah, credit scores for loans are a form of outsourcing of responsibilities. But the point is somewhat well taken. The equivalent in hiring to a credit score isn't to ask banks but to do reference checks and ask a network or former manager about a hire.
Credit scores can easily be discriminatory as much as criminal charges (without due process, at least) and other unfair systems. We just normalize it because it works for most people. We poke fun at it when other countries try to come up with e.g. a social credit score, though.
1. A third-party assigns everyone a hidden score, and gives them a cryptographic signing key.
2. They can sign off on one-time lookups to companies they apply to. Every time their credit score is looked up, it decreases to disincentivize "spray and pray".
3. Companies are incentivized to go directly to the third-party (to ensure truthiness), and not divulge the score to other companies (since they are in a competition).
4. The actual algorithms used to determine scores should stay hidden to avoid manipulation. However, how do you also ensure accuracy? Maybe have several dozen reputation companies, and apply Shapley values based on hiring decisions. To avoid correlation, you should only update a reputation's weight when the hiring decision didn't query it.
I guess that would work in societies where this was legal - not sure if I know of any though.
If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
I’ve hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse send me an email for every application that comes through, you get the resume and cover letter attached. There’s a reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto fills in the template for you with the reason you selected (and the email was pre written).
Don’t mistake an automated email for assuming your resume wasn’t looked at.
The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".
A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."
Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer time spent on screening alone. That’s not a good use of time when most of the resumes are a straight no.
I’m assuming your writing style is different in professional environments, but if it’s not, and I saw even like 10% of the snark you’ve put here, I’d instantly dismiss you unless we were hiring for a principal into fellowship IC role and you were a 100% match.
If you’re writing your resume to be read by software engineers or sysadmins, you’re writing for the wrong audience. That’s not their fault for being “incompetent”, it’s yours.
I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.
I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.
Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone stalking me across social media and trying to argue everything there, and eventually someone who threatened to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.
So now we’re back to simple “we’re proceeding with other candidates” feedback.
If we’re going to play the blame-game, then you have to see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and even vengeful. Many people do not handle rejection well.
This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.
Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.
The line is between saying something brief and saying nothing.
Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing instead of telling people a simple no.
I've even had situations where people said they wanted to keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.
The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.
It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.
The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as soon as the company has decided that, and if that really is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted the candidate.
Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies including meeting with the VP of engineering and then they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you Glassdoor..)
For example, in an interview once I got the typical "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.
I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"
The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.
So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all want that, but I'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be distributed or partitionable while also having availability and consistent."
We go back and forth for about another minute (or course eating away at my interview time), until I eventually pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different, but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of database X that gives us all these perks".
Now, in fairness to this particular company, they actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer, so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain that their interview questions either need to change or they need to become better informed about the concepts that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything, not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but simply to prove my point.
And I say that even while writing this comment in Firefox
... Legal action on what basis, exactly?
Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.
Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.
Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.
That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.
Hiring manager here. I don’t like the situation either, but to honest a lot of what you’re seeing is a natural reaction to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.
When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people who aren’t even close to qualified and obviously didn’t read the job description, you understand why we’re not sending custom written rejection letters to every single application.
This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel government employers handle better than private. My state hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the larger, successful startups that most tech workers have heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for not being decent.
We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a problem if individuals do that in reverse?
You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.
Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and individual candidates usually can’t afford lobbyists.
We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us their consulting services. That’s before you even get to “are they lying?”
Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone and pc is my work email. It’s probably prioritised wrong, but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an application that doesn’t meet the tech stack or YOE requirements when I have 20 who do, I’m just going to reject them.
> or late at night ATS let you schedule emails. I used to send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK
> definitely some companies are using software to filter resumes
I don’t doubt it, but I doubt that it’s rampant to the degree you’d believe on this site. I’d instead that it’s far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter, is spending about 15 seconds looking at “does the tech stack match, how much experience, and how many other candidates are there that I think have an edge”. The people on this site are a small minority of very smart folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a topic you are an expert in, you’ll quickly realise that you shouldn’t take everything you read on here as absolute.
