[HN Gopher] I automated my job application process
___________________________________________________________________
I automated my job application process
Author : paul-tharun
Score : 558 points
Date : 2024-12-28 15:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.daviddodda.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.daviddodda.com)
| ghjfrdghibt wrote:
| This seems like an excellent use of LLM.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| One of the major reasons why applying for jobs sucks so much is
| that companies are flooded with more garbage applications than
| they can process.
|
| So hurray for the tragedy of the commons, I guess. It was nice
| knowing everyone.
|
| On a personal level, I consider the practice espoused by this
| article of flooding the world with automated messages without
| care for how it impacts anyone else to be narcissistic and
| morally reprehensible, not admirable, but whatever floats a
| person's boat.
| qoez wrote:
| Time to go back to handing out resumes in person
| artursapek wrote:
| Exactly. It's funny someone would be so self-unaware as to brag
| about doing this in a blog post
|
| It doesn't matter though. The way to get actual good jobs is to
| be poached. And to get poached, you need to build real projects
| of your own that get peoples' attention. Resume spamming is for
| the plebs.
| kamikazeturtles wrote:
| All the jobs I got over my career, I got by filling out a non-
| conventional long job application form.
|
| I always assumed it's because that's where most job seekers would
| drop off.
|
| It's how I got a job as an HVAC tech without any trade school exp
| and how I got a software dev job without any college, bootcamp,
| or professional exp.
|
| Just some advice for any job seekers out there. The more annoying
| the job application process, the more likely you are to get
| hired.
| lokimedes wrote:
| While agents and HR may be looking to match the bare
| requirements, the hiring manager is likely also looking for
| "alpha" the stuff that escapes formal requirements. My hires
| are usually those that passes the base reqs and provide that
| unique something that the cover letter seems to reveal.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| > The irony? I got a job offer before I even finished building
| it. More on that later
|
| Nothing succeeds like success. If you are on n attempt, and you
| are geared up for what you will do for n+2, usually the problem
| surrenders its self on n.
| gamerDude wrote:
| It will be interesting to see a SaaS that applies to jobs come
| up.
|
| I wonder if the application process will switch up in the near
| future to people posting their profiles for then company
| recruiters/AI to reach out and contact since if they post a job
| they just get 10k automated applications.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| A fun variant:
|
| - scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result
|
| - take the responses with "positive sentiment" and then contact
| the linkedin person
|
| Service is now connecting people with companies that already
| thought their generated CV was close enough to what they want.
| Call this a "recruitment agency".
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > - scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result
|
| That was my first thought when looking for jobs, but maybe I
| am naive, wouldn't this break their ToS?
| maeil wrote:
| Whoopsie, guess OpenAI et al broke a few million ToSes
| while training their models!
| modmodmod wrote:
| do you really care though?
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I mean scrape it for _candidates_ as well as jobs, generate
| CVs for the candidates, apply to the jobs with the
| generated CVs, contact the candidate after a positive hit.
| And yes, I expect that 's completely against their terms of
| service.
| Oras wrote:
| There are many, search for jobs copilot or job application
| copilot.
| xianshou wrote:
| One of those cases where the act of building the system serves as
| sufficient qualification in itself, even when the results of the
| system are mediocre.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| that's how I got my new job offer!, I talked about this system
| I was building during a technical interview.
| euvin wrote:
| I've thought about the optics of talking about my own
| automatic job application system or including it on my
| resume, but I thought it'd be risky given the topic (like how
| listing your own startup is frowned upon, if I'm not
| mistaken?). Is it normally considered a bit risky or taboo?
| DavidDodda wrote:
| well, it was during the technical interview, and it was
| just a couple of engineers doing the interview. I was just
| geeking out on all the problems I was solving (and
| creating).
|
| and to be honest, I was too nerves to think about if it was
| risky or taboo.
| the_arun wrote:
| Is cover letter important? Do hiring managers/recruiters read
| those?
| codegeek wrote:
| Depends. As a Hiring Manager, I love cover letters but only if
| it is not a generic copy paste. Don't get me wrong. I don't
| mind a Cover letter that may have some generic stuff about you
| but you must add something specific about the role/company that
| you are applying for and why you will be a good fit. This will
| get you miles ahead of others in the queue.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| how would you rate this?, this email was written by the
| system from the article.
|
| Dear Hiring Manager,
|
| I hope this message finds you well. My name is David Dodda,
| and I am writing to express my interest in the Software
| Engineer position at WIA Software Systems Inc. I am a Senior
| Software Developer with extensive experience in full-stack
| development, and I believe my skills align well with the
| requirements outlined in your job posting.
|
| With a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication and
| over 5 years of professional experience, I have honed my
| capabilities in various programming languages and
| technologies, particularly in React, Node.js, AWS, and SQL.
| At Black Beard Development Group, I led the development of a
| privacy-focused AI platform and played a pivotal role in
| establishing CI/CD pipelines that improved efficiencies
| across our team.
|
| Your job description emphasizes the importance of developing
| software solutions by studying systems flow, data usage, and
| work processes. In my previous roles, I have consistently
| evaluated user feedback to improve system designs and have
| successfully executed the full lifecycle of software
| development. Additionally, my involvement in agile
| methodologies and my proficiency in AWS aligns perfectly with
| your requirement for cloud and DevOps experience.
|
| Furthermore, I have experience collaborating with teams to
| coordinate the development and integration of computer-based
| systems, ensuring optimal functionality and performance. My
| recent project involving a fantasy sports DApp required me to
| coordinate with various stakeholders, manage expectations,
| and lead technical efforts, making me well-equipped for the
| responsibilities at WIA Software Systems Inc.
|
| I am particularly excited about the hybrid work arrangement
| offered for this role, as I believe it allows for both
| collaborative in-person engagement and the flexibility of
| remote work, which enhances productivity.
|
| Thank you for considering my application. I have attached my
| resume for your review and would welcome the opportunity to
| discuss how my background, skills, and enthusiasms align with
| the goals of WIA Software Systems Inc.
|
| Best regards, David Dodda https://daviddodda.com
| codegeek wrote:
| Honestly, this is a typical generic one where may be you
| just edited the pargraph a bit about "Your job description
| emphasizes the importance of..". I would rather have you
| give me concrete examples. Instead of saying "I have
| consistently evaluated user feedback to..", give me an
| actual example.
|
| Also, a bit too long. Make it shorter.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| thanks for the feedback!
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm in a completely different field, working in
| healthcare. This letter would rank well above the average
| one I get.
|
| I receive cover letters with typos, the wrong word used,
| poor punctuation etc. If candidates could use a spell
| checking it would be a good start.
| jdbdnej wrote:
| While I would not mind getting a cover letter like that, I
| would not score any points.
|
| It just has zero value. A well written cover letter on the
| other hand would net you a big plus
| 1auralynn wrote:
| Way too wordy, overly formal, and generic
| hb-robo wrote:
| I am not a hiring manager but something about these mini-
| paragraphs puts me off. It's like those tabloid sites where
| every sentence has its own line.
| Volundr wrote:
| It's highly dependent on the manager I'm afraid and impossible
| to guess who's on the other side of that.
|
| The process outlined in the post also isn't a path to writing a
| good cover letter. You don't want to just go over your resume
| again you want to either talk about things that wouldn't be
| there (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your
| 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not
| because you need money to feed yourself) or expanding on how
| something on your resume uniquely qualifies you (I worked on
| this project that's very similar to what your doing)
|
| If it's lining up your resume to the job description (you want
| someone who can write Scala, I have used Scala in my past 3
| jobs) a resume is a better format for that. But that's all the
| LLM has context to do.
|
| Oh yeah, ideally you'd also tune your resume to the job too.
| maeil wrote:
| > (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100%
| applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because
| you need money to feed yourself)
|
| In 99.9% of jobs in the world, there are zero applicants for
| who this truly holds. You might be working at a company
| hiring for a job that's part of the 0.1%, not sure.
| Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to
| lie as blatantly as required.
| Volundr wrote:
| > Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are
| willing to lie as blatantly as required.
|
| That's a pessimistic way of looking at it, but I'm not
| going to claim it's wrong. I think my phrasing made it very
| clear that in most cases I expect if someone includes
| something about this their interest is going to be _ahem_
| embellished.
|
| All the same look at it from the hiring managers side. Say
| you have two candidates, who appear to otherwise be equal.
| One seems to think the job is just like any other. The
| other actually seems genuinely interested in the details of
| food brokering, knows of your companies involvement in <big
| name>'s success and has thoughts on how they can apply
| their background in data analytics to the challenges you
| face.
|
| Which candidate do you hire? Or do you really just toss a
| coin?
| petesergeant wrote:
| When I worked as a recruiter, I'd make candidates write two
| paragraphs of prose to summarize what they could do. Much
| easier to read than picking through a CV looking for clues.
| hansvm wrote:
| I have no clue in general. When I go through applications, I go
| through all the material and anything else I can find about the
| candidate, and cover letters are sometimes helpful. Put
| yourself in my shoes:
|
| - If the cover letter is a rehash of your resume, it's a waste
| of your time and mine. It certainly isn't helpful to your
| application, and if I have too many well-qualified applicants
| then it might be harmful.
|
| - Poorly written cover letters suggest that the applicant
| doesn't care much about this specific opportunity, it's some
| sort of AI/oversees/... scam, or the applicant can't write
| well. They're very helpful for me when there are already other
| data points suggesting identity theft or similar automation
| (nail-in-the-coffin material). Otherwise, they're not
| necessarily a negative, but it's rarely advantageous to
| advertise a lack of some skill, and it does disqualify
| applicants from some roles.
|
| - Some cover letters are especially compelling. Suppose your
| resume just has you as a pizza delivery driver, but your cover
| letter goes over the app you wrote and the data science behind
| it to optimize your hourly earnings. Suppose your work history
| is in web tech, but you're actually better at low-level
| optimizations and are applying here because you think that
| skill set is a good fit. I prefer varied backgrounds anyway, so
| you'll probably get some form of screening interview unless
| there's enough other evidence that you aren't qualified (e.g.,
| junior experience for a senior role) -- I try to bias toward
| giving everyone a chance while not wasting too much of anyone's
| time, and I'm fine having a busier calendar to make that
| happen.
|
| None of that helps you get the job though; it helps you get an
| interview. If your experience is that you're well qualified and
| usually land the job once you get into an interview, and if
| your cover letter has some information your resume lacks, you
| should definitely add one. If you normally struggle through the
| interview process, it'd be surprising for you to have an honest
| cover letter which would help you land the job in the first
| place, so I probably wouldn't bother.
