Having been on the end of circumstances you don't control, it's debilitating. Nothing you do makes any difference. But at the same time if you don't do anything, things will get worse.
I'll comment a bit on the article, and then give some wider comments based on my experience.
Before, it was enough to have something you can demonstrate. To have skill, to have experience. Now, it does not matter.
I think skills and experience almost always matter, unless you're in a 100% corrupt / nepotism area. This comment sounds like despair to me, not an accurate description of the job market.
It is solely a game of referral
I disagree again, but referral does matter a lot. Anyone who's posted a job in the last 15 years can tell you why.
Post: We're looking for network engineers familiar with python, here are details of our needs...
Responses: 90% of the resumes are about something else. Javascript, web, documentation, etc. 90% of the remaining resumes are people who are vaguely close, but their resumes don't tell you what they actually did.
So you bring in the remainder for interviews, and 75% can't answer the simplest question about past projects. Answers include "I dunno what the software did, I just implemented pages 60 through 65 of the spec". Many of the remainder have poor interpersonal skills (ignoring the female interviewer, not showering, talking forever, giving answers unrelated to the question, etc.), or they can't answer the simplest technical questions about their "skills area".
Eventually you find someone who seems good. So you give them an offer, and a trial period. Thank the gods for the trial period, because about many don't actually have the skills they claimed to have. And others say things like "Well, I know you told me to do X, but I didn't understand what you meant, so I just did Y instead". Or, "Well, I know you told me to do X, but I didn't think it would work, so I did Y instead". Did they ask clarifying questions? Did they volunteer that they were delivering something other than what was asked? No. So they get canned a month into the trial period.
Or, as an employer, I can get told by a friend I trust "Hey, this person is good, and should fit into your company. I've worked with them before, and can vouch for them". The success rate there is about 90%.
For the the author, I'm sorry you feel this way, but that's the reality of the other end of the hiring process.
On a personal note, when I started looking for work after a graduate degree, I had a weird discussion with another graduate student:
Him: I've only gotten 5 job interviews, how did you do?
Me: Hmm, I've had 5 job interviews too.
Him: What! How many resumes did you send out? I sent out 150!
Me: Uh... I sent out 15?
The root cause was that he had one resume / cover letter, and spammed the same thing to everyone. When the employer looked at that resume they saw that he wanted a job, he didn't want this job.
In contrast, I read the job posting, and reworked my resume for every single posting. I removed things which weren't relevant. I used words from the posting in my resume. I tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I've been working towards getting this job!
The results spoke for themselves.
I eventually got a job by answering a classified ad in the newspaper (yes, I'm old), but that doesn't invalidate my approach. Since then, almost every job I've gotten after that was either (a) by word of mouth, or (b) because they found me, and wanted me specifically.
So I understand the frustration and burnout. As an employee, I couldn't take it, so I started my own business. As an employer, I'm shocked at just how terrible most people are at their jobs. All I want is someone who shows up one time, is communicative, and is reasonably competent. That requirement rules out about 90% of the people who have relevant skills.
The root cause was that he had one resume / cover letter, and spammed the same thing to everyone. When the employer looked at that resume they saw that he wanted a job, he didn't want this job.
In contrast, I read the job posting, and reworked my resume for every single posting. I removed things which weren't relevant. I used words from the posting in my resume. I tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I've been working towards getting this job!
Jobs one genuinely wants are extremely rare, and tailoring a CV and a cover letter to pretend otherwise is both an act of self-harm and a lie.
I agree, but the problem nowadays is that it doesn't scale to go all in customizing both for the position. ATS will for the most part filter you out before anyone reads your cover letter or CV.
I'm currently looking for a new position, luckily for me not under short time pressure, so I haven't dived in as fully as I probably should, but my impression this time is that it will be much harder than it has been before. It also probably doesn't help that I am over 50.
I still agree that it doesn't make sense to send generic cover and CV out without tailoring it for the position you are applying.
I still agree that it doesn't make sense to send generic cover and CV out without tailoring it for the position you are applying.
As someone who's been in the hiring seat. It's all LLM slop now. Job postings are AI generated, the cover letter/resume are AI generated, I don't know who the humans in the loop even are anymore.
I think the top poster has a fantasy view of hiring or some specific niche experience (graduate school mentioned, plus getting a job in 2000s or earlier).
I think the top poster has a fantasy view of hiring
Perhaps you could explain how my comment that (essentially) "99% of resumes are useless" is a "fantasy" that is invalidated by "it's all LLM slop".
Or perhaps you could explain how my comment that "most people do badly in person" is a "fantasy" that is invalidated by "it's all LLM slop".
The reality is that at some point, a human being will read your resume and interview you. At which point, my comments are all true, and relevant.
The only way that your comments are relevant is if all screening, interviews, hiring, and management of people is done by LLMS. That's rather more of a fantasy than anything I said.
The only way that your comments are relevant is if all screening, interviews, hiring, and management of people is done by LLMS. That's rather more of a fantasy than anything I said.
I don't think you realize how much this is true. Yes, I've shared your experiences of bad interviews with a human, and bad hires, but that's after who knows how many rounds of going through HR LLMs (and before the current AI craze, ATS), job site LLMs, hiring manager LLMs, before I finally get a say on the person.
The only resumes I've gotten to see not go through that rigamarole? Referrals. Which puts a person right at the top of the pile.
Additionally, I left my last job because my manager started using LLMs to communicate with me.
The reality is that at some point, a human being will read your resume and interview you. At which point, my comments are all true, and relevant.
I fear this reality is becoming less true every year and is probably my main fear when it comes to job search. I've been on the other side and even at small companies we would get a few hundred applications, but at least I could check all of them because most of them were awful enough that you could reliably quickly reject.
I feel that is less and less true even at small companies and absolutely isn't any more at bigger ones. You can easily get rejected before anyone even glanced your application without any idea of what you would need to change to pass automated obstacles (if that was even possible).
I think one should tailor CV and cover letter not because somebody on the other side will necessary read it, but because you are feeding a black box and making some effort to guess what it prefers makes sense.
I wonder how much “jobs one genuinely wants” use things like ATS. I imagine there are some people that genuinely want jobs at large companies, but I strongly suspect “jobs one genuinely wants” will be positively correlated with smaller companies. The one job that I have genuinely wanted (which I got) and the one which I reckoned I probably wanted at the time (but which I’m glad 3½ years later that I didn’t get due to life happenings and what I see of that company now) were both email applications (the former to a specific person, the latter to a jobs+rolename@ mailbox) and I was immediately (within twelve hours) dealing with real humans. I actually didn’t send a résumé to either of them, just what would otherwise be called a cover letter.
I still agree that it doesn't make sense to send generic cover and CV out without tailoring it for the position you are applying.
Sure, but there's a wide gap between highlighting more relevant experiences for a particular position, and vomiting up drivel about how driven and dedicated to the mission you are.
I still agree that it doesn't make sense to send generic cover and CV out without tailoring it for the position you are applying.
Cover letter, sure. I'll even type it by hand, from scratch with no assistance but a spell checker. The CV though? Fuck that. You'll get all 3 (5?) pages detailing all my past experiences. I am done tailoring my CV.
I'll do you the favour of sparing you what I did with my Cello.
I tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I've been working towards getting this job!
What is this message, if not a straight up lie?
Don't get me wrong, I do not fault @alandekok for communicating this lie. My own mother advised me to do the same, told me she does the same, and explicitly used the word "lie". Her understanding was that "everyone lie on their resume" (her wording as I recall it, which I took as an emphasis rather than literally), and that our only chance at competing was often to do the same.
I can understand were she was coming from: having to find a job quickly after a separation, (almost?) no work experience to speak of (besides raising two kids, which in a decent world should count, dammit), litterary degree dropout if I recall correctly… And later when she switched from selling clothes to selling houses — and she was admittedly quite good at both jobs.
Now I have a confession to make: there's a little gap in my resume. About 18 months, mostly because of one bad reference from the company that I just parted with (in one of the instance I can name they reportedly said I "lacked autonomy, lacked motivation, and was difficult to manage."). This gap did two things to my resume: first, months were gone from the starting and ending dates of my past experiences. Second, I might, at least for a time, have introduced an off-by-one… error shall we say, that just happened to cover that gap.
A couple years later when working for yet another contracting company, I got a an interview for a gig (as a contractor). At the conclusion of the interview, some big brass representing the client company said: "the important thing is, there is no gap in the resume". Of course my respect for the swine instantly went from undecided to negative, and I saw no need to correct his minor misunderstanding of my career.
My point is, if you don't hide or lie about some things, doors close, careers can even end. Some of those things aren't even relevant to our worth as an employee or a contractor. Some decision makers are so transparently bad at evaluating a prospective hire (I've met some that are good), that frankly, it's better to deceive them than trying to explain, say, why personal projects can be just as relevant as paid gigs (another sour grape).
I can also vouch for the self-harm bit. Barely a sting in my case, but I know how much I would hate to turn the knob any further. In fact, right now I can't. It would impact my self image too much.
Yeah to be honest I would probably also lean toward turning every knob I can in a direction that makes me employable (within reason as you note --- though I'm not sure if I could lie on my resume, I also didn't go through what you did), even if it went against my personal values. I can relate to your conversation with your mom --- I've had very similar ones with my own family before. Unfortunately for many of us "everyone else is doing it" is either compulsion or comfort enough to justify our actions.