Another suggestion - Reach out to two different recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might need to pay them to do it). You’ll get two totally different responses. Both might work, and neither might work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria. Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the past 5 years, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold to fix that problem was snake oil.
Of course my guess could be way off, but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
> AI screening
There's been aggressive keyword filtering since long before LLMs exploded.
> but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
As an anecdote, I posted on who’s hiring here, and we used a separate job requisition for HN, (this was my last job where we went from 2 -> 15 people). We got about 30 applications in the 7 days following that on that req, and of those 30, only one came even remotely close to meeting the requirements on the JD - we were looking for someone with a few years experience in a Java like language, in a Europe/US time zone. Most of the candidates failed both of those criteria, hard. My point being that people who are frustrated with their situation are likely to be more vocal than someone who isn’t.
I’ve spent enough time on HN reading about topics I know a lot about, and seeing people confidently claim how X is easy or if they just Y, and they’re totally wrong. I know a decent amount about working on the hiring side - it’s been a core component of my job for the last 6 years. I’ve worked with recruiters both internal and external, spent far more time with greenhouse than any engineer should ever have to do.
My feeling is that there’s far less sophistication going on, and the dearth of human responses (which is problematic) lets people make up their own reasons as to why it’s not working when the reality is that there’s just a hell of a lot of applicants for every single job.
Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This logic only sounds good until you’re on the hiring side and you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser applications and the people who are genuinely applying.
Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably in that situation because they’re spraying low-effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through this game by now.
> I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
Doesn’t work that way, in my experience. The people who game their way through the application process don’t suddenly switch to honest and high performing employees after they start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how little or how low quality work they can get away with.
The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant and loyal employee isn’t realistic.
Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.
Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.
Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring side, you often never see the applications of many of the people genuinely applying because your stupid automated filters determined they weren't qualified.
Less than 1/100th of 1%.
You should also see what I had to say about the history of slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched; salt the earth strategy for finding labor.
What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working (given the current environment) to even get to the point where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize them for the value they could potentially provide? If you pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what that first role provides? The economics of things are important.
You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations (delusions) back to some more close to reality.
?? 1 in 1500 is 1/15th of 1%, which is more than 1/100th of 1%...
Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to, that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).
I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or more applications.
Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills, but there is a difference between interview skills and engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career without having to heavily interview before (senior IC level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.
So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't have a strong background and work ethic.
This increases the risk on applicants that their investment on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.
Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.
If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a conversation with them about the damage they are doing to your industry.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-jobs-cbs...
If they can bullshit job description to reach more applications why candidates cannot do the same with CV?
The result we are going to is almost every CV now will be a 99% matching to the job description thanks to LLM tools.
And cover letter is even more useless now.
Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.
I look forward to the day the average person has the same level of access to agents to counter all this. Oh, Wall Street Journal you want to make it difficult to unsubscribe? You want me to call, waste time on the phone, etc. OK, I'll just have my AI agent call and take up your calling agents time, increasing your costs.
... my AI agent goes through phone tree... finally connected to agent... WSJ Support Person:'Hello, Wall Street Journal support' My AI Agent: 'please hold as I connect with my human' hold music plays... My AI Agent: 'sorry, we are taking longer to connect than normal, please hold while you are connected' hold music plays...
I blame all the ASTs and companies that fail to give any feedback whatsoever other than a generic "We went another way". If you can't give people the 5 minutes of effort of looking over their resume, why do you expect them to respect your time instead?
There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500 jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply, let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is needed.
You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven’t been replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more savings.
The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.
The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.
The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.
The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.
I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.
Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?
What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.
Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of cooperation among companies in various little things they have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over decades.
The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing power, not even increasing).
The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves in many respects. Companies care far more for short term profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise as you call it).
Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no we can't have this. (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landis)
Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.
Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out, and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind people are today.
Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good amount of time.
Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.
When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in the first place by the actions taken.
You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed, larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when in a downturn there may be nothing wrong. Its completely irrational when these people then say they can't find talent. The brain drain is real.
Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent candidates which your HR departm...
Of course later, in time, countries impacted more people. Population grows with time, and any rational comparison along these lines would need to be normalized against population, but the truth in the ambiguity of the latter phrase doesn't make the former phrase true.