| gaws wrote:
| In most cases, they are not important. All the offers I
| received asked for a cover letter, and I always submitted a
| one-line PDF that said I would discuss my work history and why
| I'd like the job only in an interview.
| thih9 wrote:
| This is some next level bs spam. I know job search in IT is
| difficult these days but this kind of automation will not make it
| better; if anything, the opposite.
|
| The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace
| both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment
| process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews
| next.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Yup, in person and worst, only in network.
|
| So you end up using technology to de-evolve society back to
| tribes.
|
| Still, at least we are other people who are creating this AI
| technology and all of its application ... so we see the pain up
| close and we can start to steer it in a better direction that's
| more healthy for society.
|
| But you know we have to find our integrity first.
| codegeek wrote:
| Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
| Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and
| got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close
| to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes
| to find someone worth interviewing.
|
| The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get
| ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues.
|
| I get that the market is bad right now and there are lot of
| people looking for jobs but auto submissions and flooding job
| sites wont work. Not for the ones that matter anyway.
| zachthewf wrote:
| Were you able to find good candidates from your post
| eventually?
| codegeek wrote:
| Not yet. It has been a week and I have 500+ resumes sitting
| in the inbox. Not fun.
| dazed_confused wrote:
| Good luck! Sounds terrible
| ArlenBales wrote:
| Just curious, do you use LLMs in your reviewing process?
| e.g. Summarization, prioritization, etc.
| codegeek wrote:
| Thinking about it. Might build my own tool.
| cbsmith wrote:
| That's okay. You can just use a bunch of LLMs to filter through
| to the few resumes you would have gotten before people used
| LLMs to find jobs... ;-)
| zwnow wrote:
| Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You are the reason people
| go for these kinda solutions. Hiring process is complete bs.
| imnotjames wrote:
| What do you suggest?
| petesergeant wrote:
| Add a tiny captcha-like task that takes a real candidate
| who read the job ad 20 seconds to do, but won't get done by
| spray and pray candidates.
| feznyng wrote:
| Bunch of services that can do captchas now. It'd maybe
| lessen the load on employers but then job seeking becomes
| pay to play. The candidate who can afford one of those
| services + automation beats out those who can't. It's
| already an arms race of sorts.
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| If one is not currently employed as an engineer?
|
| Frankly, seriously consider a career change. The ladder has
| been pulled up for entry-level positions due to AI,
| interest-rates, etc. This will come back and bite us as an
| industry, but it'll be 10 years from now and most people
| can't wait that long.
|
| I can't speak for everyone, but 3000+ applicants for a
| single opening is typical at my org. The odds of any given
| individual getting in are essentially zero. Referrals get
| priority over everyone else, even candidates that are on-
| paper better qualified.
|
| It sucks for everyone involved, especially for job hunters.
| But from the hiring side, truthfully, there's no end in
| sight.
| zwnow wrote:
| Oooooor work in Europe. Plenty of work here. I still get
| 1 job offer per 1 application.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| My 5 year plan is to move to the EU, but it's a process.
| You're not going to be doing it as your next job hop from
| the US if you haven't been planning for it.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| The trick is to get a masters or MBA in the country where
| you want to live. Germany and Netherlands are excellent
| for this. You can find lots of jobs with no local
| language requirements.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| The fun part is that I went the security engineer route
| instead of SDE/SWE. It has some pros and cons, but seems
| like it's one of the "high demand" roles that gets more
| traction looking at others who have moved abroad.
|
| I also have friends and family in Netherlands, France,
| and UK who help me keep tabs on how things are going in
| various places and where might be better locations to
| target for an American with a technical background
| looking to just up and leave the US.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Resumes must be dropped off at the office in person.
| charlie0 wrote:
| YEAH! Go back to the old Boomer ways of applying, lol.
| How ironic, but this seems preferable over the current
| sh*tstorm.
| Gigachad wrote:
| The internet is going to end up just a place for AI
| generated noise. Real people will only be found in the
| real world soon.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Have you tried using AI to screen the AI generated
| applications?
| programjames wrote:
| The issue is, if you're looking for only one hire out of a
| thousand applicants, you need a 99.9% accurate AI. HR isn't
| that good, so it'll be mildly difficult to train an AI to be
| that good.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| What's our alternative? It doesn't seem to be "carefully
| consider and apply to a handful of highly relevant postings". I
| don't see the downsides for candidates to play the numbers
| game.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Hiring and placement agencies that do prescreenings and
| provide CVs in standardized formats to employers and them
| getting paid according to how much salary the hire will get.
|
| win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last
| two jobs in Vienna
| codegeek wrote:
| Yes but now you need these agencies to prescreen for you
| which is a very expensive and time consuming process. Also,
| I have used some before and not all agencies are worth the
| time or money. Most of them are glorified Keyword scanners.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| We only ever used body shops when we were really desperate.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I work in an industry where this practice is universal.
| That said, why don't more of these companies complaining on
| this thread try that model? I know the reason: Cost.
| Instead of wasted hours of their staff's time, they are
| faced with a realistically large bill that most managers
| would like to deny. For me, head hunters find me on
| LinkedIn.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Well, those companies can't have it that bad if they
| rather wade through 1000's of fake/ai/mismatched CVs and
| other slop themselves.
|
| The costs will diffuse through a mix of incompetent
| inhouse HR and already overworked seniors and leads that
| now need to waste time on hiring.
| _blk wrote:
| Don't look at it as us vs them. Recruiters are part of your
| (future) team. Maybe not your direct team, but once you get
| bad people in your team you'll want them to do a better job..
| Chicken vs egg. Apply where you actually want to apply and
| trust that the recruiter does his job.
| saulpw wrote:
| I have trusted in the past, and verified that the recruiter
| does not in fact do their job.
| codegeek wrote:
| The downside is that if all candidates are thinking like you,
| you are now hoping that the hiring team can sort through 100s
| of garbage Resumes to may be find you who may be a good fit.
| Your odds of being called for Round 1 is now much lower due
| to all that noise. Doesn't matter whose fault it is. Your
| probability of being called for Round 1 just went down
| significantly and this hurts you.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I can't stop other people doing this, and not doing it if
| other people are is a disadvantage for me. Imprisoned in a
| dilemma of our own making.
| imnotjames wrote:
| What happens when you get an interview and spend time for
| a company you don't want to work for?
| petesergeant wrote:
| I'll turn it down if further research shows I don't want
| to work there? Why upfront my research if I'll be ghosted
| anyway? Turning down interviews because "circumstances
| have changed" is hardly unusual
| kmac_ wrote:
| Ghost jobs on one side, ghost applications on the other.
| Some people will just send automated applications
| everywhere, every day, and check for responses. That
| leads to ghost responses, and the cycle continues.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Responding to someone to say you got their message but
| have changed your mind isn't ghosting. Job hunting would
| be less miserable if rejections happened in a reasonable
| time frame
| em-bee wrote:
| interview practice
| StefanBatory wrote:
| You are happy you have anything to pay your bills ;)
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Nice wordplay! (see Prisoner's dilemma)
| ruchirp wrote:
| +1
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I would have thought the one thing these ATS systems could
| do by now is filter the obvious garbage resumes.
| pixelsort wrote:
| The hiring teams are employed. If they aren't in a position
| to fix the dynamics then nobody can. HR enjoys a vaulted
| position under which their suffering KPIs allow them to
| point their fingers at the market and shrug the blame from
| their shoulders . It isn't like they are going to suddenly
| band together and boycott AI. We've all had our sip from
| the fountain of eternal laziness and now we all want more.
| em-bee wrote:
| that ship has sailed. companies already get 100s of
| applications for every job post even without candidates
| automating applications.
| cess11 wrote:
| Sorting a few hundred documents don't seem like a very hard
| task for a software company.
| jland10 wrote:
| But this is a classic prisoners dilemma then... If I don't
| do it and everyone else does then I am only hurting my own
| chances.
|
| Based on what you're saying, the only way to actually fix
| this is to fix the underlying systematic problem. No idea
| how you do that, but seems like the only logical way I can
| think of
| pishpash wrote:
| Referrals and networking? When has submitting a resume to a
| portal ever been the way to find a job other than a cookie
| cutter one?
|
| Apply like a bot, work like a bot.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I haven't seen the power of referrals for 10 years now. At
| work I can give you a "referral" by uploading your resume
| to our ATS. That's it. It receives no more consideration
| than if you were to click Easy Apply on LinkedIn as far as
| I'm aware.
| yuliyp wrote:
| That type of referral indeed is mostly worthless (it
| might get you actually looked at by a human instead of
| rejected before that). Useful referrals are the kind
| where you go chat with your friend, figure out what they
| want in a job, then go find the hiring manager and tell
| them about this amazing ex-colleague who's a perfect fit
| for the role. That gets the candidate treated seriously.
| Sometimes it doesn't work out, but definitely gives the
| candidate a fair shot.
| ghaff wrote:
| At a former employer, I sort of hated the referral
| ambassador or whatever it was called thing (with
| financial rewards attached I think). I always felt it
| encouraged quantity over quality. I actually sent a
| couple people I knew off on their merry way and suggested
| a couple others just go to the job site. On the other
| hand, I got several jobs through people I actually knew
| and had worked with in some manner.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I referred two friends at my former employer and the
| process has changed in the span of 5 years; first one
| needed at least a short recommendation, second was pretty
| much fire and forget (and hope for the bonus if they get
| hired)
| Terr_ wrote:
| I wonder if we might see the rise a broad but weak "yes
| that's a real person" referral system as opposed to "I
| know that person will be good for the job" referrals.
| sensanaty wrote:
| Referrals in my company basically just guarantee that the
| resume isn't immediately thrown in the trash, doesn't
| really help anyone's odds otherwise. I suspect in most
| companies it's similar, if they even get that much of a
| benefit (unless you're upper management (aka nepotism) I
| guess)
| ghaff wrote:
| Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I
| guess it doesn't have to be. But I've definitely gotten
| several jobs through senior managers I had worked with
| which largely bypassed the whole HR system where it
| existed.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Nepotism is most associated with relatives although I
| guess it doesn't have to be.
|
| IIRC "nepotism" is specifically family/relatives, and the
| larger Venn-diagram circle would be "favoritism."
| ghaff wrote:
| Wikipedia disagrees even if relatives seems to be the
| predominant meaning:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism
| mhb wrote:
| Charge $x for a candidate to apply for your job. Put the
| money in an escrow pool. Pay it to the person you hire for
| the job.
|
| Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes
| in escrow pool.
| icedrift wrote:
| Betting currency is a terrible solution, especially at the
| junior level when people are trying to start their careers.
| On the other hand, forcing candidates to invest time and in
| exchange guaranteeing their application will be reviewed
| could work well.