I really do respect OP for sticking to their values. But --- not just trying to console myself for my own behavior here --- I do wonder whether it is quite so black-and-white. Do you differentiate between a conscious choice (e.g. using a network) and one you didn't get to make (e.g. being from a wealthy enough family)? What about grayer areas?
For example, my gut says that paying for SAT (college admission test) prep school isn't so bad as fudging my resume, but would someone more principled than I avoid SAT prep school because it gives them an unfair advantage over people who don't have the same privilege? Do you still oppose prep school if you think the SAT is not a good heuristic and you object to its use? It's not like (in my time) you could reasonably opt out of taking it if you wanted to go to college. My gut says that putting resources toward education isn't a moral failing, but it is also objectively making the playing field less even. Is fudging a resume or using a referral worse? Probably? But I don't really know how to evaluate it.
The system I set up when I was job hunting (for over seven months in 2021) was a tiered system of efforts based on the job offer.
The lowest was sharing by generic CV/cover letter with placeholder for the company name, job title and a few generic elements.
The second tiers was rewriting one specific paragraph of the cover letter and sorting out my CV/renaming part of the generic function.
The highest tiers was rewriting the cover letter from scratch and tuning my CV to the job.
To support the effort, I worked on a templated Latex set-up that allowed to generate the different part for each offer, keep them in separate folders and keep a trace. This was pre-LLM and would probably less work or at all today for the junior/medior jobs I was targeting. But it helped me keep my own sanity regarding the importance and the involvement I wanted to put into various offers without lying too much to myself.
This comment sounds like despair to me, not an accurate description of the job market.
The beautiful thing about my piece is that it's my perspective of the industry. I've included projects that I've worked on in each and every application because I try to make a bit of process/job of it with tracking parameters to see if it's open and rarely is it done so. And from the responses from others in this thread, it seems to be more of a reflection of the industry than just my personal stance.
So I understand the frustration and burnout. As an employee, I couldn't take it, so I started my own business. As an employer, I'm shocked at just how terrible most people are at their jobs. All I want is someone who shows up one time, is communicative, and is reasonably competent. That requirement rules out about 90% of the people who have relevant skills.
You can find out how good I am if you hire me today :) Just like the housing market, employers control the demand (by controlling how many people are employed as needed/described by business need). Unless you've been employed within the last five years, it's sad to say that you won't be able to relate to the unemployed perspective here. I've been spottily unemployed and watched the scene changed aggressively. Recruiters who are friends went from reviewing 50 applications a day to nearly having to automate 1,000.
I disagree again, but referral does matter a lot. Anyone who's posted a job in the last 15 years can tell you why.
[lengthy description of the challenges of Doing The Work™ to surface candidates]
Or, as an employer, I can get told by a friend I trust "Hey, this person is good, and should fit into your company. I've worked with them before, and can vouch for them". The success rate there is about 90%.
I think this reply aptly demonstrates that the table is tilted profoundly in the direction of nepotism. Employers would rather not have to Do The Work™ of surfacing --- or worse, actually having to build --- the candidates that they need. In such an environment, the optimal strategy for candidates becomes either (1) nepotism, or (2) becoming an employer.
I think this reply aptly demonstrates that the table is tilted profoundly in the direction of nepotism.
A charitable interpretation is that for every job posting, employers are inundated with 1000's of jobs that have nothing whatsoever to to do with the posting. Even with automated tools, it's a huge amount of work to sift through them all. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.
What would you rather do? Try to pick a small signal out of massive amounts of noise? Or try to pick a reasonably large signal out of small amounts of noise?
It might look like nepotism to the people getting rejected. But the people hiring would love to hire competent people. They just can't separate the competent people from the background noise.
This is hardly new though. I've gotten a job that wasn't via networking exactly once: and that was my first school internship. Twice e guess if you count the temp agency before that. The whole rest of my career was on networking. I've never considered "applying to a job" where I don't already know anyone to be a realistic thing to try doing.
Maybe I'm reading the wrong things in your post, but it definitely sounds to me like you're blaming the victim here a little. The fact that hiring means going through piles of CVs of unsuitable candidates does not tie in even a little bit with the fact that a candidate gets rejected when they are actually suitable.
I'm trying to explain what's happening on the other side of the table. If you think this is blaming the victim, then please suggest solutions to the problems I raised.
What can employers do in order to detect suitable candidates and not reject them?
In the past few years, I've personally read hundreds of resumes. Interviewed dozens of people. Hired a few. Not all managed to stay.
When I talk to other potential employers, they all share the same problem. Like potential employees, they would love to find a good match between candidate and company. But they're finding it very difficult.
So there's a big disconnect here. Either one (or both) groups of people are mistaken. Or maybe something else is going on.
Off of the top of my head, I would say that people who are doing well and are happy in their jobs tend to find new employment through their personal network. The same goes for employers.
My personal experience is that the job market is inundated with resumes which have nothing whatsoever to do with the job posting. Maybe the practice of the author isn't to spam resumes, but it seems to be the practice of most people applying for jobs. Even a little bit of attention paid to "job fit" by people looking for work would help everyone enormously. Employers wouldn't have to be so aggressive about filtering out nonsense, and candidates would then find it easier to get interviews.
requiring job posters to give updates throughout the process for applications to prevent the Uncanny Gap we as job hunter experience
adding captchas and another anti-bot prevention tools (I'm willing to give Greenhouse and Ashby my ID to fill out a job, eventually they'll collect this PII anyhow)
being more honest/transparent about why a candidate is rejected (using a rubric or ranking system like we do for credit reporting)
And this was off the top off of my head. There's a lot of options but not enough effort into humanizing the process; making it hard for everyone but especially for the folks who need to pay bills or get health insurance (because without a job, you're waiting just as long for social benefits).
Anyone who's posted a job in the last 15 years can tell you why.
You left out the part where almost immediately the posting gets barraged with countless resumes.
Many of the remainder have poor interpersonal skills
Another area I've found almost all(!) candidates lack is being able to describe what their company does in a way that doesn't require the other person to have an engineering degree.
The amount of agency, persistence, optimism one can have in finding a job really depends on a lot of things imho. "Hard work with care and results is all that matters" is a guiding star that can get broken down by real life. The fact that referrals matter(so much to the point it feels overwhelming, to me at least) makes things feel grimey. Not everybody works with referrals, but so much works on it that it feels pointless to care for craft. Personally I wish I knew where to start on how to improve those type of things around me in real life.
As an employer, I'm shocked at just how terrible most people are at their jobs.
I have no experience here, but what I always appreciate from persons that I met, isn't that they are good at their job from the start, but that they can improve incrementally(this might also be what you mean under "is communicative/competent", but I always like to mention it explicitly.
Not everybody works with referrals, but so much works on it that it feels pointless to care for craft.
If you want referrals from credible people, you need to invest in craft.
Suggesting someone else for a job is a significant reputational investment! If I recommend someone and they turn out to be a bad fit it's a hit on my reputation.
I'm not going to refer someone if I don't think they have the skills for the job.
Many people invest in craft and nobody cares or notices because they don't build enough of a social network. Many people don't care about their craft at all, and network enough they're always comfortably employed. Your idea of how the job market should work and how it actually works are not the same thing.
Where did I express my idea of how the job market should work?
It's certainly true that investing in your craft won't help if you can't help people understand how you've invested in your craft. That's why I've long advocated for side projects and online writing (which doesn't have to be prolific) as a way to help bump yourself up the flood of resumes.
That's why I've long advocated for side projects and online writing (which doesn't have to be prolific) as a way to help bump yourself up the flood of resumes.
Which probably is not as effective advice these days because of the slopsea. Anybody can whip up a text that says something.
I'm mentioning this more as another example of how tumultuous the journey to show merit/care for craft can be.
Which probably is not as effective advice these days because of the slopsea.
Even before that, there are loads of managers that think side projects hardly ever count. Also, less than 5% of the people that ever interviewed me showed any sign of having even glanced at my long lived and fairly substantial blog, even thought I put a link in my CV, and am extremely easy to find online.
I sortof hint to that in my original post, in that investing in your craft("hard work with care..matters" part) is a good thing to have a focus on. But it's not easy at all for people that are not social or have other (social) things/issues happening at the same time, and that's also why I use the word feels in my post.
There is a will there to do better, but enabling/empowering people is not an obvious thing here. I get why referral systems are here, I get that individuals think they are rigorous in who they endorse, but the bias is strong!
So that's also why I mention I don't know how to start improving the situation around me, because craft and merit and referrals are one thing, but awareness about employee rights/unions, improvements to social infrastructure etc all seem to me more effective ways to help people rather than go against the preference on how a bunch of well-networked people meet other slightly-less networked people.
Completely agree on bias. Referrals work great for people who have strong connections and have already been able to establish themselves in prior roles, they're massively biased against anyone who's just getting started or who doesn't have a strong network.
This conversation is like talking to someone before Brexit or before the American housing crisis of 2008-2012 and trying to have them understand how bad things have become. You wouldn't understand the magnitude until you're in the position yourself (and I don't wish it on anyone).