The inquisition lasted quite a long time (1478-~1820), it has been attributed to the collapse of Portugal/Spain as a national superpower of the time (which was dependent on sea power), the brain drain from fleeing refugees (mostly Jews) was also quite impactful (for France), and it was self-financing. The events became less about heresy, and more about seizing wealth domestically, while creating an environment of persecution for cover. The impacts of it are still felt today in those localities where it was worst.
In terms of the many domains important for measuring the health of a country, these events dramatically impacted the state of things towards the negative across multiple critical domains, as well as their neighbors.
Its improper to discount, minimize, and nullify (through fallacy) both events and their effects, that have been well established by experts without providing some proper basis.
Characterizing it solely as propaganda in isolation isn't a valid characterization. Many people died, or were imprisoned and abused, and the surviving records show this.
Population levels are not the same, this comparison is without basis.
You also assume the formal documented executions are the only deaths where people were killed and died, they are not.
About 5 minutes of 'proper' research based in method, will establish that you are mistaken and don't know what you are talking about. This is the problem when you try to have an AI think for you, you get it wrong, and potentially become delusional.
The inquisition lasted almost three centuries. At its height, Spain had a population of about 7.5 million people. Many prosecutions occurred, but few executions as part of trials. The majority of people died from maltreatment, torture, and executions (absent trials) and these records are sparse in the historical record, but there are credible records to support more died than were executed.
The mortality rate was also significantly higher than it is today, and the families of the accused individuals often died from poverty as a result of fear from guilt-by-association (if you were to include that, most don't). Additionally, the Spanish inquisition inspired surrounding countries to similar acts of terror, and in the Latin America's as well. We are only talking about Spain here. The full global death count as a result of the inquisition is much much higher.
You can find established historical material linked at: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t....
This is the sixth result down on google.
According to wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisizione#L'Inquisizione_sp... they put to death 826 people, so that's less than 3 people per year and less than 2% of the people they judged.
We know this accurately because it was a legal proceeding that left paper trails which can be studied.
Your claim that it led to the collapse of portugal and spain seems quite wild. And certainly doesn't explain why you think it had no ill effect in protestant countries that kept burning people for 200 years more.
Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.
You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.
Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.
The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.
When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.
Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.
This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.
In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.
There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.
I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait until next year to see if I can get that now while still carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new positions.
I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as possible.
There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that increase.
You can't have many of these experiences before you become jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't get rewarded for it.
I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If that means spamming LLM applications for the next position, then so be it I guess.
Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that many people get far more money for far less effort than a Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all levels below where I'm at).
All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the world really works, so can you really blame people for getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken advantage of and be a sucker - do you?
I've been working for nearly 30 years now. This is pretty standard. Talk to your friends who dont work in tech a 3% raise is pretty good.
It's not perfect, but it's far from zero in my experience.
I'm now on the side of the table where I frequently make personnel decisions: hire, promote, offer a new role, offer a new assignment, merit adjustment, expand a successful team, disband or merge an unsuccessful team into another, transfer in, transfer out, put on a PIP, etc. Most of the good things on that list go to people who demonstrate ability and results, and rarely do those results come without effort. Most of the bad things on that list go to people who demonstrate an inability to deliver results, which is sometimes related to a lack of effort.
I see sovietization everywhere in the country now.
I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not really how things should work, should it?
Job seekers do not care and should not care what you want. They want the job, you are paid to find the best candidate. Just arriving at a situation where you get flooded with hundreds of resumes, means that you or your organisation has failed with what you were trying to do. You should have had hand picked candidates ready in the pipeline when it came time to hire. You are a hiring manager after all.
This is just a natural response to the automatic screening methods that have been used by the hiring side for years. Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race started by the hiring side.
Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought about that before screening automatically. This is on you.
It's absurd, and only getting worse.
The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line of replying to recruiters only to be met with “contract to hire <20% of market rate and you must move to Nowhere, MN” when clearly your profile says what metro you are attached to.
Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my network.
Would you hire a statistician that didn't have 'n' years of MS Excel experience, or had never used Pandas?