| burnerthrow008 wrote:
| Candidates aren't going to apply until you can _actually_
| guarantee that their application will be reviewed and
| given due consideration. And that will never happen
| because the fakers will invest an unlimited amount of
| time, so your review process will fall over.
| mhb wrote:
| Huh? The problem is getting to the point where the
| company is able to have a candidate invest time and then
| review their work. If the candidate doesn't have the
| application fee, there could be a secondary market of
| people who would back the candidate if they were
| confident they could get the job and the escrowed
| application fees.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| "Hey, if you want to work, pay us" sounds so fucking
| dystopian.
|
| I already saw "work" offers where YOU have to pay them
| their salary. As in, to employer, for the "opportunity"
| mhb wrote:
| Idea 3: Use a prediction market to find the best candidate.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Meanwhile, I am flooded with recruiter "opportunities" that are
| nowhere near my capabilities.
|
| There's noise all around happening.
|
| Maybe the problem is that spamming people is free.
| _blk wrote:
| Absolutely. I mean I remember 20y ago when someone's solution
| to spam was paying a small fee. Not what you want, but it's
| gotta be somewhere there. There has to be a cost to it, but
| it probably shouldn't be directly monetary. Submission delay
| might work.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Requiring applicants to pay a fee will mean that the
| positions that I have to apply for that either do not
| exist, or are opened "just in case", or are market
| research, or the COA positions to push internal candidates,
| or any one of countless similar positions, will require me
| to pay out of pocket. Not exactly fair from my perspective.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Agreed, while paying to reduce spam may work in other
| contexts, in this setting the incentives don't align.
| Imagine if Linkedin got paid every time you applied for a
| listing, the pile of ghost jobs would be practically
| infinite.
| nickff wrote:
| Some of the listing services actually do charge employers
| per applicant, unless they are rejected within a certain
| amount of time (usually 48 or 72 hrs).
| Etheryte wrote:
| The critical distinction here is that the employer pays,
| not the applicant. This direction works, that's roughly
| how all job boards work if you squint, but if it was the
| applicant paying, the incentives would be opposing.
| nickff wrote:
| This system still does incentivize the board to accept
| (or at least not deter) junk or fraudulent applicants.
| programjames wrote:
| Isn't this Musk's solution to stopping Xitter spam? Promote
| subscribed accounts more, so it costs money to speak.
| programjames wrote:
| Isn't a better solution to create a reputation score _just_
| for email addresses? You start out very low, and sending
| emails further lowers your score. However, every email that
| is read (and not marked spam) increases it a little more.
| If reputations start out just marginally above the
| "straight to spam" tolerance level, then spam accounts can
| only get out a few emails.
| jstanley wrote:
| And you can create a new address for every spam message
| you send and never get blocked?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| How do they contact you? Email, social media, or LinkedIn? If
| LinkedIn, it is definitely not free. Recruiters pay a hefty
| fee for the right to contact people outside their network.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| This situation is basically equivalent to the prisoner dilemma
| and requires jobseekers to spray and pray
| mhb wrote:
| More like tragedy of the commons.
| cess11 wrote:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-
| commons/A...
|
| Enjoy. It's Nobel prize material.
| imnotjames wrote:
| I've run into the same thing.
|
| We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get
| >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some
| that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized
| crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter
| with changes in the names and past jobs.
|
| Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit
| the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real
| people.
|
| I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not
| online job postings because it's basically impossible right now
| with the automated resume submission companies.
|
| And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me
| that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real
| people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them
| were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.
| narnarpapadaddy wrote:
| This is my experience as well. The candidate management tools
| (even the AI-powered ones) I've tried have been next to
| worthless.
| cute_boi wrote:
| It seems that many processes, from interviews to real work,
| are increasingly manipulated. I've noticed a pattern with
| candidates employed by certain consulting companies,
| especially in Texas and New Jersey. These companies often
| recruit low-cost labor from India, craft fake resumes, and
| submit them to platforms like LinkedIn.
|
| During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen
| setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure
| jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card
| verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack
| most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally
| unskilled.
|
| Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to
| individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while
| profiting $4,000-$5,000 per month from the arrangement.
|
| We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site
| interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level
| LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle
| with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving
| simple LeetCode problems, in person.
|
| Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more
| sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how
| can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a
| landscape?
| lostlogin wrote:
| What's the outsourced work from India like? Anything worth
| having?
| citiguy wrote:
| I've done this. It can be hit or miss. Get a great team
| with a strong lead and you'll love them. Unfortunately
| there's quite a bit of opportunity over there so once
| you've trained them up, they're always looking for their
| next (better paying) gig with their new skills. It's rare
| if folks last past a year on your team.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Time difference is tough, unless you're ok with 7am or
| 10pm zoom calls.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| There are so many incredibly talented software engineers
| in India that want to stay in India for family/cultural
| reasons. The best setups I have seen have one very
| reliable senior person who experience working in EU/NA,
| then returned home. They can help with the cultural
| barriers with more junior hires. Further, if you pay 20%
| more than your competition, you can get _way_ better
| candidates. My experience is also pretty similar with
| offshore teams in China, but their English skills are
| worse (on average).
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I keep holding out hope that one day my totally genuine,
| slightly rusty, slightly nervous, takes all 40 minutes to
| solve the Leetcode medium style will be seen as so
| refreshing and honest I'll be an insta-hire.
|
| Not yet!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| They are taking advantage of the incompetence at the
| workplace you're at. That's just what business is and has
| always been. If you're a fool, you'll be separated from
| your money.
| itronitron wrote:
| why would you ever task an employee to implement a
| LinkedList?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Unfortunately so many people lie about experience that
| you need to so some sort of whiteboard test just to see
| if the candidate really is fluent in the language they
| are claiming 5 years experience with. It can be a really
| simple test.
| itronitron wrote:
| In my two decades of experience, I've never seen another
| software engineer implement a linked list or even _use_ a
| linked list. There are better, and more interesting,
| questions to be asking.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I personally wouldn't expect someone to implement one
| (end cases easy to mess up if they are stressed), but
| writing a function to reverse one (foreach, pop front,
| push front) is enough to catch the liars. You can argue
| about how often a std::list vs std::vector is a
| performance win, but I'd run a mile from any developer
| who wasn't highly familiar with the basic data structures
| provided by any language they are claiming to be fluent
| in.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > or even use a linked list.
|
| You must work in a super specialized industry, then
| zahlman wrote:
| The only real requirements to "never use a linked list"
| are a) use a language where some kind of contiguous-
| storage-based sequence (array, vector, whatever you want
| to call it; Python calls it a list, even) is built in (or
| in the standard library); plus b) not ever need to remove
| O(1) values from the middle of a sequence in O(1) time
| while preserving order.
|
| But arguably, a candidate who _hasn 't_ ever had to
| contemplate the concept of "linked list" but can derive
| the necessary ideas on the spot given the basic design,
| has some useful talents.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Creating linked list is very simple in Java. It is just a
| simple class with next method.
|
| I am sure 12+ years of experience should be able to do it
| easily.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with
| changes in the names and past jobs.
|
| I mean when I write a cover letter I take the cover letter I
| took the last time and change a couple of names and that's
| it.
|
| Why do I want the job? I want the job because I do work for
| money, I don't have some idea that your SaaS is really giving
| me anything that any of the others I've worked at in the past
| didn't give me - no company means anything to me aside from
| having reasonably interesting problems to work on and
| hopefully not onerous working environment.
| zahlman wrote:
| How are people finding the job that isn't publicly posted;
| and how does foreign organized crime (seek to) benefit from
| applying?
| trentnix wrote:
| _" Please don't flood us with auto-resumes"_
|
| ...
|
| _" Click here to submit to having your resume processed by a
| bot that will do all the filtering for us"_
|
| This might not be you and your company, but it seems to be most
| of them.
| codegeek wrote:
| Agreed. Both sides are bad. Most of these "bots" are useless
| and do a terrible job. I have seen that side as well. Many
| years ago, I was applying at IBM (don't ask) for a role and
| the recruiter told me that the online portal will reject me
| anyway. But not to worry because he knows what buttons to
| click to get me the interview because I was a really good
| fit.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > IBM (don't ask)
|
| Lol I dipped out of further consideration once they sent me
| what the interview process was gonna be like. Like 6
| rounds, whiteboard coding, leetcode crap, "behavioral"
| interviews, a talk with some pencil pushers and some extra
| stuff. I don't know how desperate you have to be to put up
| with that.
| welder wrote:
| What do you think of https://wonderful.dev? You get
| notifications when candidates are interested in your jobs, then
| you can choose to reach out to the ones you want to apply.
| thedougd wrote:
| I'm at a point where I'm almost willing to ignore the first few
| days of applicants. They're all spray and pray junk. A week or
| two in and the applicant quality is significantly better.
| codegeek wrote:
| Really good point. But the issue is that some job sites
| (indeed for example) wants you to pay to play. If you reduce
| the sponsorship or daily cost, the resume count also goes
| down. But regardless, I have seen the same. 1st few days are
| nightmare. I am 1 week into the job posting and have 500+
| resumes. This after I have rejected at least 100 already.
| Madness.
| programjames wrote:
| Ah, now I know to do my spray and pray on week-old job
| listings ;)
| Plasmoid wrote:
| The current advice meta is that you want to apply asap since
| "many" companies ignore the stragglers.
| voidr wrote:
| Hiring agents have been spamming potential job seekers for
| years with garbage and then came up with the abomination known
| as ATS, which makes it very difficult to argue that job seekers
| should not use automation.
|
| Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that
| encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can
| step in and start regulating.
| robocat wrote:
| > both sides or the governments can step in and start
| regulating
|
| How could regulations help?
|
| Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to
| candidates; yet we are collectively failing.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| Only sort of. Lots of employees are only looking for any
| job and the adverse selection nature of hiring makes the
| typical job seeker pool look worse than average.
|
| On the company side, only some people in the organization
| are strongly aligned with hiring. The vast majority are
| indifferent or even somewhat negative as new hires mean
| more work.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| More than that, the incentives are inversely aligned -
| companies want to hire a "good match" for as little as
| possible, and applicants want to be hired at the maximum
| possible rate.
| voisin wrote:
| I haven't hired in years but I am surprised there aren't AI
| agents that can intelligently rate the compatibility of resumes
| to your job posting
| bostik wrote:
| There are recruiting agencies who have tried this method:
| "Use AI to match the most relevant candidates to the job spec
| you gave us."
|
| Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of
| overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no
| tomorrow. And they all find the _same_ unqualified
| candidates.
|
| If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified,
| non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately
| that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency
| recruiters value their personally built candidate networks
| for a good reason.)