To your point about being prolific, I've attempted to do this and seemingly so, this over-indexes for college-educated or heavily-networked/industry-favored folks and not on a system of merit. It's the kind of advice Paul Graham would have given (again disconnected from the day-to-day).
Not everybody works with referrals, but so much works on it that it feels pointless to care for craft.
IMHO, it's always good to improve yourself, and to do the right thing.
what I always appreciate from persons that I met, isn't that they are good at their job from the start, but that they can improve incrementally
I agree 100%.
In my experience, the people who don't improve incrementally are bad, and stay bad. They do the same thing for years, while the world changes around them. Or they see a problem, go "Huh, that's weird", and then ignore it.
I call this the "It was on fire when I laid down on it" problem:
IMHO, it's always good to improve yourself, and to do the right thing.
Yes, agree, I hope I was clear that a person has agency, but that persisting through the trials of life might mean that one would need to have a better supporting system than what we currently have.
I call this the "It was on fire when I laid down on it" problem:
I've put it on my (endless) to-read list! From the Goodreads description it's a bit hard to understand what it's exactly about ha.
I eventually got a job by answering a classified ad in the newspaper (yes, I'm old)
Let me guess, you walked in to meet the owner, gave him a firm handshake, and he gave you a career with a pension? This comment feels like a trope and disconnected with the experience of the article writer.
You're pretty much complaining that I'm denigrating the author and invalidating their lived experience, by denigrating me and invalidating my lived experience.
You're pretty much complaining that I'm denigrating the author and invalidating their lived experience, by denigrating me and invalidating my lived experience.
It's not intended to invalidate your experience, but point out the very common trope of boomers saying you should just walk into the place of business and slap your resume down to get noticed without noticing how the world works has changed.
If you could post a message without being insulting, that would be great. No one here is referring to you as a "snot-nosed know-nothing kid", so you shouldn't jump to negative sterotypes.
You could have interpreted my comment in the way it was intended: as a marker of just how much things have changed over the years, and how some things have remained the same. Instead, you immediately jumped to negative interpretations.
You characterized my comment as intending to mean this:
Let me guess, you walked in to meet the owner, gave him a firm handshake, and he gave you a career with a pension
So despite the clear possibility that I meant something else, and my statement that I meant something else, you still believe I was intending something negative.
I don't need to defend myself from accusations which are wholly invented, and which deny reality.
I'm sorry for you, and wish you a more positive life.
I have done hiring for a dev job in the last year and I would have jumped for joy to see a hand-delivered resume. It would have gone to the top of the pile immediately.
Hard to do as a fully-remote company though. We're looking at job fairs.
Even when I did hiring in person, it was literally impossible for such a scenario to happen. Any resume that didn't go through HR and get vetted by some nebulous process was a resume that I officially could not consider for a position.
Nice! I go to a few tech conferences regularly, but the people companies tend to send to these are ads/HR/PR, not hiring managers. Remote work has been a blessing in general but also a curse in this regard. I miss when interviews were done in person tbh, Zoom calls feel so impersonal especially with a panel.
Maybe things have changed in the past few years, but my experience was that job fairs could land interviews with local companies (which is awesome) but larger companies would just have a person take your piece of paper, then direct you to careers.company.com.
Indeed, the biggest employers in my area don’t even have a front door. They have a security gate, which you’re not getting past without an appointment and ID.
I haven't been in the job market for the past 10 years, neither am I hiring at the moment, but this has been the feeling I have hearing from friends and acquaintances about their job search stories. I often dig a bit deeper than I probably should, and I see most everyone around me complain about not being able to find a job. Then when they tell me about the interview process, or their history, skills, and when I see what they're working on and I casually ask them questions about the code they've supposedly written and their attitude toward programming, I see why finding a job can be difficult. I've found a general attitude of "I got a degree, so the job should come immediately with no further effort". No doubt the market has become much more competitive than my days, though.
Over the past couple of years I’ve read hundreds of applications (that have been filtered before getting to me) and interviewed 20%. I’ve hired about 40% of those we interviewed. Of those hires, I’d say 20% turned out to be completely useless, 40% were OK but I wouldn’t hire them again, and 40% were good.
So while my numbers aren’t as dire as yours, I think that’s the pre-filtering. But still, most applications I see are trash - barely relevant skills, unstable work history, either clearly slop or so badly written I’d prefer if they had used an LLM to at least tidy it up a bit.
One thing that’s different culturally here is that (at least in my sector) “referrals” aren’t really a thing, but references are. We expect every applicant to be able to provide written references, preferably from more senior staff and/or clients. That does help to a degree.
That’s certainly a problem, but it still doesn’t account for the vast majority of terrible applications.
Also: interviewing is hard. I’m not sure how much experience you have doing it. I’ve interviewed people who I know are excellent (worked with them before) but barely scrape through because they suck at interviews. I’ve interviewed people who seemed excellent but turned out to be terrible because of factors that it’s hard to pull out in an interview (eg laziness, being OTT argumentative etc).
Why does this make an application "trash"? (As a stably employed person who has seen my less-fortunate friends fired over and over for absolute nonsense or unavoidable circumstances.)
I was too vague here - “unstable” doesn’t mean one or two short gigs, that happens to most people. But if someone has 10 years of experience and hasn't been able to stay in the same role longer than 6 months, that’s a red flag (though not by itself a disqualifying one). It also depends on what the roles were, and if any explanation is provided.
Anyone who's posted a job in the last 15 years can tell you why.
Why? In my experience, it's better to apply early than wait for somebody to give you a referral, because if you apply too late, your application won't even be looked at.
Damn, this hits hard. I'm currently employed, but the uncertainty is palpable and it's honestly tiring not knowing which month is the one that my company decides I'm no longer needed. Hope you can find solace in whatever you decide to pursue next and thanks for the heartfelt write-up, it really resonated with me.
It really feels like the author is reaching some level of despair and trying hard to find some personal reasons for the failure in finding a position. Of course we don't know all the details, but the market is crap right now. I know a few people struggling to find a position and a few who left the industry rather than fight it. So... if there really is a personal reason, I hope the author discovers it, and if not, I hope they will gain the perspective they need to persevere in bad times. Good luck!
I appreciate that and I was. I was looking at every rejection e-mail (which after a while, you realize it's all stock messaging so I'm not even worth giving a notice of "fuck off" too) and looking for what it is. It's a lot of "it's not you, it's me [the company]" rhetoric, which gets hard to believe after the 100th e-mail!
I'd hire you if I could. The way I see it is this: any company with real opportunity should be welcoming people in.
The fact that tech companies keep turning people away only tells me that they have no idea how to put valuable people to valuable use. I have no such fear, but for the moment I and my company have no money to hire anyone -_-
They have no idea how to put valuable people to use in a way that would benefit the rich few.
There is plenty of work to be done, but you cannot get to it unless some filthy rich aging man puts some of his cronies on it to get him the ROI. Western governments are thoroughly captured and forbidden from doing the necessary infrastructure work as well. And poor people cannot afford to spend time organizing large scale projects so they instead put the little money (influence over direction) they have towards immediately easing their suffering instead.
Whatever you do, do not look into what China is doing right now. Do not visit Owner-occupancy on Wikipedia and sort by descending percentage and look at the second spot in the "Home ownership rate" column. And for the love of all that is holy, do not search for "flying cars china" on YouTube.
You have been warned.
If only there were a political force in the US campaigning on changing this destructive political status quo. If only.
It’s true. I think a big part of the angst over vibecoding is the realization that our productivity potentially massively increased at doing something that ultimately has relatively low social value (cranking out rent capturing software) and was relatively difficult to sustainably use for good (because of subscription models)
Nah. To me most of the complaints about LLMs look like systemd debates all over again.
I am extremely concerned that western governments would give in and ban open weight models and with them any chance we have, long-term, to keep the means of production in our hands. Being forced to rent software development tools from capitalists would be a total nightmare scenario in my book.
What concerns me about the discourse is that people pull against any LLM adoption because capitalists are pushing for it instead of (tactically) saying "We are happy to add this new thing to our toolbox, but we are concerned about industrial espionage and vendor lock-in, can we get some on-site inference boxes and maybe subscribe to someone who will train the models as a service? Or even found an organization that will do it in the open for everyone to use?"
And, also, we should do the scraping ourselves. In a way that does not harm the websites, and publish to collected scrapes as a database (which is separately copyrightable in many jurisdictions including EU) with extra license on top that says you can use it to train LLMs but only if you keep the weights open.
BTW, did you know that Stanisław Lem wrote in the sixties that the first AI systems will be basically a large-scale plagiarism of human authors? Funny to see people being surprised about that some 60 years later. He also wrote about the paperclip problem, although with much more insight. And that one is a doozy if you truly think it through in the current western societal arrangement.
I don't think folk are surprised about the plagiarism, they're just angry that once again society is demonstrating that it does not care to constrain a certain class of people.
Not everyone is aware. I think the penetration is way higher for GenZ, say 40-50% but below 20% for people over 60. Most people still believe that culture is an immutable natural phenomenon. Not explicitly, obviously. But in how they approach it.
This makes it super hard to change it. Nonlinearly so. And the fascist reaction to tweaking it just a tiny bit recently around human rights shows that the majority really, really does not want to say aloud what they value and how they want to live.