If I were a statistician with 20 years experience, would I even apply to positions listing those as requirements?
It's an interesting problem, as giving information on the position requirements clues applicants into the game they need to play and also runs the risk of turning some otherwise qualified people away.
I'm trying to eke out enough money to put in my 401K and hope that when it's time for me to retire in a few decades, I'll have enough to scrape by on and the economy hasn't exploded by then and render my investments worthless.
Maybe spray and pray works if you’re more junior, but later in your career you’ll want to be very picky about where you spend your time interviewing because the roles are long term and have a huge impact on your life.
I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).
If recruiting departments really suffer at parsing about 50 apps per day per recruiter, I can see why this got so bad so quickly.
Afaik, any kind of slush-pile reading (including grading, which is probably the best researched) tends to get less fair as the process wears on the reader.
GP isn't optimizing for finishing the pile, but for making the most of what's in it.
I want to give everyone a fair shake (including reading cover letters) and for me, resume fatigue sets in if I read more than 50.
I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise.
Figuring out how to get there means figuring out how not to get ghosted, not just blasting off a quick application and crossing fingers. I imagine that probably means reaching out to people in their network at the company, learning about their hiring practices and how people get hired there, etc.
Even more so, if we got a referral right now from within the company we'd absolutely skip them straight to the interviews. Dealing with resumes sucks right now as an employer, and we want to avoid that stage as much as you do.
I have a hard time believing that the market is as dire as people say it is at least right now approaching 2025. I see peers who are getting laid off get back into jobs, it’s just taking a few months longer than it used to. It’s just not a magical hot job market like it used to be.
A good indicator is to look at Meta’s employee count. It’s down dramatically since 2022 but they still have more employees working for them than the last day of 2021.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/employees/
Or look at layoffs.fyi, where layoffs are reported at their lowest level since early 2022.
The core problem is not that the systems suck but that so many people in IT lost their jobs in the last 2-3 years so that they don't have a choice other than to spray-and-pray (in the end of the day you need to put the food on the table).
Things won't improve until hiring recovers (increase in labor demand), and some IT professionals probably will pivot to other industries (decrease in labor supply), as it happened in 2000 and again in 2008.
I'd like to know more about a manual approach.
I think both approaches are valid. I took the automated approach to online dating, married now. So that worked out.
Taking the automated approach for companies will probably work in a similar fashion as online dating. However, unlike online dating, I feel very strong targeted approaches have a chance of working better as long as you get to the interview stage.
Targeted approaches don't work with online dating as the biggest issue is figuring out with whom you have chemistry. For work, there's no such thing to figure out - not to the extent as it is required like romantic intimacy.
What would a targeted approach to online dating be?
From GP:
> spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there
Replace "where I want to work" with "who I want to date" and it sounds concerning.
Courting someone, winning someone over. It's done in the offline world. I haven't thought about it much when it comes to online dating. I should've been a bit sharper on that.
When it comes to dating, I always went for the high volume approach. So I really shouldn't be speaking about a targeted approach. I guess I did because I was trying too hard to draw a parallel to applying to jobs.
So my mind just went:
But perhaps quadrant 4 doesn't really exist and I really was just shoehorning approaches of applying to jobs online into online dating because I saw this 2x2 matrix.Using all the top sites as well that are supposed to make the hiring process easier.
https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...
But this is one of the most entitled industries in the universe. Even the mere notion of suggesting academic degrees, PE Exams and other forms of "gatekeeping" is tantamount to shouting Voldemort's name through a megaphone.
This article unintentionally perfectly rebuts the idea of licensing: https://mcpmag.com/articles/2005/05/11/the-death-of-paper-mc...
Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter, and much gatekeeping has been reduced.
Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you are working within a static prescribed framework (legal, accounting, building codes). It is terrible for jobs that require professional taste.
Tell me how you would create a license for a graphic designer or UX specialist.
I actually fail to understand idealists that believe that licensing might even work. Who are y'all?
Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.
Our society is poor at creating scales and then selecting a cutoff point for illegality. There are 0b10 types of people: binary thinkers and grey area thinkers.