| the_snooze wrote:
| As a hiring manager, I've chosen to opt out of this system
| altogether. Instead of public postings, I just poll my network
| and post job announcements in private channels in my
| professional community. Much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of people here hate this but the few jobs I've
| gotten in the past 25 years or so were always directly
| through people I knew. The resume was pretty much pro forma.
|
| But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more
| difficult position.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more
| difficult position.
|
| The lesson people should take from this is you need to
| cultivate your network through your career. Sadly it seems
| most people would rather complain about how broken the
| system is.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I wish I knew how to find one of these channels. My real
| human professional network has slowly evaporated over the
| last decade.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Advice from an old guy that went through this after moving
| to a new area and loosing my phat California income
| eventually. If you aren't working, pickup consulting gigs.
| They will probably suck and be high stress low reward, but
| it will help you build connections locally. Look for ones
| that don't just need a body but that really need help so
| you are in a position where your work is visible. Heck once
| I got in most of the 'come in and clean up our mess' jobs
| wanted to hire me to manage their teams/projects. Not ideal
| but it paid well and I have a pretty limited pool of bog
| standard dev work (or worse, internal IT dev) where I live
| anyways.
| em-bee wrote:
| where do you find "come in and clean up our mess" jobs?
| i'd love to take on some of those (i actually enjoy doing
| that)
| DavidDodda wrote:
| I am with you on that. applying for jobs indiscriminately is
| bad. but right now llms have got to a point where they are
| pretty good at pattern matching job requirements with skills in
| my resume. it's smart enough to not apply for php heavy
| projects/jobs when given a MERN stack developer resume.
|
| I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is
| based both on number and quality of your leads.
| vunderba wrote:
| With automated hiring spam and our industry's _tenuous grasp_
| of basic integrity with actual HN posts proudly boasting of
| their apps to help you cheat during interviews using LLMs,
| several of my friends who assist in hiring at their companies
| have already returned to "on site" interviews to cut down on
| the proverbial chaff.
|
| The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are
| being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live
| in now.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Thinking that "in person" will stop or prevent cheating is
| laughable.
|
| For god-sakes, the chess world is freaking out over an ANAL
| BEADS cheating scandal! https://kotaku.com/chess-champion-
| anal-bead-magnus-carlsen-h...
|
| https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish
|
| A candidate who wants that job will figure out some way to
| have ChatGPT help them in a way you can't detect, even if it
| also has an impact on their ass health.
| dustyventure wrote:
| If you are dumb enough not to hire someone who is able to
| integrate ChatGPT from analbeads into a conversation while
| looking natural then that is on you.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| As long as the interviewee also reports to work with their
| anal AI interface, what's the problem ?
| godelski wrote:
| You're right, you can't ever stop cheating. That's not the
| point. The point is to make it harder & more expensive. To
| make it not worth it.
|
| Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still
| brute force it." Sure... good luck
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I'd be absolutely fine going in person to interview for a
| remote job if I thought I had any reasonable chance of
| success with your process. We are talking about where I'm
| going to be working for at least the next few years. That's
| kind of a big deal.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, it's not about the in-person trip, it's about the
| trip multiplied by the probability that your application
| will be seriously considered as a near finalist.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah I get that. My friends (the hiring managers) are in
| relatively large tech hubs (Austin and Seattle), so from
| what I understand 90% of the applicants have been "locally
| sourced". It'd be another story entirely if you had to
| travel a significant distance just for an interview.
| salomon812 wrote:
| > The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are
| being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we
| live in now.
|
| Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago
| before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet
| each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm
| old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with
| hiring.
| archagon wrote:
| > _with actual HN posts proudly boasting of their apps to
| help you cheat during interviews using LLMs_
|
| I mean, I don't disagree emotionally, but this is a lot
| closer in spirit to what the OG hackers did than most of the
| stuff you see on the front page.
| vunderba wrote:
| I mean.... IMHO self titled "solopreneurs" throwing
| together a for-profit web app that runs in the background
| to feed an applicant answers from ChatGPT just so they can
| cheat en masse on an exam feels like a far cry from old
| school phreakers building blue boxes in their basement to
| stick it to Ma Bell.
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle
| directevolve wrote:
| The next logical step is for exam proctoring facilities to
| begin offering interview and resume proctoring services.
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| What I find most infuriating is that people just don't care,
| even when faced with enough evidence that their strategy of
| mass applying even when they are not a good fit is failing. It
| just makes it harder for everybody else as you said.
| plagiarist wrote:
| This is the human condition. "If everyone would just," but
| everyone will not just. All of civilization is full of these
| tragedies of the commons.
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| it's number's game anyway on who gets the initial interviews
|
| hate the game playa ;)
| ghaff wrote:
| It all ends up being a nasty feedback loop. (Especially) junior
| people in a somewhat tough market for tech end up spamming
| resumes so companies respond with pretty crappy algorithmic
| filters which basically somewhat randomly toss most of the
| resumes into the bit bucket. Rinse and repeat.
|
| But per downthread comment, applicants don't care if their
| actions make things worse for the market as a whole. And it's
| not clear if they should as a one-turn game. (As someone else
| remarked, Prisoner's Dilemma and all that.)
| programjames wrote:
| There's actually a solution around this: name and shame! Just
| like bad companies get called out on GlassDoor, companies
| should create a reputation system for prospective employees
| (e.g. a professional credit score). This already exists for
| potential tenants, so I don't really understand why it
| doesn't exist for potential employees given they occur at
| about the same frequency and have a similar amount of money
| trading hands.
| ghaff wrote:
| Applicants have long sprayed and prayed even when it
| involved sending physical letters. Some of the current
| systems have decreased the effort per company applied-to
| but, for entry-level employees, it was rarely a carefully-
| targeted thing for new professionals. It was always a
| numbers game to some degree although admittedly the scale
| and tools involved have changed.
| programjames wrote:
| The smaller scale in the past made it so managers either
| knew (at least by reputation) the person submitting the
| resume, or it was not too expensive to find out.
| Nowadays, jobs are getting 100x as many applications,
| most of which are far lower in quality.
|
| University admissions has followed a similar trend, going
| from 5-10 being "spray and pray" twenty years ago to
| 20-30 applications nowadays. However, it didn't increase
| as much because (1) each application costs money, and (2)
| most universities expect a cover letter. It still costs
| quite a bit to filter the applicants, but the fee helps
| pay for that.
| ghaff wrote:
| The "solution," such as it is, is that companies strongly
| bias towards referrals and managers towards people they
| personally know. And, from some conversations I've had,
| that is exactly what is happening. With the result that
| it's tough for junior people with no real networks (OK
| maybe their school is a signal) because companies really
| don't want to sift all the junk they're getting and I
| don't really blame them.
| programjames wrote:
| That's a solution, but I'd prefer a system that, when
| ideal/efficient, is optimal.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure what other solutions look like: Gatekeeping
| of various forms including institutions and
| certifications, letters of introduction like essentially
| the US service academies, standardized tests, informal
| networks, etc.
| programjames wrote:
| There's two distinct reasons why more qualified
| candidates might get skipped over:
|
| 1) There is too much noise occluding their signal.
|
| 2) There is a form of gatekeeping going on.
|
| Gatekeeping only really works in exploitative systems
| (e.g. "me and my children are the masters, and you and
| your children are the slaves") or when the noise is so
| high that companies wouldn't gain much from not
| gatekeeping (e.g. Harvard admissions in the late 1800s).
|
| So, if you don't exist in an exploitative system,
| providing more signal is going to both benefit deserving
| candidates and punish gatekeeping companies. I don't see
| why a reputation score would increase gatekeeping.
|
| At the end of the day, every applicant could be ranked on
| their ability at the job. Wouldn't it be best for
| everyone--companies and prospective employees--to know
| where they rank up, so they don't waste time applying to
| hundreds of jobs or sifting through hundreds of
| applications?
|
| The only people who are hurt are the hustlers: people who
| spend far more time hustling for a position than gaining
| the skills needed to do well in that position. Their goal
| is the extreme limit of noise, where success rate is
| directly proportional to how many applications are filled
| out, and I have no sympathy for the destruction of the
| commons (that I have to live in).
| ghaff wrote:
| For a lot of things, hustling is probably at least as
| important to me as a hiring manager as rather amorphous
| "skills needed to do well in that position" at least as
| an entry-level employee. Of course, I don't want someone
| who has none of the skills needed for the job in most
| cases but they probably don't know most of what they need
| to learn anyway.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >OK maybe their school is a signal
|
| "School" is quite variable.
|
| Weak signal: you only went to class and did OK in them.
|
| Strong signal: you had an internship, or undergrad
| research experience, or part-time employment as a
| TA/tutor, or have a completed project to show off, or
| some kind of non-trivial community/group/club/fraternity
| leadership.
|
| Really strong signal: you published a paper with someone
| I know and they recommend you to me.
| ghaff wrote:
| Typically, undergrads aren't publishing papers. I did co-
| author a paper in grad school though it was irrelevant to
| my eventual job.
|
| Most people are looking at whether you just went to
| (whatever they consider) a top tier university.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Absolutely, it's very rare for an undergrad to be on a
| paper. But that's what makes it such a strong signal: it
| shows they had the grit and maturity to contribute to a
| research effort to completion, in a team with people more
| experienced than they are. In an interview, it gives them
| something non-trivial to talk about and be proud of.
| That's very likely a strong junior candidate.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a ton of things you might look at for a newly
| graduated undergrad beyond grades: research and other
| academic projects, sports teams, editor on a newspaper,
| etc.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Why are sports teams important signals?
| Root_Denied wrote:
| The weird thing to me is that I don't see this happening
| at the large FAANG companies - referrals don't seem to
| move the needle whatsoever anymore, and not just for me
| but for quite a few of the people in my network.
|
| On the flipside I'm not finding good resources to find
| startups to apply to that don't have hundreds of
| applicants already. There's no good answer the market has
| come up with as far as I can tell, so everything just
| gets worse for everyone as a result.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| About uni apps in the US: Most people limit the number
| because there is a modest fee associated with each. I
| doubt it is 2-3x since last generation.
| andylynch wrote:
| You're talking about blacklists.
|
| They are not a new idea, in fact they are well known, but
| also prohibited by law in many places because of their
| widespread abuse.
|
| There's also a more general idea in competition law that
| companies shoul, well, compete their fields, and allowing
| cartel-like behaviour on the labour market is contradictory
| to this.
| programjames wrote:
| A reputation score is only a blacklist if you target
| specific people to tank their reputations.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Yes, that's what happens.
| programjames wrote:
| Is this also your opinion on credit scores used for
| loans?