I think the anti-AI crowd means well, it's just that they don't really offer alternatives. To wage slavery I mean. It's basically safe posturing on their side. If they really wanted results (power to choose) and not just an anti-system lifestyle they'd have unionized by now.
Actually, a large portion of them likely still believe that capitalism equals freedom and profit motive ensures collective wins.
Just look at how messed up are the meta discussions here. :-D
To me most of the complaints about LLMs look like systemd debates all over again.
I stopped having pet Linux machines a long time ago so other than the fact of some people being very upset I’m not sure what it was all about.
I am extremely concerned that western governments would give in and ban open weight models and with them any chance we have, long-term, to keep the means of production in our hands. Being forced to rent software development tools from capitalists would be a total nightmare scenario in my book.
It is much harder to spy on a local deployment so yes I imagine you’re right. That said I’m not sure how easy it will be to enforce given that you can send physical media by mail. Plus we’ll probably all switch to Chinese to save on tokens.
The fact that tech companies keep turning people away only tells me that they have no idea how to put valuable people to valuable use.
I’m not sure if you have been or are in the situation of hiring people but it’s a massive funnel. Of 200 people that apply, maybe one makes it to the end of the funnel. There are so many things that affect if you end up passing the bar.
I have a lot of (I think talented) friends searching and reporting the same.
I've been thinking about searching, but while I have some things going for me I also (like the author) have spoken loudly in dissent, and have other imperfections like only having most of a college degree. I cannot imagine that the market would be kind to me
The scary part is that i think many of us are not too far away from this. My resume doesn't have any name brand companies, and my network is pretty small.
I got lucky finding my current job, but luck is not always there for us
First of all, I’m truly sorry that you are going through that. The whole industry is like a game of musical chairs right now, and none of us have any control over what’s going on, no matter how talented you are, which really sucks. I hope you can get back on your feet soon.
Unfortunately, in the long run, I do think they are kicking most of us out by rebuilding the moat there was before the advent of personal computing ~40 years ago, all of that before the whole world economy goes tits up once more this century.
I’ve been thinking on how to hedge against this, as far as my skill set is concerned. It will be very hard to get a higher paying job, unless I decide to make the jump to big tech, which I never really wanted to, even when it was the best option by far, and much less now that I know I’d be getting those fat checks on borrowed time.
That being said, personal computing will get much more expensive, and people
will start to look for cheaper alternatives. I’m probably wrong but I think things such as electronics repairs and custom computer builds will make a resurgence. That doesn’t pay nearly enough in comparison to our industry’s historical record, but, yeah, there’s that. I think that is something most of us would tolerate working with anyway.
I’m probably wrong but I think things such as electronics repairs and custom computer builds will make a resurgence.
I'm surprised a console-like PC never came about. A maker that just makes one set of specs, and that's their only product (like the Steam Machine, but back in the time of the PS3).
Me too, but I think that turned out to be a good thing, even if due to sheer luck.
As a middle-aged man, it's easy for me to look at consumer habits from 20 or 30 years ago and assume that's what people will do now. Things like going back to a desktop-centered market instead of a laptop-centered one because desktops are cheaper and more repairable in general, normal consumers choosing their hardware specs based on future upgrade cycles, etc.
Either that or (most likely) Chinese companies will put out a bunch of cellphone-like cheap SoC-based devices on mini-PC and laptop form factors. Those would be two radically different worlds, anyway.
Edit: btw, Apple kind of did the latter with the MacBook Neo, right? The only thing missing in the non-Apple side of the equation is the OS, but Windows supports ARM already (sighs) or Google could take over with Android/ChromeOS (sighs even deeper).
Am I on some sort of blacklist invisible to employees for talking too much and causing too much of a ruckus in a workplace? Did my bringing up of a book at a company get one of the executives too upset? Did me having a crisis in public become too embarrassing for another? What the fuck is the problem?
As someone who has spent a lot of time over the past 20+ years on both sides of the interview table, I'm going to take this series of questions at face value and answer them: it only took me about 5 minutes of looking around on your website to see that I would probably never be able to hire you.
Companies don't want noise; they don't want to hire people who write multiple hundred-word-plus articles about political hot button issues, or their anger/frustration at previous employers, or any of a number of other topics.
So - yes - you have probably managed to get yourself on such a "blacklist" through your own public persona. Sorry no one told you before that having strong opinions online is a limiting factor on your future viability as an employee.
I'm reading narcissism out of these blog posts even when they aren't on hot button issues. To the OP, I would say it's not a problem of topic but a problem of what motivated the writing. Another way of looking at it is: this could be your last job in tech or it could not, you could keep blogging like you have been or not, but if you can't learn to wrestle with this side of your personality it will keep causing the same conflicts in whatever you do with your future.
I had a similar experience two years ago. It was maddening to be desk rejected for jobs for which, AFAICT, my resume demonstrated all the requirements.
As others have suggested, I think there’s an abundance of qualified people looking for relatively senior roles. If many folks pass the bar, the company has to artificially invent an ordering because you can’t fully interview, say, 20 people. If you apply for a level below your experience, I think hiring managers get worried you’ll get bored and leave or create weird dynamics with tech leads / supervisors with less experience than you.
About five years ago I was a hiring manager. Picking five folks to interview from twenty resumes is brutal. In the end, I think it was mostly random. I didn’t do this but I suspect many hiring managers use metrics like “years worked at FAANG” to build confidence that someone is credible. Looks like @jalcine and I are similar in lacking work experience at FAANG.
I decided to stop spending any time at all applying to job ads and spend a bunch more time just reconnecting with people, talking to them and essentially reminding them that I exist and that we used to talk. It's landed me three leads that all seem promising and I'll likely know in a few days whether I have a work contract that'd give me a year's worth of buffer. One of the leads is also in exactly the type of job that I want, working with people who are far more experienced than I (20+ years in a pretty niche area), so it's possible that I'll literally have to choose between really good money or potentially a wealth of knowledge to soak in.
I'm saying this mostly to say that I radically changed how I was looking and it was the first time in about 2-3 months of looking that I felt any kind of real progress.
Edit: To be clear, a bunch of these conversations, as far as looking for opportunities go, were duds (I also came to the realization that people that I had previously helped had absolutely zero interest in helping me when I needed it) and I realize that not everyone has the opportunity to reach out to a network.
It's also interesting because I've only ever gotten one job by applying, so I don't even really know why I was wasting my time on that even to begin with.
We're not supposed to say that we're in a recession but damned if I'd lie as I hear from more than half of the people I know about how difficult it is to keep a job, let alone find one
I guess the typical USian fake positivity around might be trying to mask it? But we're absolutely in a recession, and it's barely getting started. There's this company you might've heard of called "OpenAI"…
the challenge is that there is a specific math-y definition of what a "recession" is
and, you know that SRE line about how when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric? yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh politicians and economists are well aware of that and see it as desired behavior
Am I on some sort of blacklist invisible to employees for talking too much and causing too much of a ruckus in a workplace?
...
It also doesn't help that I'm on public record multiple times for being comfortable with bringing a company to the cloth if they're not respecting their workers (which is most of the time; without a union, you only have promises, not commitments).
...
I also know when I make white people uncomfortable and I'm not capable of being a respectable Negro.
A black man in the United States (the beating heart of white supremacy) with a flair for politics and trade unionism? You can bet your ass that the moment HR Googles the man's name he becomes an immediate no.
We have a few folks in our tech-workers group without these qualities, who have not worked in a couple of years now. Not sure these are a major factor. Lack of degree does match however.
Just wanted to add my support and sympathy. I’m graduating this spring and it’s been depressing. I’m lucky enough to have a support system and time. I wish you the best and hope that as with all challenges, this too shall pass <3
My experience earlier this year was I needed a "human in the loop" (recruiter or referral) to break through the noise. The people I knew were hiring weren't hiring for my expertise, but they were getting 500+ applications for a single posting. Sending applications felt like sending them directly into the void. Having a human in the loop ensured my resume was at least seen by a human.
Oh @jalcine, i feel for ya! I'm lucky to be currently employed, but many (if not all) of the things you're feeling, are some that I felt too! I say "lucky" because like yourself I'm a capable person with deep experience...but i just don't have a deep or wide network, or i'm not a good sales person....and the "who-you-know" tactic seems to be way more necessary nowadays...So, i've got as far as i have on plenty of skill, tons of experience, and plenty of luck...so if/when i lose my job, it will be as hard or similar to what you described. But even still, you know what? Its still not you and its not me. Its lots of things that have enshittified - including and especially careers and jobs. Cory Doctorow's enshittification term no longer applies to apps/services, but to many every day life topics, and careers is getting hit hard last few years, and we humans are feeling it. So, Jacky, dude, please feel free to send a message so that we can connect...so that my network becomes available to you so that I can help. Good luck to you, and if you do pivot to a non-tech career, you can always keep computing as a hobby. Do take care of yourself because heatlhcare begins with self-care!!! Good luck!!!
alandekok | 17 hours ago
Having been on the end of circumstances you don't control, it's debilitating. Nothing you do makes any difference. But at the same time if you don't do anything, things will get worse.
I'll comment a bit on the article, and then give some wider comments based on my experience.