Certification doesn't prevent accidents - the only thing it provides is scapegoats for faulty systems.
I would be in favor of licensing knowing it would probably exclude me unless of course it does not require a university degree. I was not born into a family of means and being autodidactic allowed me to excel beyond my upbringing.
The best path would be to have journeyman type of pathway.
You'd still need to interview people because there's no license that will tell you who the good/great candidates are
Basically you find a grad right now and make them do a coding test. Something is broken there.
A degree could include the vocational qualification as a 1 year study, but having the vocation qualification alone would save youngsters a lot of money and reduce the burden on hiring. You could even still interview coding questions but the application process can remove the spam/ai bullshit to some extent. "Can they code?" is answered.
Who would want to work at such a place? Why would I trust the opinions of people who work at such a place?
I acknowledge that some feel their contributions are at that level, but that doesn't mean it's the norm.
Interested to hear if you have a different thought here
My guess for most of us is "not very much at all", several of the best people I've worked with as programmers did not have a CS degree, and I've interviewed people with CS degrees who could not write a function to sum an array of integers in any language of their choosing, meaning "honoring their degree" would have been an unwise choice.
My advice is to invest heavily in your professional network and when you have one, treat it like the special garden that it is. This takes years to cultivate. I also see people try to come at it from a very transactional unauthentic angle which will always fail. The right way to approach it is honestly quite simple: make friends. Be nice. Help people. Mentor. Etc. Don’t expect anything from it. People remember that stuff. Opportunities find you.
Well, that's how.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slavelabour/search/?q=job+applicati...
My advice for both sides: don’t use job boards. Use your own website.
I can't remember the details, but I stopped taking it seriously.
In a similar way, recruiters post ghost jobs to gather data and make companies look like they are growing.
A great way to test this is to wait for the email inviting you to an interview.
The emotional rollercoaster of selling yourself on a company only for it not to work out hurts too much. It's also a cost borne only by the applicant. It's easy to want to kick that can down the road until you're sure that you have a shot where some part, at least, is within your own control.
It will never be entirely down to your own performance and actions. Lots of job descriptions out there are for roles without a budget, or at companies with hiring moratoria, or where there's already a successful applicant waiting for a formal job offer.
The effort you put into researching an application, IMO, should be a function of the effort required by the applicant to proceed and the respect given to applicants by employers. The effort for a phone interview is very low. The respect is near zero.
I made a Chrome extension for LinkedIn that would filter out listings to exclude certain keywords, e.g. "Rust" or "Java" and find only listings that applied to me. From there I could manually apply and track my job application status. This saved much more time. I had a few macros to paste information which sped up the process.
If you must nag for subscriptions, you might want to try and find a way that does it without interfering with page interactivity.
Of cause this assumes you are a good fit in the first place regarding your skills. But the latter is usually much easier to filter out
I was looking for work in 2021-2022, and an approach like yours got me a job after interviewing with circa 10 companies. Unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of office politics and had to leave in early 2024.
At the start of my 2024 job search I again tried targeted search, targeting was good enough that I had a circa 1:10 application to interview ratio. It took over 50 companies before I found my current role. The market is much tougher now than it was a few years ago.
I hear there was a time when companies were eager/desperate to hire. Those were good years for job seekers.
As far as I can recall I’ve never not had an interview from an application.
I do generally use recruitment agencies so maybe that’s a factor.
Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the generation will actually be successful?
You get provably better performance if you let the thing analyze the situation / think through the problem / whatever before letting it commit to choosing a status like that.
It also feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing (getting past the screening for as many job as possible, regardless of fit). I personally felt like the most successful experience I had with job search (and retention) is if I knew someone at the company and just bypassed the initial resume screening altogether and hand-crafted a nuanced resume and cover letter with a strong backing from people that knew me.
I realize not everyone has that luxury but I made diligent effort to network in and out of work and it has mostly helped me filter out bad jobs/fit and save time for both parties.
A couple of years ago it was so bad that I stopped applying as soon as I saw that WorkDay crap pop up, regardless of the company.
There's usually an option to upload another file near the end of the form. After it has filled in the fields using your plain resume, delete it and upload the nicer one.