| lstamour wrote:
| Define the objective metric that you would use to assess
| a candidate's work ethic or reputation credit score.
| Would LinkedIn issue it, as if it were a popularity
| contest?
|
| And come to think of it, actually, credit scores can be
| gamed. It's well known that when companies and
| territories get credit scores they are largely a con
| game, as in based on the conifdence the raters have on
| your future performance, and not objective reality.
|
| Likewise, credit scores can be juiced and tools exist to
| help you improve them and track them. But a bad credit
| score doesn't always mean fiscal mismanagement. It could
| be loans from a predatory lender or due to a medical
| expense or something completely outside the context the
| credit check is to be used for. Credit scores tell you if
| someone has lots of money first, and if they are smart
| with their money second. People with financial means
| often have good credit scores but can be as likely to
| default if their circumstances change. Perhaps more
| likely if the amounts of money at play are greater.
| People got those subprime mortgages with great credit
| scores, somehow.
|
| So... Yeah, credit scores for loans are a form of
| outsourcing of responsibilities. But the point is
| somewhat well taken. The equivalent in hiring to a credit
| score isn't to ask banks but to do reference checks and
| ask a network or former manager about a hire.
|
| Credit scores can easily be discriminatory as much as
| criminal charges (without due process, at least) and
| other unfair systems. We just normalize it because it
| works for most people. We poke fun at it when other
| countries try to come up with e.g. a social credit score,
| though.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Yes
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| Just like how many companies have methods available to them
| to remove bad glassdoor reviews (or make fake 5-star
| reviews), this system is even more rife for abuse.
| programjames wrote:
| Credit scores seem to be pretty robust? Maybe this kind
| of system would work:
|
| 1. A third-party assigns everyone a hidden score, and
| gives them a cryptographic signing key.
|
| 2. They can sign off on one-time lookups to companies
| they apply to. Every time their credit score is looked
| up, it decreases to disincentivize "spray and pray".
|
| 3. Companies are incentivized to go directly to the
| third-party (to ensure truthiness), and not divulge the
| score to other companies (since they are in a
| competition).
|
| 4. The actual algorithms used to determine scores should
| stay hidden to avoid manipulation. However, how do you
| also ensure accuracy? Maybe have several dozen reputation
| companies, and apply Shapley values based on hiring
| decisions. To avoid correlation, you should only update a
| reputation's weight when the hiring decision didn't query
| it.
| randomifcpfan wrote:
| College degrees from reputable colleges used to serve
| this purpose, but grade inflation has greatly weakened
| this signal.
| programjames wrote:
| You also want colleges to signal to their applicants, not
| force them to also signal for their alumni. The two will
| naturally be correlated, but you can do better by
| specializing.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > many companies have methods available to them to remove
| bad glassdoor reviews
|
| I never heard about this. Can you share more details? Is
| it rumors or verified?
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >companies should create a reputation system for
| prospective employees
|
| I guess that would work in societies where this was legal -
| not sure if I know of any though.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Maybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought
| this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified
| candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview,
| etc, etc.
|
| If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land
| a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating
| it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate
| it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already
| found a job!
| xingped wrote:
| 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation companies
| have created. When you get a rejection response mere minutes
| after submission that claims "after careful consideration..."
| then of course I'm not going to spend any more time than that
| applying to any jobs anymore. Prove a human actually took the
| time to review my resume and I'll actually apply to your
| company like a human.
| maccard wrote:
| If I get 500 applications to a role and spend 1 minute
| writing each person a personalised no sorry, that's 20% of
| my week just writing rejection emails (never mind actually
| reviewing the resume).
|
| I've hired for 3 companies for engineers from entry level
| to staff level, and for non technical candidates for other
| departments. Applicant tracking systems like greenhouse
| send me an email for every application that comes through,
| you get the resume and cover letter attached. There's a
| reject candidate button where you choose why, and it auto
| fills in the template for you with the reason you selected
| (and the email was pre written).
|
| Don't mistake an automated email for assuming your resume
| wasn't looked at.
| mjevans wrote:
| Maybe it is time for a set of unions or guilds to do that
| certification for you.
| ddalex wrote:
| This. Just as doctors or lawyers or civil engineers can't
| do their jobs before being vetted by their own
| professional bodies it's time we do the same for software
| engineering.
| tombert wrote:
| I don't assume it "wasn't looked at", but I absolutely do
| think that a lot of the time it "wasn't understood"
| because the recruiters reading it only have very simply
| "keyword lookup" ability, instead of _actually_ reading
| the resume.
|
| I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords
| for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because
| certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I
| put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux
| systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart,
| scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I
| know how to use all of those things, because I think
| they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".
|
| A software engineer reading my resume would come away
| with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a
| recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-
| matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which
| appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW
| BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."
|
| Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to
| learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the
| system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I
| can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume
| into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try
| and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read
| it.
| salomon812 wrote:
| God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a
| human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from
| giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure
| what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from
| the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the
| strength to do this fight as well.
|
| Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many
| and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
| Aurornis wrote:
| I tried giving honest and actionable interview feedback
| at first.
|
| A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well
| and tried to use my feedback against me. I had people
| trying to argue that my feedback was wrong, someone
| stalking me across social media and trying to argue
| everything there, and eventually someone who threatened
| to use my feedback as the basis for a discrimination
| lawsuit.
|
| So now we're back to simple "we're proceeding with other
| candidates" feedback.
|
| If we're going to play the blame-game, then you have to
| see the full picture. Many candidates can be awful and
| even vengeful. Many people _do not_ handle rejection
| well.
| salomon812 wrote:
| > A scary number of candidates did not take rejection
| well and tried to use my feedback against me.
|
| This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've
| never attempted it.
|
| Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a
| technical screen they had done poorly and demanded
| feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my
| mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| At least _some_ kind of feedback is greatly appreciated.
| A simple, "No" would do so much more for me than being
| ghosted.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The line isn't between detailed feedback and brief,
| uninformative feedback.
|
| The line is between saying something brief and saying
| nothing.
|
| Somehow, it has become standard to say absolutely nothing
| instead of telling people a simple no.
|
| I've even had situations where people said they wanted to
| keep talking to me, and then went completely silent.
| josephg wrote:
| But brief feedback is probably more likely to result in
| pushback / being sued by candidates, since candidates
| will feel like you didn't properly consider them.
|
| The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives
| for a company point in the direction of giving no
| feedback at all. This isn't because hiring managers are
| sociopaths.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I'm not arguing for feedback, I'm arguing for an answer.
|
| It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing"
| is not going to get you sued.
| yoshicoder wrote:
| See after just having through 3 rounds of recruiting over
| the past three years, I don't think the ghosting is
| intentional from most companies. I would say 60% of
| companies give a "not continuing" response after 1-2
| months from application, while ~25% seem like they have a
| configuration/software mistake that causes it to send the
| rejection 6 months - a year later, which people in the
| meantime think was just ghosting. Not sure why this is so
| common
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think there's something wrong with a hiring process
| where it takes 1-2 months to decide whether to proceed to
| next step (screening call, or interview, or offer) with a
| candidate, not to mention the fact that a well qualified
| candidate isn't going to be waiting around that long -
| they'll be applying to other jobs at the same time, and
| if good will be snapped up.
|
| The time to send the "Sorry, not continuing" email is as
| soon as the company has decided that, and if that really
| is 1-2 months later, you may as well have just ghosted
| the candidate.
| gedy wrote:
| > So now we're back to simple "we're proceeding with
| other candidates" feedback.
|
| Hell if companies would even do that - I've spent a lot
| of time (7+ hours) interviewing with some known companies
| including meeting with the VP of engineering and then
| they just stop messaging and ghost you (looking at you
| Glassdoor..)
| resonious wrote:
| I've also seen the "your feedback is wrong" pushback.
| Like... do they expect me to say "oh woops my bad.
| actually here's an offer"?
| tombert wrote:
| I agree with what you're saying, but it can be immensely
| frustrating when you're rejected for a job when the
| interviewer themselves is actually wrong, which has
| happened a few times. I've been given technical questions
| in interviews, and I answer the questions correctly (I
| always double-check when I get home), and the interviewer
| pretty much tells me that I'm wrong.
|
| For example, in an interview once I got the typical
| "design Twitter" whiteboarding question, and it's going
| fine, until the topic of databases and storage comes up.
|
| I ask "do we want consistency or availability here?"
|
| The interviewer says that he wants both. To which I say
| "umm, ok, but I thought you said you wanted this to be
| distributed?", and he said yeah that's what he wants.
|
| So I have to push back and say "well I mean, we all
| _want_ that, but I 'm pretty sure you can't have stuff be
| distributed or partitionable while also having
| availability and consistent."
|
| We go back and forth for about another minute (or course
| eating away at my interview time), until I eventually
| pull out my phone and pull up the Wikipedia article for
| CAP theorem, to which the interviewer said that this is
| "different" somehow. I said "it's actually not different,
| but lets just use assume that there exists some kind of
| database X that gives us all these perks".
|
| Now, in fairness to this particular company, they
| actually did move forward and gave me a (crappy) offer,
| so credit there, but I've had other interviews that went
| similarly and I'm declined. I've never done it, but I've
| sort of wanted to go onto LinkedIn and try and explain
| that their interview questions either need to change or
| they need to become better informed about the concepts
| that they're interviewing for. Not to change anything,
| not to convince anyone to suddenly give me an offer, but
| simply to prove my point.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think people are just upset when they submit a resume,
| or even go on an interview, and get NO response at all ..
| I don't think most people care about feedback - they just
| want a response. A one-line auto response would be fine.
| atlintots wrote:
| Yep. As an undergrad, one of my first "proper" interviews
| was with Mozilla for an internship. I was obviously super
| excited since I actually cared about their products. I
| spent a lot of time carefully preparing for the two
| rounds of interviews, just to get ghosted! Sent a follow-
| up email a couple weeks later -- no response! I was
| crushed!
| mdaniel wrote:
| That seems "on brand" for Mozilla, based on the sheer
| number of WTAF moves that org makes
|
| _And I say that even while writing this comment in
| Firefox_
| zahlman wrote:
| >I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a
| human, but the threat of legal action
|
| ... Legal action on what basis, exactly?
| tombert wrote:
| Not the person you're responding to, but if you give any
| kind of specific feedback, then you're effectively saying
| "Reason X is why I didn't hire you".
|
| Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they
| wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an
| interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for
| an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback
| for the rejection letter.
|
| Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this
| shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a
| satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm
| going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly
| you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you
| thought they were dressing unprofessionally.