I think skills and experience almost always matter, unless you're in a 100% corrupt / nepotism area. This comment sounds like despair to me, not an accurate description of the job market.
I disagree again, but referral does matter a lot. Anyone who's posted a job in the last 15 years can tell you why.
Post: We're looking for network engineers familiar with python, here are details of our needs...
Responses: 90% of the resumes are about something else. Javascript, web, documentation, etc. 90% of the remaining resumes are people who are vaguely close, but their resumes don't tell you what they actually did.
So you bring in the remainder for interviews, and 75% can't answer the simplest question about past projects. Answers include "I dunno what the software did, I just implemented pages 60 through 65 of the spec". Many of the remainder have poor interpersonal skills (ignoring the female interviewer, not showering, talking forever, giving answers unrelated to the question, etc.), or they can't answer the simplest technical questions about their "skills area".
Eventually you find someone who seems good. So you give them an offer, and a trial period. Thank the gods for the trial period, because about many don't actually have the skills they claimed to have. And others say things like "Well, I know you told me to do X, but I didn't understand what you meant, so I just did Y instead". Or, "Well, I know you told me to do X, but I didn't think it would work, so I did Y instead". Did they ask clarifying questions? Did they volunteer that they were delivering something other than what was asked? No. So they get canned a month into the trial period.
Or, as an employer, I can get told by a friend I trust "Hey, this person is good, and should fit into your company. I've worked with them before, and can vouch for them". The success rate there is about 90%.
For the the author, I'm sorry you feel this way, but that's the reality of the other end of the hiring process.
On a personal note, when I started looking for work after a graduate degree, I had a weird discussion with another graduate student:
The root cause was that he had one resume / cover letter, and spammed the same thing to everyone. When the employer looked at that resume they saw that he wanted a job, he didn't want this job.
In contrast, I read the job posting, and reworked my resume for every single posting. I removed things which weren't relevant. I used words from the posting in my resume. I tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I've been working towards getting this job!
The results spoke for themselves.
I eventually got a job by answering a classified ad in the newspaper (yes, I'm old), but that doesn't invalidate my approach. Since then, almost every job I've gotten after that was either (a) by word of mouth, or (b) because they found me, and wanted me specifically.
So I understand the frustration and burnout. As an employee, I couldn't take it, so I started my own business. As an employer, I'm shocked at just how terrible most people are at their jobs. All I want is someone who shows up one time, is communicative, and is reasonably competent. That requirement rules out about 90% of the people who have relevant skills.
hjvt | 16 hours ago
Jobs one genuinely wants are extremely rare, and tailoring a CV and a cover letter to pretend otherwise is both an act of self-harm and a lie.
alandekok | 15 hours ago
That is a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view. I'm sorry you have such an extremist and negative views about the world.
markos | 14 hours ago
I agree, but the problem nowadays is that it doesn't scale to go all in customizing both for the position. ATS will for the most part filter you out before anyone reads your cover letter or CV.
I'm currently looking for a new position, luckily for me not under short time pressure, so I haven't dived in as fully as I probably should, but my impression this time is that it will be much harder than it has been before. It also probably doesn't help that I am over 50.
I still agree that it doesn't make sense to send generic cover and CV out without tailoring it for the position you are applying.
Halkcyon | 14 hours ago
As someone who's been in the hiring seat. It's all LLM slop now. Job postings are AI generated, the cover letter/resume are AI generated, I don't know who the humans in the loop even are anymore.
I think the top poster has a fantasy view of hiring or some specific niche experience (graduate school mentioned, plus getting a job in 2000s or earlier).
alandekok | 13 hours ago
Perhaps you could explain how my comment that (essentially) "99% of resumes are useless" is a "fantasy" that is invalidated by "it's all LLM slop".
Or perhaps you could explain how my comment that "most people do badly in person" is a "fantasy" that is invalidated by "it's all LLM slop".
The reality is that at some point, a human being will read your resume and interview you. At which point, my comments are all true, and relevant.
The only way that your comments are relevant is if all screening, interviews, hiring, and management of people is done by LLMS. That's rather more of a fantasy than anything I said.
Halkcyon | 13 hours ago
I don't think you realize how much this is true. Yes, I've shared your experiences of bad interviews with a human, and bad hires, but that's after who knows how many rounds of going through HR LLMs (and before the current AI craze, ATS), job site LLMs, hiring manager LLMs, before I finally get a say on the person.
The only resumes I've gotten to see not go through that rigamarole? Referrals. Which puts a person right at the top of the pile.
Additionally, I left my last job because my manager started using LLMs to communicate with me.
markos | 11 hours ago
I fear this reality is becoming less true every year and is probably my main fear when it comes to job search. I've been on the other side and even at small companies we would get a few hundred applications, but at least I could check all of them because most of them were awful enough that you could reliably quickly reject.
I feel that is less and less true even at small companies and absolutely isn't any more at bigger ones. You can easily get rejected before anyone even glanced your application without any idea of what you would need to change to pass automated obstacles (if that was even possible).
I think one should tailor CV and cover letter not because somebody on the other side will necessary read it, but because you are feeding a black box and making some effort to guess what it prefers makes sense.
chrismorgan | 11 hours ago
I wonder how much “jobs one genuinely wants” use things like ATS. I imagine there are some people that genuinely want jobs at large companies, but I strongly suspect “jobs one genuinely wants” will be positively correlated with smaller companies. The one job that I have genuinely wanted (which I got) and the one which I reckoned I probably wanted at the time (but which I’m glad 3½ years later that I didn’t get due to life happenings and what I see of that company now) were both email applications (the former to a specific person, the latter to a jobs+rolename@ mailbox) and I was immediately (within twelve hours) dealing with real humans. I actually didn’t send a résumé to either of them, just what would otherwise be called a cover letter.
hjvt | 13 hours ago
Sure, but there's a wide gap between highlighting more relevant experiences for a particular position, and vomiting up drivel about how driven and dedicated to the mission you are.
Loup-Vaillant | 5 hours ago
Cover letter, sure. I'll even type it by hand, from scratch with no assistance but a spell checker. The CV though? Fuck that. You'll get all 3 (5?) pages detailing all my past experiences. I am done tailoring my CV.
I'll do you the favour of sparing you what I did with my Cello.
Loup-Vaillant | 6 hours ago
What is this message, if not a straight up lie?
Don't get me wrong, I do not fault @alandekok for communicating this lie. My own mother advised me to do the same, told me she does the same, and explicitly used the word "lie". Her understanding was that "everyone lie on their resume" (her wording as I recall it, which I took as an emphasis rather than literally), and that our only chance at competing was often to do the same.
I can understand were she was coming from: having to find a job quickly after a separation, (almost?) no work experience to speak of (besides raising two kids, which in a decent world should count, dammit), litterary degree dropout if I recall correctly… And later when she switched from selling clothes to selling houses — and she was admittedly quite good at both jobs.
Now I have a confession to make: there's a little gap in my resume. About 18 months, mostly because of one bad reference from the company that I just parted with (in one of the instance I can name they reportedly said I "lacked autonomy, lacked motivation, and was difficult to manage."). This gap did two things to my resume: first, months were gone from the starting and ending dates of my past experiences. Second, I might, at least for a time, have introduced an off-by-one… error shall we say, that just happened to cover that gap.
A couple years later when working for yet another contracting company, I got a an interview for a gig (as a contractor). At the conclusion of the interview, some big brass representing the client company said: "the important thing is, there is no gap in the resume". Of course my respect for the swine instantly went from undecided to negative, and I saw no need to correct his minor misunderstanding of my career.
My point is, if you don't hide or lie about some things, doors close, careers can even end. Some of those things aren't even relevant to our worth as an employee or a contractor. Some decision makers are so transparently bad at evaluating a prospective hire (I've met some that are good), that frankly, it's better to deceive them than trying to explain, say, why personal projects can be just as relevant as paid gigs (another sour grape).
I can also vouch for the self-harm bit. Barely a sting in my case, but I know how much I would hate to turn the knob any further. In fact, right now I can't. It would impact my self image too much.
cole-k | 5 hours ago
Yeah to be honest I would probably also lean toward turning every knob I can in a direction that makes me employable (within reason as you note --- though I'm not sure if I could lie on my resume, I also didn't go through what you did), even if it went against my personal values. I can relate to your conversation with your mom --- I've had very similar ones with my own family before. Unfortunately for many of us "everyone else is doing it" is either compulsion or comfort enough to justify our actions.
I really do respect OP for sticking to their values. But --- not just trying to console myself for my own behavior here --- I do wonder whether it is quite so black-and-white. Do you differentiate between a conscious choice (e.g. using a network) and one you didn't get to make (e.g. being from a wealthy enough family)? What about grayer areas?
For example, my gut says that paying for SAT (college admission test) prep school isn't so bad as fudging my resume, but would someone more principled than I avoid SAT prep school because it gives them an unfair advantage over people who don't have the same privilege? Do you still oppose prep school if you think the SAT is not a good heuristic and you object to its use? It's not like (in my time) you could reasonably opt out of taking it if you wanted to go to college. My gut says that putting resources toward education isn't a moral failing, but it is also objectively making the playing field less even. Is fudging a resume or using a referral worse? Probably? But I don't really know how to evaluate it.
elliotmorris | 11 hours ago
notagoodidea | 6 hours ago
The system I set up when I was job hunting (for over seven months in 2021) was a tiered system of efforts based on the job offer.