|
| Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that
| there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but
| it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply
| leave it vague with something generic like "while we were
| impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to
| pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain
| plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected
| you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over
| that.
|
| That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is
| in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job,
| but I _do_ think they 're entitled to a _response_ , even
| if it's just a blanket form rejection.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 100%, this is a natural reaction to the situation
| companies have created
|
| Hiring manager here. I don't like the situation either, but
| to honest a lot of what you're seeing is a natural reaction
| to the shenanigans that applicants are doing.
|
| When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from people
| who aren't even close to qualified and obviously didn't
| read the job description, you understand why we're not
| sending custom written rejection letters to every single
| application.
| icedrift wrote:
| I think their main complaint (or at least mine would be)
| is the laziness in many companies recruitment strategies.
| As an applicant in the software space I used to only
| apply to roles where I fit 70% or more of the
| qualifications but there is no difference in how often I
| get an interview compared to blindly applying to anything
| in the web space. I have 0 incentive to take the time to
| only apply to jobs I'm qualified for.
|
| This is one of the few aspects of hiring I feel
| government employers handle better than private. My state
| hold monthly events where you can just show up and talk
| to a representatives and if you pass the vibes check you
| are virtually guaranteed a proper interview.
| easterncalculus wrote:
| >When you post a job listing and get 500 resumes from
| people who aren't even close to qualified and obviously
| didn't read the job description, you understand why we're
| not sending custom written rejection letters to every
| single application.
|
| Then why not send the automated responses (or nothing) to
| the obvious spam appliers and save the feedback for the
| clearly more legitimate applications? If the argument is
| that so few applications are legit, then it should be
| proportionally few emails to send.
|
| Awhile ago I applied to an internship at one of the
| larger, successful startups that most tech workers have
| heard of (several thousand employees). I got a response
| from a real person in a day. There's really no excuse for
| not being decent.
| robocat wrote:
| The weird part is that your response to being ignored as a
| unique person is to treat companies as though they are all
| exactly the same. The relationship is not assymetrical. I
| also wonder whether the signals we interpret from the
| application process have much correlation with whether the
| job is actually worthwhile?
| plagiarist wrote:
| I also find it hard to sympathize. This is an industry that
| is notorious for emailing software developers with irrelevant
| job offers.
|
| We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals
| have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a
| problem if individuals do that in reverse?
| lolinder wrote:
| > it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves
|
| You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for
| this environment isn't hiring companies--they'll eventually
| work through all the resumes and find _someone_ who will be
| qualified to fill their open roles, it 's just much more
| expensive--the primary people who suffer for this is
| qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to
| stand out from a sea of garbage.
|
| Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out
| summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because
| time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. _That 's_ the
| fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and _we 're_
| the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Alas, in this case it appears that unchecked competition
| and automation have led to a divergent outcome, creating
| worse outcomes for everyone.
|
| Who will champion the necessary regulations? In terms of
| financial incentives, employers can pay lower wages when
| candidates have a tougher time getting interviews, and
| individual candidates usually can't afford lobbyists.
| maccard wrote:
| I've been hiring for teams for a few years now, and I've
| heard people lament these things like you are. In practice
| I've not seen any of these "smart" scanning techniques used,
| it's a recruiter comparing resumes to a checklist I gave to
| them (5-ish years experience, maybe a degree role dependent,
| or something that you think is super relevant, one of
| c#/java/kotlin, hiring for a mid level role so we expect some
| amount of experience at being self sufficient) and they
| filter the hundreds down to 10-15 that they screen and pass
| 4-5 on to me.
|
| We did some spot checks on resumes that were passed on to
| make sure we were filtering ok and the quality was awful - a
| significant amount of people were applying for jobs asking
| for 5 years experience in a Java-like language with no
| experience, no degree and a half assed cover letter about
| being a good learner. A decent number were data scientists
| who had 2 years of python experience, and a surprising number
| were wildly over-qualified people who I realised after
| speaking to one or two they were actually trying to sell us
| their consulting services. That's before you even get to "are
| they lying?"
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure - that's how things are meant to work, with recruiters
| providing a valuable filtering service, but it does seem
| that many companies are now using (poor quality) AI
| screening, as well as a slew of abusive application
| practices (the ghosting. etc), and it seems any mutual
| respect between hiring company and candidate is
| disappearing. I don't know what the solution is.
| maccard wrote:
| My point is that that had been my experience hiring in a
| 10 person company and a 30k person company, and that the
| "suggested" AI screening isn't happening - it's probably
| that your application is the same as the other 300
| applications that went in.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I haven't experienced it myself (haven't applied for a
| job in a long time), but there are lots of reports here
| on HN of people getting online applications rejected
| withing minutes, or late at night - definitely some
| companies are using software to filter resumes. This has
| been going on for a long time - it's not just a recent
| "AI" thing - resumes used to get rejected for not having
| the right keywords on them.
| maccard wrote:
| > lots of reports of people getting online applications
| rejected within minutes
|
| Possibly the single most distracting alert on my phone
| and pc is my work email. It's probably prioritised wrong,
| but if I have 200 candidates for a position, and I get an
| application that doesn't meet the tech stack or YOE
| requirements when I have 20 who do, I'm just going to
| reject them.
|
| > or late at night ATS let you schedule emails. I used to
| send mine at 4am EST despite being in the UK
|
| > definitely some companies are using software to filter
| resumes
|
| I don't doubt it, but I doubt that it's rampant to the
| degree you'd believe on this site. I'd instead that it's
| far more likely that the hiring manager, or a recruiter,
| is spending about 15 seconds looking at "does the tech
| stack match, how much experience, and how many other
| candidates are there that I think have an edge". The
| people on this site are a small minority of very smart
| folk, but if you spend any time in a comment section of a
| topic you are an expert in, you'll quickly realise that
| you shouldn't take everything you read on here as
| absolute.
|
| Another suggestion - Reach out to two different
| recruiters and get them to review your resume. (You might
| need to pay them to do it). You'll get two totally
| different responses. Both might work, and neither might
| work. At the end of the day, a human makes the call, and
| even if the ATS is automated, a human set those criteria.
| Honestly, having spent so much of my time hiring over the
| past 5 years, it wouldn't surprise me if there was
| literally no ATS scanning, and everything that was sold
| to fix that problem was snake oil.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| What's the time frame here, what's your sample size for
| applying to jobs yourself, and what's your sample size
| for doing hiring (ie how many different companies)? I'm
| guessing that your personal sample size is extremely
| limited - not just in quantity but also in geographic
| area.
|
| Of course my guess could be way off, but what you are
| saying is definitely the exception to the common
| narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
|
| > AI screening
|
| There's been aggressive keyword filtering since long
| before LLMs exploded.
| maccard wrote:
| I've been hiring in anger since 2018, applied for 1 job
| (sent about 10 applications) and hired over three
| companies. First was an 800 person company that grew to
| 2000 while I was there, second I was hire number 2 for a
| startup and I hired the full 15 person engineering team,
| and a decent chunk of the non engineering product/test
| roles into. 50 person company . Third (current role) I've
| been involved in hiring about 8 people in the last 6
| months that I've been here. It's a 45 person company, but
| a subsidiary of a 30k multinational whose hiring
| practices we use.
|
| > but what you are saying is definitely the exception to
| the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
|
| As an anecdote, I posted on who's hiring here, and we
| used a separate job requisition for HN, (this was my last
| job where we went from 2 -> 15 people). We got about 30
| applications in the 7 days following that on that req,
| and of those 30, only one came even remotely close to
| meeting the requirements on the JD - we were looking for
| someone with a few years experience in a Java like
| language, in a Europe/US time zone. Most of the
| candidates failed both of those criteria, hard. My point
| being that people who are frustrated with their situation
| are likely to be more vocal than someone who isn't.
|
| I've spent enough time on HN reading about topics I know
| a lot about, and seeing people confidently claim how X is
| easy or if they just Y, and they're totally wrong. I know
| a decent amount about working on the hiring side - it's
| been a core component of my job for the last 6 years.
| I've worked with recruiters both internal and external,
| spent far more time with greenhouse than any engineer
| should ever have to do.
|
| My feeling is that there's far less sophistication going
| on, and the dearth of human responses (which is
| problematic) lets people make up their own reasons as to
| why it's not working when the reality is that there's
| just a hell of a lot of applicants for every single job.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to
| land a single interview, then can you blame someone for
| automating it?
|
| Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions. This
| logic only sounds good until you're on the hiring side and
| you see the stark difference between the LLM abuser
| applications and the people who are genuinely applying.
|
| Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are probably
| in that situation because they're spraying low-effort LLM
| resumes around and most hiring managers can see right through
| this game by now.
|
| > I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate
| it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't
| already found a job!
|
| Doesn't work that way, in my experience. The people who game
| their way through the application process don't suddenly
| switch to honest and high performing employees after they
| start. They continue the process of trying to min-max their
| effort given to the company, riding the line of finding how
| little or how low quality work they can get away with.
|
| The mythical lazy applicant who suddenly becomes a brilliant
| and loyal employee isn't realistic.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| > Yes, a candidate is responsible for their own actions.
|
| Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate,
| you've to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring
| resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I've to
| send, this doesn't scale.
|
| Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-
| reject it because the algorithm decided it's not a match.
| If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a
| different story but that is not the case.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >This logic only sounds good until you're on the hiring
| side and you see the stark difference between the LLM
| abuser applications and the people who are genuinely
| applying.
|
| Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring
| side, you often never see the applications of many of the
| people genuinely applying because your stupid automated
| filters determined they weren't qualified.
| trod1234 wrote:
| As a side note, for a person with a decade of experience in
| IT, its currently taking roughly 1500 applications per pre-
| screen interview to give you an idea where the market is at
| today (and over the past 2 years with the mass adoption of
| AI).
|
| Less than 1/100th of 1%.
|
| You should also see what I had to say about the history of
| slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from
| them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer
| exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched;
| salt the earth strategy for finding labor.
|
| What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working
| (given the current environment) to even get to the point
| where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize
| them for the value they could potentially provide? If you
| pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled
| labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what
| that first role provides? The economics of things are
| important.
|
| You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations
| (delusions) back to some more close to reality.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Less than 1/100th of 1%.
|
| ?? 1 in 1500 is 1/15th of 1%, which is more than 1/100th
| of 1%...
| tripper_27 wrote:
| > Those people who have to apply to 100s of jobs are
| probably in that situation because they're spraying low-
| effort LLM resumes around and most hiring managers can see
| right through this game by now.
|
| Just came off a brutal 7 month job search. And that's with
| a resume good enough, and care enough in jobs I applied to,
| that I got to the hiring manager with 1 of 10 applications
| (vs 1:100 or worse which is what I've heard is normal).
|
| I think I interviewed at 50+ companies, which makes 500 or
| more applications.
|
| Yes, this clearly says something about my interview skills,
| but there is a difference between interview skills and
| engineering/software skills-- I've done well in my career
| without having to heavily interview before (senior IC
| level) and I came by that strong resume honestly.
|
| So please be careful about generalizing. I'm an example of
| someone who had to apply to 5x as many jobs as you say
| would be needed, and it would have been 50x if I didn't
| have a strong background and work ethic.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| Responsibility needs to be taken on the hiring side. Some
| companies post jobs with no intent to hire [1]. 70% of
| hiring managers surveyed say this is a morally acceptable,
| 45% of hiring managers have said they've done it.
|
| This increases the risk on applicants that their investment
| on a carefully crafted resume/cover letter is time wasted.
|
| Fake job postings punish the behavior you desire from
| applicants and incentivize spraying low-effort LLM resumes.
|
| If you do not post fake job postings, I applaud you. If you
| know a colleague who does this, I ask that you have a
| conversation with them about the damage they are doing to
| your industry.
|
| [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-job-listing-ghost-
| jobs-cbs...
| ponector wrote:
| That is true. Companies are using LLM in ATS to filter
| resume.
|
| If they can bullshit job description to reach more
| applications why candidates cannot do the same with CV?
|
| The result we are going to is almost every CV now will be a
| 99% matching to the job description thanks to LLM tools.
|
| And cover letter is even more useless now.
| Terr_ wrote:
| It's certainly a mutual escalation issue. Even a few bad-
| actors on either side can catalyze more bad-actors on the
| other, especially since most of the badness involves abuse of
| scale.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'We can use automation tools to just throw away your resume,
| but heaven forbid the average person does' isn't a take average
| people care about.
|
| I look forward to the day the average person has the same level
| of access to agents to counter all this. Oh, Wall Street
| Journal you want to make it difficult to unsubscribe? You want
| me to call, waste time on the phone, etc. OK, I'll just have my
| AI agent call and take up your calling agents time, increasing
| your costs.
|
| ... my AI agent goes through phone tree... finally connected to
| agent... WSJ Support Person:'Hello, Wall Street Journal
| support' My AI Agent: 'please hold as I connect with my human'
| hold music plays... My AI Agent: 'sorry, we are taking longer
| to connect than normal, please hold while you are connected'
| hold music plays...
| sensanaty wrote:
| I've had situations where a reapplication to the same spot
| (with the same resume/details) I got auto-rejected from would
| yield an acceptance.
|
| I blame all the ASTs and companies that fail to give _any_
| feedback whatsoever other than a generic "We went another
| way". If you can't give people the 5 minutes of effort of
| looking over their resume, why do you expect them to respect
| your time instead?
| highcountess wrote:
| I am sure it's tough for you, but imagine being someone looking
| for work when you probably don't even realize the massive
| amounts of noise on the employee side. I get friends asking me
| for input on whether I think that a job listing may be a
| fraudulent or scammy listing, and that's from the top job board
| sites. People have zero trust in the system because the
| corporations have created this toxic hell of commoditized
| humans where you are now all the sudden competing with the
| whole rest of the world in this poss as t-American transitional
| hell we are currently in.
|
| There have been posts here on HN about people applying to 500
| jobs in 8 months and not even getting so much as a human reply,
| let alone a job. There are other posts proving that companies
| are posting false job openings to give the impression of growth
| to Wall Street or also just to argue that more immigration is
| needed.
|
| You may complain about it, but just be happy you haven't been
| replaced by AI application reviewers, because that is coming. I
| suggest you start thinking about pairing down expenses and
| increasing savings. No, seriously. Worst case, you have more
| savings.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-
| effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the
| problem.
|
| The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media
| malaise infect young mentees. I've been doing volunteer
| mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a
| sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they
| need to min-max. It's sad to see smart, motivated young people
| get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit
| and TikTok, which teach them that _trying_ is lame and the only
| way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a
| job, lie your way through interviews, and "quiet quit" by
| testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok
| swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies
| and CEOs, not their own decisions.
|
| The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of
| these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug
| malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to
| their own low performance. It's depressing for me and other
| mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior
| has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021
| and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing
| that could happen to them was that they'd get fired and get a
| new job next week with a 20% raise.
|
| The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take
| their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way
| through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to
| coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.
|
| The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering
| in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated
| applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other
| side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine
| and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and
| coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.
|
| I don't know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is
| continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on
| one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM
| ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.
| linkjuice4all wrote:
| > Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job
| market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max
|
| Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating
| applications is just the response to automating rejections,
| so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies
| are min-maxing their employees?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Yes we can. Resume spamming is not a new phenomenon. Ten
| years ago we were already struggling to sift through the
| nonsense at the big co i worked for, llms just expanded the
| "tam".
| icedrift wrote:
| I don't understand why more companies don't leverage in
| person events. It's something my state does for
| government jobs and as an applicant, it's so much easier
| to chat up an agency rep about what they're looking for
| and schedule a formal interview.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| It's used by every single big co and a lot of smaller
| ones too. It just doesn't scale well when you need to
| hire hundreds of engineers every year. I never actually
| seen public job postings bring in many leads that
| actually convert to offers. It's one of the worst
| channels which is why candidates are getting such crap
| experience going that route
| trod1234 wrote:
| Public job board listings have been spammed by fake jobs
| called ghost jobs. Candidates must overcome that to find real
| jobs, and the boards in general do not remove said postings.
| Candidates are forced to identify characterize and remove
| listings on their side (extra work and cost), through strict
| OSINT background searches. Businesses have forced candidates
| to bear increasing arbitrary costs just to find a job and
| this is a longstanding trend (half a century). Comparisons
| could easily be made of a slave master in uncivilized times,
| where mental coercion and torture has replaced physical
| torture.
|
| What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference
| plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets
| jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam
| (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than
| to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.
|
| Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't
| support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of
| cooperation among companies in various little things they
| have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over
| decades.
|
| The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You
| have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers
| further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any
| workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of
| inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing
| power, not even increasing).
|
| The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are
| working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves
| in many respects. Companies care far more for short term
| profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being
| clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most
| costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise
| as you call it).
|
| Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with
| minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a
| bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain
| during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the
| Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the
| destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in
| granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to
| suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government
| responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no
| we can't have this. (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,
| Landis)
|
| Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for
| them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and
| frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.
|
| Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out,
| and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind
| people are today.
|
| Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of
| time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren
| even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good
| amount of time.
|
| Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible
| (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are
| available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they
| rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.
|
| When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in
| pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent
| can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in
| the first place by the actions taken.
|
| You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most
| companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed,
| larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or
| straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says
| its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when
| in a downturn there may be nothing wrong. Its completely
| irrational when these people then say they can't find talent.
| The brain drain is real.
|
| Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given
| sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a
| discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent
| candidates which your HR department, or 3rd-party pre-
| screener (AI), ignored, and that isn't even touching on all
| the protected class violations silently occurring in
| unenforceable ways, thanks to AI's black box characteristics
| (where age, gender, and other things are being used to
| decide).
| LtWorf wrote:
| The inquisition being as bad as you think it was was mostly
| protestant porn/propaganda. Protestant countries burned far
| more people and for centuries after the catholics had
| stopped.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >It's sad to see smart, motivated young people get their
| opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and
| TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way
| to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job,
| lie your way through interviews, and "quiet quit" by testing
| the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in
| to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and
| CEOs, not their own decisions.
|
| I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior
| SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at
| the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a
| 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was
| criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait
| until next year to see if I can get that now while still
| carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new
| positions.
|
| I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th
| percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the
| company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to
| do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I
| am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE
| work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But
| they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just
| accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as
| possible.
|
| There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have
| to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the
| minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't
| reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give
| rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that
| increase.
|
| You can't have many of these experiences before you become
| jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work
| when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't
| get rewarded for it.
|
| I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much
| as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If
| that means spamming LLM applications for the next position,
| then so be it I guess.
|
| Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses
| caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that
| many people get far more money for far less effort than a
| Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all
| levels below where I'm at).
|
| All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the
| world really works, so can you really blame people for
| getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work
| when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken
| advantage of and be a sucker - do you?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Why do still work there?
| LtWorf wrote:
| He hasn't set up his bot to apply to other jobs yet, so
| he gets autorejected
| rr808 wrote:
| > I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase.
|
| I've been working for nearly 30 years now. This is pretty
| standard. Talk to your friends who dont work in tech a 3%
| raise is pretty good.
| LtWorf wrote:
| In my whole career I've seen 0 correlation between effort and
| rewards.
| josephg wrote:
| How long has your career been? I've been doing software
| professionally for 20 years and the correlation I've seen
| is huge. Not necessarily inside a single company - but
| after awhile you get jobs from networking & people you
| worked with in the past. If none of your ex colleagues want
| to work with you again, it'll become a lot harder for you
| to get hired & promoted.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I've seen a strongly positive correlation over a 30+ year
| career.
|
| It's not perfect, but it's far from zero in my experience.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| 'We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us'
|
| I see sovietization everywhere in the country now.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to
| being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own
| low performance.
|
| I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not
| really how things should work, should it?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
|
| Job seekers do not care and should not care what you want. They
| want the job, you are paid to find the best candidate. Just
| arriving at a situation where you get flooded with hundreds of
| resumes, means that you or your organisation has failed with
| what you were trying to do. You should have had hand picked
| candidates ready in the pipeline when it came time to hire. You
| are a hiring manager after all.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want.
|
| This is just a natural response to the automatic screening
| methods that have been used by the hiring side for years.
| Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race
| started by the hiring side.
|
| Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse
| off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you
| personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought
| about that before screening automatically. This is on you.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Exactly. I've referred many ex-colleagues to a specific
| position, their CV was perfect but an automated system
| rejected them so that was that. I can't even as a human being
| go talk to the director because the applicant status was
| "rejected" so their hands were tied too.
|
| It's absurd, and only getting worse.
| anarticle wrote:
| Too bad, fix hiring. A five interview cycle that takes nearly
| two weeks which keeps me from applying to other companies who
| are shitting up job listings with fake or ghost listings is
| reducing the SNR of hiring dramatically.
|
| The solution is likely some kind of highly curated list you
| have to pay to be on, for both sides to increase signal and get
| rid of scammers. Many friends of mine have gone down the line
| of replying to recruiters only to be met with "contract to hire
| <20% of market rate and you must move to Nowhere, MN" when
| clearly your profile says what metro you are attached to.