To support the effort, I worked on a templated Latex set-up that allowed to generate the different part for each offer, keep them in separate folders and keep a trace. This was pre-LLM and would probably less work or at all today for the junior/medior jobs I was targeting. But it helped me keep my own sanity regarding the importance and the involvement I wanted to put into various offers without lying too much to myself.
[OP] jalcine | 13 hours ago
The beautiful thing about my piece is that it's my perspective of the industry. I've included projects that I've worked on in each and every application because I try to make a bit of process/job of it with tracking parameters to see if it's open and rarely is it done so. And from the responses from others in this thread, it seems to be more of a reflection of the industry than just my personal stance.
You can find out how good I am if you hire me today :) Just like the housing market, employers control the demand (by controlling how many people are employed as needed/described by business need). Unless you've been employed within the last five years, it's sad to say that you won't be able to relate to the unemployed perspective here. I've been spottily unemployed and watched the scene changed aggressively. Recruiters who are friends went from reviewing 50 applications a day to nearly having to automate 1,000.
aspensmonster | 13 hours ago
I think this reply aptly demonstrates that the table is tilted profoundly in the direction of nepotism. Employers would rather not have to Do The Work™ of surfacing --- or worse, actually having to build --- the candidates that they need. In such an environment, the optimal strategy for candidates becomes either (1) nepotism, or (2) becoming an employer.
alandekok | 11 hours ago
A charitable interpretation is that for every job posting, employers are inundated with 1000's of jobs that have nothing whatsoever to to do with the posting. Even with automated tools, it's a huge amount of work to sift through them all. The signal to noise ratio is terrible.
What would you rather do? Try to pick a small signal out of massive amounts of noise? Or try to pick a reasonably large signal out of small amounts of noise?
It might look like nepotism to the people getting rejected. But the people hiring would love to hire competent people. They just can't separate the competent people from the background noise.
singpolyma | 9 hours ago
This is hardly new though. I've gotten a job that wasn't via networking exactly once: and that was my first school internship. Twice e guess if you count the temp agency before that. The whole rest of my career was on networking. I've never considered "applying to a job" where I don't already know anyone to be a realistic thing to try doing.
mariusor | 11 hours ago
Maybe I'm reading the wrong things in your post, but it definitely sounds to me like you're blaming the victim here a little. The fact that hiring means going through piles of CVs of unsuitable candidates does not tie in even a little bit with the fact that a candidate gets rejected when they are actually suitable.
alandekok | 10 hours ago
I'm trying to explain what's happening on the other side of the table. If you think this is blaming the victim, then please suggest solutions to the problems I raised.
What can employers do in order to detect suitable candidates and not reject them?
In the past few years, I've personally read hundreds of resumes. Interviewed dozens of people. Hired a few. Not all managed to stay.
When I talk to other potential employers, they all share the same problem. Like potential employees, they would love to find a good match between candidate and company. But they're finding it very difficult.
So there's a big disconnect here. Either one (or both) groups of people are mistaken. Or maybe something else is going on.
Off of the top of my head, I would say that people who are doing well and are happy in their jobs tend to find new employment through their personal network. The same goes for employers.
My personal experience is that the job market is inundated with resumes which have nothing whatsoever to do with the job posting. Maybe the practice of the author isn't to spam resumes, but it seems to be the practice of most people applying for jobs. Even a little bit of attention paid to "job fit" by people looking for work would help everyone enormously. Employers wouldn't have to be so aggressive about filtering out nonsense, and candidates would then find it easier to get interviews.
[OP] jalcine | 5 hours ago
Some solutions we can have into this:
And this was off the top off of my head. There's a lot of options but not enough effort into humanizing the process; making it hard for everyone but especially for the folks who need to pay bills or get health insurance (because without a job, you're waiting just as long for social benefits).
danlamanna | 13 hours ago
You left out the part where almost immediately the posting gets barraged with countless resumes.
Another area I've found almost all(!) candidates lack is being able to describe what their company does in a way that doesn't require the other person to have an engineering degree.
zetashift | 16 hours ago
The amount of agency, persistence, optimism one can have in finding a job really depends on a lot of things imho. "Hard work with care and results is all that matters" is a guiding star that can get broken down by real life. The fact that referrals matter(so much to the point it feels overwhelming, to me at least) makes things feel grimey. Not everybody works with referrals, but so much works on it that it feels pointless to care for craft. Personally I wish I knew where to start on how to improve those type of things around me in real life.
I have no experience here, but what I always appreciate from persons that I met, isn't that they are good at their job from the start, but that they can improve incrementally(this might also be what you mean under "is communicative/competent", but I always like to mention it explicitly.
simonw | 15 hours ago
If you want referrals from credible people, you need to invest in craft.
Suggesting someone else for a job is a significant reputational investment! If I recommend someone and they turn out to be a bad fit it's a hit on my reputation.
I'm not going to refer someone if I don't think they have the skills for the job.
kel | 12 hours ago
Many people invest in craft and nobody cares or notices because they don't build enough of a social network. Many people don't care about their craft at all, and network enough they're always comfortably employed. Your idea of how the job market should work and how it actually works are not the same thing.
simonw | 10 hours ago
Where did I express my idea of how the job market should work?
It's certainly true that investing in your craft won't help if you can't help people understand how you've invested in your craft. That's why I've long advocated for side projects and online writing (which doesn't have to be prolific) as a way to help bump yourself up the flood of resumes.
zetashift | 10 hours ago
Which probably is not as effective advice these days because of the slopsea. Anybody can whip up a text that says something.
I'm mentioning this more as another example of how tumultuous the journey to show merit/care for craft can be.
Loup-Vaillant | 5 hours ago
Even before that, there are loads of managers that think side projects hardly ever count. Also, less than 5% of the people that ever interviewed me showed any sign of having even glanced at my long lived and fairly substantial blog, even thought I put a link in my CV, and am extremely easy to find online.
zetashift | 14 hours ago
I sortof hint to that in my original post, in that investing in your craft("hard work with care..matters" part) is a good thing to have a focus on. But it's not easy at all for people that are not social or have other (social) things/issues happening at the same time, and that's also why I use the word feels in my post.
There is a will there to do better, but enabling/empowering people is not an obvious thing here. I get why referral systems are here, I get that individuals think they are rigorous in who they endorse, but the bias is strong!
So that's also why I mention I don't know how to start improving the situation around me, because craft and merit and referrals are one thing, but awareness about employee rights/unions, improvements to social infrastructure etc all seem to me more effective ways to help people rather than go against the preference on how a bunch of well-networked people meet other slightly-less networked people.
(sorry for the ramble)
simonw | 13 hours ago
Completely agree on bias. Referrals work great for people who have strong connections and have already been able to establish themselves in prior roles, they're massively biased against anyone who's just getting started or who doesn't have a strong network.
[OP] jalcine | 5 hours ago
I've invested in my craft for a decade and nearly exhausted my referrals. I've written cover letters using My Brain GPT (aka by hand) and tailored my resume such that I can tweak it on demand (it's all HTML at https://www.jacky.wtf/work). This isn't the first time I've experienced this (as documented at https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/the-hunt-driving-me-mad/) because it's not about skills (despite what folks write who haven't had to look for a job in a decade: https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/on-the-tech-resume-inside-out/): it's more than that.
This conversation is like talking to someone before Brexit or before the American housing crisis of 2008-2012 and trying to have them understand how bad things have become. You wouldn't understand the magnitude until you're in the position yourself (and I don't wish it on anyone).
To your point about being prolific, I've attempted to do this and seemingly so, this over-indexes for college-educated or heavily-networked/industry-favored folks and not on a system of merit. It's the kind of advice Paul Graham would have given (again disconnected from the day-to-day).
alandekok | 15 hours ago
IMHO, it's always good to improve yourself, and to do the right thing.
I agree 100%.
In my experience, the people who don't improve incrementally are bad, and stay bad. They do the same thing for years, while the world changes around them. Or they see a problem, go "Huh, that's weird", and then ignore it.
I call this the "It was on fire when I laid down on it" problem:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8379880-it-was-on-fire-when-i-lay-down-on-it
zetashift | 13 hours ago
Yes, agree, I hope I was clear that a person has agency, but that persisting through the trials of life might mean that one would need to have a better supporting system than what we currently have.
I've put it on my (endless) to-read list! From the Goodreads description it's a bit hard to understand what it's exactly about ha.
And now, for a surprising segue from Goodreads, @jalcine is working on: https://livtet.olamaelcu.net/ which looks promising!
Halkcyon | 14 hours ago
Let me guess, you walked in to meet the owner, gave him a firm handshake, and he gave you a career with a pension? This comment feels like a trope and disconnected with the experience of the article writer.
alandekok | 13 hours ago
You're pretty much complaining that I'm denigrating the author and invalidating their lived experience, by denigrating me and invalidating my lived experience.
Good job.
Next, try cursing me out and calling me names.
Halkcyon | 13 hours ago
It's not intended to invalidate your experience, but point out the very common trope of boomers saying you should just walk into the place of business and slap your resume down to get noticed without noticing how the world works has changed.
alandekok | 11 hours ago
If you could post a message without being insulting, that would be great. No one here is referring to you as a "snot-nosed know-nothing kid", so you shouldn't jump to negative sterotypes.
You could have interpreted my comment in the way it was intended: as a marker of just how much things have changed over the years, and how some things have remained the same. Instead, you immediately jumped to negative interpretations.
And FWIW, I'm not a boomer. I'm just an adult.
Halkcyon | 11 hours ago
You were literally performing the trope, and from my POV, disregarding the real struggles of the author.
alandekok | 11 hours ago
You characterized my comment as intending to mean this:
So despite the clear possibility that I meant something else, and my statement that I meant something else, you still believe I was intending something negative.
I don't need to defend myself from accusations which are wholly invented, and which deny reality.
I'm sorry for you, and wish you a more positive life.
jfloren | 13 hours ago
I have done hiring for a dev job in the last year and I would have jumped for joy to see a hand-delivered resume. It would have gone to the top of the pile immediately.
Hard to do as a fully-remote company though. We're looking at job fairs.
zod000 | 12 hours ago
Even when I did hiring in person, it was literally impossible for such a scenario to happen. Any resume that didn't go through HR and get vetted by some nebulous process was a resume that I officially could not consider for a position.
Halkcyon | 13 hours ago
Nice! I go to a few tech conferences regularly, but the people companies tend to send to these are ads/HR/PR, not hiring managers. Remote work has been a blessing in general but also a curse in this regard. I miss when interviews were done in person tbh, Zoom calls feel so impersonal especially with a panel.
kneeawn | 9 hours ago
Maybe things have changed in the past few years, but my experience was that job fairs could land interviews with local companies (which is awesome) but larger companies would just have a person take your piece of paper, then direct you to careers.company.com.
white-star | 8 hours ago
Indeed, the biggest employers in my area don’t even have a front door. They have a security gate, which you’re not getting past without an appointment and ID.
fengshaun | 11 hours ago
I haven't been in the job market for the past 10 years, neither am I hiring at the moment, but this has been the feeling I have hearing from friends and acquaintances about their job search stories. I often dig a bit deeper than I probably should, and I see most everyone around me complain about not being able to find a job. Then when they tell me about the interview process, or their history, skills, and when I see what they're working on and I casually ask them questions about the code they've supposedly written and their attitude toward programming, I see why finding a job can be difficult. I've found a general attitude of "I got a degree, so the job should come immediately with no further effort". No doubt the market has become much more competitive than my days, though.
utahshex | 4 hours ago
Over the past couple of years I’ve read hundreds of applications (that have been filtered before getting to me) and interviewed 20%. I’ve hired about 40% of those we interviewed. Of those hires, I’d say 20% turned out to be completely useless, 40% were OK but I wouldn’t hire them again, and 40% were good.
So while my numbers aren’t as dire as yours, I think that’s the pre-filtering. But still, most applications I see are trash - barely relevant skills, unstable work history, either clearly slop or so badly written I’d prefer if they had used an LLM to at least tidy it up a bit.
One thing that’s different culturally here is that (at least in my sector) “referrals” aren’t really a thing, but references are. We expect every applicant to be able to provide written references, preferably from more senior staff and/or clients. That does help to a degree.
Student | 4 hours ago
It sounds like part of the problem is that your interview process might be worse than flipping a coin.
alanmeira | 3 hours ago
flipping a coin won't get you 50% of good results.
utahshex | 4 hours ago
That’s certainly a problem, but it still doesn’t account for the vast majority of terrible applications.
Also: interviewing is hard. I’m not sure how much experience you have doing it. I’ve interviewed people who I know are excellent (worked with them before) but barely scrape through because they suck at interviews. I’ve interviewed people who seemed excellent but turned out to be terrible because of factors that it’s hard to pull out in an interview (eg laziness, being OTT argumentative etc).
mtset | 2 hours ago
Why does this make an application "trash"? (As a stably employed person who has seen my less-fortunate friends fired over and over for absolute nonsense or unavoidable circumstances.)
utahshex | 2 hours ago
I was too vague here - “unstable” doesn’t mean one or two short gigs, that happens to most people. But if someone has 10 years of experience and hasn't been able to stay in the same role longer than 6 months, that’s a red flag (though not by itself a disqualifying one). It also depends on what the roles were, and if any explanation is provided.
mtset | 2 hours ago
Makes sense, thank you!
dprkh | 14 hours ago
Why? In my experience, it's better to apply early than wait for somebody to give you a referral, because if you apply too late, your application won't even be looked at.
pralkarz | 19 hours ago
Damn, this hits hard. I'm currently employed, but the uncertainty is palpable and it's honestly tiring not knowing which month is the one that my company decides I'm no longer needed. Hope you can find solace in whatever you decide to pursue next and thanks for the heartfelt write-up, it really resonated with me.
viraptor | 16 hours ago
It really feels like the author is reaching some level of despair and trying hard to find some personal reasons for the failure in finding a position. Of course we don't know all the details, but the market is crap right now. I know a few people struggling to find a position and a few who left the industry rather than fight it. So... if there really is a personal reason, I hope the author discovers it, and if not, I hope they will gain the perspective they need to persevere in bad times. Good luck!
[OP] jalcine | 13 hours ago
I appreciate that and I was. I was looking at every rejection e-mail (which after a while, you realize it's all stock messaging so I'm not even worth giving a notice of "fuck off" too) and looking for what it is. It's a lot of "it's not you, it's me [the company]" rhetoric, which gets hard to believe after the 100th e-mail!
jfloren | 13 hours ago
This is what everyone gets, because HR tells themselves it reduces legal liability (it actually just reduces work).
conartist6 | 19 hours ago
I'd hire you if I could. The way I see it is this: any company with real opportunity should be welcoming people in.
The fact that tech companies keep turning people away only tells me that they have no idea how to put valuable people to valuable use. I have no such fear, but for the moment I and my company have no money to hire anyone -_-
mordae | 16 hours ago
They have no idea how to put valuable people to use in a way that would benefit the rich few.
There is plenty of work to be done, but you cannot get to it unless some filthy rich aging man puts some of his cronies on it to get him the ROI. Western governments are thoroughly captured and forbidden from doing the necessary infrastructure work as well. And poor people cannot afford to spend time organizing large scale projects so they instead put the little money (influence over direction) they have towards immediately easing their suffering instead.
Whatever you do, do not look into what China is doing right now. Do not visit Owner-occupancy on Wikipedia and sort by descending percentage and look at the second spot in the "Home ownership rate" column. And for the love of all that is holy, do not search for "flying cars china" on YouTube.
You have been warned.
If only there were a political force in the US campaigning on changing this destructive political status quo. If only.
Student | 14 hours ago
It’s true. I think a big part of the angst over vibecoding is the realization that our productivity potentially massively increased at doing something that ultimately has relatively low social value (cranking out rent capturing software) and was relatively difficult to sustainably use for good (because of subscription models)
mordae | 13 hours ago
Nah. To me most of the complaints about LLMs look like
systemddebates all over again.I am extremely concerned that western governments would give in and ban open weight models and with them any chance we have, long-term, to keep the means of production in our hands. Being forced to rent software development tools from capitalists would be a total nightmare scenario in my book.
What concerns me about the discourse is that people pull against any LLM adoption because capitalists are pushing for it instead of (tactically) saying "We are happy to add this new thing to our toolbox, but we are concerned about industrial espionage and vendor lock-in, can we get some on-site inference boxes and maybe subscribe to someone who will train the models as a service? Or even found an organization that will do it in the open for everyone to use?"
And, also, we should do the scraping ourselves. In a way that does not harm the websites, and publish to collected scrapes as a database (which is separately copyrightable in many jurisdictions including EU) with extra license on top that says you can use it to train LLMs but only if you keep the weights open.
BTW, did you know that Stanisław Lem wrote in the sixties that the first AI systems will be basically a large-scale plagiarism of human authors? Funny to see people being surprised about that some 60 years later. He also wrote about the paperclip problem, although with much more insight. And that one is a doozy if you truly think it through in the current western societal arrangement.
elliotmorris | 11 hours ago
I don't think folk are surprised about the plagiarism, they're just angry that once again society is demonstrating that it does not care to constrain a certain class of people.
mordae | 7 hours ago
It boils down to this again: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IpcR4bPcoUQ
Not everyone is aware. I think the penetration is way higher for GenZ, say 40-50% but below 20% for people over 60. Most people still believe that culture is an immutable natural phenomenon. Not explicitly, obviously. But in how they approach it.
This makes it super hard to change it. Nonlinearly so. And the fascist reaction to tweaking it just a tiny bit recently around human rights shows that the majority really, really does not want to say aloud what they value and how they want to live.
I think the anti-AI crowd means well, it's just that they don't really offer alternatives. To wage slavery I mean. It's basically safe posturing on their side. If they really wanted results (power to choose) and not just an anti-system lifestyle they'd have unionized by now.
Actually, a large portion of them likely still believe that capitalism equals freedom and profit motive ensures collective wins.
Just look at how messed up are the meta discussions here. :-D
Student | 7 hours ago
I stopped having pet Linux machines a long time ago so other than the fact of some people being very upset I’m not sure what it was all about.
It is much harder to spy on a local deployment so yes I imagine you’re right. That said I’m not sure how easy it will be to enforce given that you can send physical media by mail. Plus we’ll probably all switch to Chinese to save on tokens.
orib | 7 hours ago
I dislike systemd because it works poorly. If it was well designed and worked nicely, I would be fine with it.
I dislike AI because of the world that they are investing in building. If they work better, my objections increase.
atk | 5 hours ago
I guess, yes. In the sense that 99% of people chipping in their opinions have no fucking clue of what they are talking about (on all sides).
Other than that, no.
mitsuhiko | 16 hours ago
I’m not sure if you have been or are in the situation of hiring people but it’s a massive funnel. Of 200 people that apply, maybe one makes it to the end of the funnel. There are so many things that affect if you end up passing the bar.
conartist6 | 15 hours ago
I have a lot of (I think talented) friends searching and reporting the same.
I've been thinking about searching, but while I have some things going for me I also (like the author) have spoken loudly in dissent, and have other imperfections like only having most of a college degree. I cannot imagine that the market would be kind to me
Xiao | 14 hours ago
The scary part is that i think many of us are not too far away from this. My resume doesn't have any name brand companies, and my network is pretty small.
I got lucky finding my current job, but luck is not always there for us
tmcb | 15 hours ago
First of all, I’m truly sorry that you are going through that. The whole industry is like a game of musical chairs right now, and none of us have any control over what’s going on, no matter how talented you are, which really sucks. I hope you can get back on your feet soon.
Unfortunately, in the long run, I do think they are kicking most of us out by rebuilding the moat there was before the advent of personal computing ~40 years ago, all of that before the whole world economy goes tits up once more this century.
I’ve been thinking on how to hedge against this, as far as my skill set is concerned. It will be very hard to get a higher paying job, unless I decide to make the jump to big tech, which I never really wanted to, even when it was the best option by far, and much less now that I know I’d be getting those fat checks on borrowed time.
That being said, personal computing will get much more expensive, and people will start to look for cheaper alternatives. I’m probably wrong but I think things such as electronics repairs and custom computer builds will make a resurgence. That doesn’t pay nearly enough in comparison to our industry’s historical record, but, yeah, there’s that. I think that is something most of us would tolerate working with anyway.
Again, best of luck on your journey.
Halkcyon | 13 hours ago
I'm surprised a console-like PC never came about. A maker that just makes one set of specs, and that's their only product (like the Steam Machine, but back in the time of the PS3).
tmcb | 8 hours ago
Me too, but I think that turned out to be a good thing, even if due to sheer luck.
As a middle-aged man, it's easy for me to look at consumer habits from 20 or 30 years ago and assume that's what people will do now. Things like going back to a desktop-centered market instead of a laptop-centered one because desktops are cheaper and more repairable in general, normal consumers choosing their hardware specs based on future upgrade cycles, etc.
Either that or (most likely) Chinese companies will put out a bunch of cellphone-like cheap SoC-based devices on mini-PC and laptop form factors. Those would be two radically different worlds, anyway.
Edit: btw, Apple kind of did the latter with the MacBook Neo, right? The only thing missing in the non-Apple side of the equation is the OS, but Windows supports ARM already (sighs) or Google could take over with Android/ChromeOS (sighs even deeper).
tml | 8 hours ago
As someone who has spent a lot of time over the past 20+ years on both sides of the interview table, I'm going to take this series of questions at face value and answer them: it only took me about 5 minutes of looking around on your website to see that I would probably never be able to hire you.
Companies don't want noise; they don't want to hire people who write multiple hundred-word-plus articles about political hot button issues, or their anger/frustration at previous employers, or any of a number of other topics.
So - yes - you have probably managed to get yourself on such a "blacklist" through your own public persona. Sorry no one told you before that having strong opinions online is a limiting factor on your future viability as an employee.
technetium | 7 hours ago
articles like the one OP writes would be better done under a pseudonym
lordgilman | 3 hours ago
I'm reading narcissism out of these blog posts even when they aren't on hot button issues. To the OP, I would say it's not a problem of topic but a problem of what motivated the writing. Another way of looking at it is: this could be your last job in tech or it could not, you could keep blogging like you have been or not, but if you can't learn to wrestle with this side of your personality it will keep causing the same conflicts in whatever you do with your future.
danking | 14 hours ago
I had a similar experience two years ago. It was maddening to be desk rejected for jobs for which, AFAICT, my resume demonstrated all the requirements.
As others have suggested, I think there’s an abundance of qualified people looking for relatively senior roles. If many folks pass the bar, the company has to artificially invent an ordering because you can’t fully interview, say, 20 people. If you apply for a level below your experience, I think hiring managers get worried you’ll get bored and leave or create weird dynamics with tech leads / supervisors with less experience than you.
About five years ago I was a hiring manager. Picking five folks to interview from twenty resumes is brutal. In the end, I think it was mostly random. I didn’t do this but I suspect many hiring managers use metrics like “years worked at FAANG” to build confidence that someone is credible. Looks like @jalcine and I are similar in lacking work experience at FAANG.
mt | 15 hours ago
Feel this post in my bones. I don’t have much in terms of advice, but it was cathartic to read that, thanks @jalcine.
gonz | 9 hours ago
I decided to stop spending any time at all applying to job ads and spend a bunch more time just reconnecting with people, talking to them and essentially reminding them that I exist and that we used to talk. It's landed me three leads that all seem promising and I'll likely know in a few days whether I have a work contract that'd give me a year's worth of buffer. One of the leads is also in exactly the type of job that I want, working with people who are far more experienced than I (20+ years in a pretty niche area), so it's possible that I'll literally have to choose between really good money or potentially a wealth of knowledge to soak in.
I'm saying this mostly to say that I radically changed how I was looking and it was the first time in about 2-3 months of looking that I felt any kind of real progress.
Edit: To be clear, a bunch of these conversations, as far as looking for opportunities go, were duds (I also came to the realization that people that I had previously helped had absolutely zero interest in helping me when I needed it) and I realize that not everyone has the opportunity to reach out to a network.
It's also interesting because I've only ever gotten one job by applying, so I don't even really know why I was wasting my time on that even to begin with.
benoliver999 | 18 hours ago
mauvehed | 15 hours ago
This hits home in such painful ways. I feel you. All too much.
valpackett | 8 hours ago
I guess the typical USian fake positivity around might be trying to mask it? But we're absolutely in a recession, and it's barely getting started. There's this company you might've heard of called "OpenAI"…
Yeah, so it's not just a "bubble" where overhyped tech is getting ridiculous investment. It's an economic time bomb with the exact same structure as the subprime mortgages of the mid-2000s. Interesting times!
Irene | 7 hours ago
I agree with you
the challenge is that there is a specific math-y definition of what a "recession" is
and, you know that SRE line about how when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric? yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh politicians and economists are well aware of that and see it as desired behavior
Halkcyon | 7 hours ago
JPMC analysts recently said it also looks like the economics of the dotcom boom.
aspensmonster | 13 hours ago
A black man in the United States (the beating heart of white supremacy) with a flair for politics and trade unionism? You can bet your ass that the moment HR Googles the man's name he becomes an immediate no.
quad | 3 hours ago
As a fellow Black man in tech, I remember reading his earlier posts and thinking this was the inevitable conclusion. 😔
white-star | 8 hours ago
We have a few folks in our tech-workers group without these qualities, who have not worked in a couple of years now. Not sure these are a major factor. Lack of degree does match however.
kneeawn | 9 hours ago
Just wanted to add my support and sympathy. I’m graduating this spring and it’s been depressing. I’m lucky enough to have a support system and time. I wish you the best and hope that as with all challenges, this too shall pass <3
pyj | 6 hours ago
My experience earlier this year was I needed a "human in the loop" (recruiter or referral) to break through the noise. The people I knew were hiring weren't hiring for my expertise, but they were getting 500+ applications for a single posting. Sending applications felt like sending them directly into the void. Having a human in the loop ensured my resume was at least seen by a human.
mxuribe | 5 hours ago
Oh @jalcine, i feel for ya! I'm lucky to be currently employed, but many (if not all) of the things you're feeling, are some that I felt too! I say "lucky" because like yourself I'm a capable person with deep experience...but i just don't have a deep or wide network, or i'm not a good sales person....and the "who-you-know" tactic seems to be way more necessary nowadays...So, i've got as far as i have on plenty of skill, tons of experience, and plenty of luck...so if/when i lose my job, it will be as hard or similar to what you described. But even still, you know what? Its still not you and its not me. Its lots of things that have enshittified - including and especially careers and jobs. Cory Doctorow's enshittification term no longer applies to apps/services, but to many every day life topics, and careers is getting hit hard last few years, and we humans are feeling it. So, Jacky, dude, please feel free to send a message so that we can connect...so that my network becomes available to you so that I can help. Good luck to you, and if you do pivot to a non-tech career, you can always keep computing as a hobby. Do take care of yourself because heatlhcare begins with self-care!!! Good luck!!!
gkoos | an hour ago
No disrespect, but reading these comments I feel like most people are responding to a completely different article.