|
| Things are gonna be worse longer I think. Leaning hard on my
| network.
| itronitron wrote:
| Most (not all) position descriptions for software engineers
| include requirements for experience with particular tools,
| applications, or 'frameworks'.
|
| Would you hire a statistician that didn't have 'n' years of MS
| Excel experience, or had never used Pandas?
|
| If I were a statistician with 20 years experience, would I even
| apply to positions listing those as requirements?
|
| It's an interesting problem, as giving information on the
| position requirements clues applicants into the game they need
| to play and also runs the risk of turning some otherwise
| qualified people away.
| la64710 wrote:
| What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job
| seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality
| of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews
| candidates who are not selected get not a single honest useful
| feedback and is treated like human scrap with a soulless
| rejection. Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy
| for the corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at
| my disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem
| fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don't
| care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I also wonder how many applications are from people who just
| send applications to hit the minimum needed to receive
| unemployment but don't actually want the specific job.
| hnthrow213 wrote:
| 2025 - ai agent mass spamming incoming
| PerilousD wrote:
| I'm so glad I retired and can afford to say "No" with an
| occasional "Yes" if it's interesting :-)
| thepuppet33r wrote:
| Congrats on your privileged position! I'm glad you are able to
| retire, but not sure this is the best time to crow about it.
|
| I'm trying to eke out enough money to put in my 401K and hope
| that when it's time for me to retire in a few decades, I'll
| have enough to scrape by on and the economy hasn't exploded by
| then and render my investments worthless.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| As someone who automates everything and normally loves this type
| of thing, my approach for job hunting has been way different.
| Instead of spray and pray, I spend a week or so deeply
| researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there
| role-wise. Everything 100% manual and focused, no more than 8
| total companies.
|
| Maybe spray and pray works if you're more junior, but later in
| your career you'll want to be very picky about where you spend
| your time interviewing because the roles are long term and have a
| huge impact on your life.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| That investment isn't worth it to just be ghosted
| Oras wrote:
| Agree. You need to see it from the other side. Most likely,
| they are receiving 100+ applications, so the chance that your
| application will be seen is too low.
| pknomad wrote:
| This.
|
| I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day
| (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so
| that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so
| much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI
| use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).
| uoaei wrote:
| Do you have a technical background? 50 seems quite low
| for someone to get the gist of the resumes and have a
| sense of the applicants.
|
| If recruiting departments really suffer at parsing about
| 50 apps per day per recruiter, I can see why this got so
| bad so quickly.
| abathur wrote:
| I think GP means they stop at this point to ensure that
| they are giving all of the resumes a pretty fair shake by
| being fresh.
|
| Afaik, any kind of slush-pile reading (including grading,
| which is probably the best researched) tends to get less
| fair as the process wears on the reader.
|
| GP isn't optimizing for finishing the pile, but for
| making the most of what's in it.
| pknomad wrote:
| Yep. You got it.
| pknomad wrote:
| I do. Credentials-wise I have BS in one of the STEM and
| currently enrolled in MS CS with intent to pursue PhD in
| Maths/CS. I have around 8 YoE and worked from Series B
| startups to IBs.
|
| I want to give everyone a fair shake (including reading
| cover letters) and _for me_ , resume fatigue sets in if I
| read more than 50.
| dangus wrote:
| I think you missed this part, emphasis mine:
|
| I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work
| and _figure out how to get there role-wise._
|
| Figuring out how to get there means figuring out how not to
| get ghosted, not just blasting off a quick application and
| crossing fingers. I imagine that probably means reaching out
| to people in their network at the company, learning about
| their hiring practices and how people get hired there, etc.
| mholm wrote:
| When was the most recent time you tried this, and for what
| level of role was it? I believe this could absolutely be
| effective pre-2023, or for very high level roles. I don't
| think it's currently viable advice for ~Senior level
| engineers, who are currently competing against thousands of
| other applications, many of whom were generated
| specifically for the given role.
| lolinder wrote:
| Speaking as someone currently involved in hiring for
| Senior roles at my company: We have hundreds of resumes,
| most of which are garbage. We're not seeing a lot of
| evidence of large numbers of people working hard to
| tailor their resume to the role, so doing so would
| absolutely help you in our case.
|
| Even more so, if we got a referral right now from within
| the company we'd absolutely skip them straight to the
| interviews. Dealing with resumes sucks right now as an
| employer, and we want to avoid that stage as much as you
| do.
| dangus wrote:
| I'm not going to get into my specific work history in the
| spirit of trying not to put more metadata about myself
| out there, but I can confidently say referrals are still
| king and I have witnessed those results.
|
| I have a hard time believing that the market is as dire
| as people say it is at least right now approaching 2025.
| I see peers who are getting laid off get back into jobs,
| it's just taking a few months longer than it used to.
| It's just not a magical hot job market like it used to
| be.
|
| A good indicator is to look at Meta's employee count.
| It's down dramatically since 2022 but they still have
| more employees working for them than the last day of
| 2021.
|
| https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/employees/
|
| Or look at layoffs.fyi, where layoffs are reported at
| their lowest level since early 2022.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| Basically my approach as well. The problem is that your well-
| thought-through application will get lost in a sea of
| applicants (many using tools similar to the one shown above).
| The tools used by the recruiters/HR also suck and can be easily
| gamed (ie strategically spreading keywords/phrases throughout
| the resume even if the candidate has no actual experience). The
| end result is hiring managers cannot find good candidates to
| interview, and good candidates cannot get interviews.
|
| The core problem is not that the systems suck but that so many
| people in IT lost their jobs in the last 2-3 years so that they
| don't have a choice other than to spray-and-pray (in the end of
| the day you need to put the food on the table).
|
| Things won't improve until hiring recovers (increase in labor
| demand), and some IT professionals probably will pivot to other
| industries (decrease in labor supply), as it happened in 2000
| and again in 2008.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| This sounds like a good and noble pursuit, but I would be able
| to take exactly one ghosting or premature rejection before
| abandoning it completely. There are so many BS reasons
| applications are ignored, I can't see this approach working
| well. Maybe if you can network your way to a manager or
| something
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| There are no foolproof methods. Shotgunning makes it much
| harder to get past the recruiter screen. Yes the high touch
| method leads to larger feelings of rejection but its also
| more likely to actually work.
| bravura wrote:
| With that said, an LLM to a) generate a LONG-list and b) help
| you zero in on your short-list; is something I would pay for.
| sroussey wrote:
| I agree! Not that it's worked as of yet.
| uoaei wrote:
| When was the last time that worked for you and what's your
| background and the types of roles you were applying for?
| mettamage wrote:
| So do you network yourself into the companies then to get an
| interview? Or do you apply online?
|
| I'd like to know more about a manual approach.
|
| I think both approaches are valid. I took the automated
| approach to online dating, married now. So that worked out.
|
| Taking the automated approach for companies will probably work
| in a similar fashion as online dating. However, unlike online
| dating, I feel very strong targeted approaches have a chance of
| working better as long as you get to the interview stage.
|
| Targeted approaches don't work with online dating as the
| biggest issue is figuring out with whom you have chemistry. For
| work, there's no such thing to figure out - not to the extent
| as it is required like romantic intimacy.
| normie3000 wrote:
| > Targeted approaches don't work with online dating
|
| What would a targeted approach to online dating be?
|
| From GP:
|
| > spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work
| and figure out how to get there
|
| Replace "where I want to work" with "who I want to date" and
| it sounds concerning.
| mettamage wrote:
| > What would a targeted approach to online dating be?
|
| Courting someone, winning someone over. It's done in the
| offline world. I haven't thought about it much when it
| comes to online dating. I should've been a bit sharper on
| that.
|
| When it comes to dating, I always went for the high volume
| approach. So I really shouldn't be speaking about a
| targeted approach. I guess I did because I was trying too
| hard to draw a parallel to applying to jobs.
|
| So my mind just went: applying
| online online dating volume 1
| 2 targeted 3 4
|
| But perhaps quadrant 4 doesn't really exist and I really
| was just shoehorning approaches of applying to jobs online
| into online dating because I saw this 2x2 matrix.
| ramoz wrote:
| Something has to give. As a hiring manager I can't filter through
| 100s of resumes or profiles.
|
| Using all the top sites as well that are supposed to make the
| hiring process easier.
| petesergeant wrote:
| That something is hiring a recruitment consultant.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| Is there a solution that doesn't expose you to the entirety of
| the internet at one time? Proactive networking maybe? Asking
| existing employees if they have friends looking for jobs?
| Oras wrote:
| I'm curious which companies still use emails to receive resumes
| and job applications! This sounds like hell to manage.
| teeray wrote:
| It's astounding that we, as an industry, are so averse to
| licensing developers. It solves the resume spam problem and the
| repetitive LeetCode round(s) that every company now wants. We
| also don't have to settle for the licensing process other
| industries have--ours can be more inclusive of alternative
| development backgrounds, while still providing a meaningful
| quality filter.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yep, I've talked about this at length _for years_. We need to
| bring back the PE Exam to help guarantee some minimal level of
| competency in prospective applicants.
|
| https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...
|
| But this is one of the most entitled industries in the
| universe. Even the mere notion of suggesting academic degrees,
| PE Exams and other forms of "gatekeeping" is tantamount to
| shouting Voldemort's name through a megaphone.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| To be fair, there is a very good case for ignoring
| applications that list different certifications if you're
| hiring. I fear the same would logic would apply to licensing.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Most non software engineers do not have the PE.
| robocat wrote:
| Because MCSE was such a success?
|
| This article unintentionally perfectly rebuts the idea of
| licensing: https://mcpmag.com/articles/2005/05/11/the-death-of-
| paper-mc...
|
| Our industry is one where actual skills should and do matter,
| and much gatekeeping has been reduced.
|
| Professional rote learning is great for mandarin jobs where you
| are working within a static prescribed framework (legal,
| accounting, building codes). It is terrible for jobs that
| require professional taste.
|
| Tell me how you would create a license for a graphic designer
| or UX specialist.
|
| I actually fail to understand idealists that believe that
| licensing might even work. Who are y'all?
| abc-1 wrote:
| > Our industry is one where actual skills should and do
| matter [...] Professional rote learning is great for mandarin
| jobs where you are working within a static prescribed
| framework (legal, accounting, building codes).
|
| Saying things like this reflects poorly on our community and
| demonstrates a poor understanding on how much creativity and
| thought goes into legal and accounting. There's a reason
| there is a large pay band for lawyers and accountants.
| pockmarked19 wrote:
| Creativity and thought going into accounting ought to be
| illegal. Albeit I am sure there is plenty of demand for
| "creative accounting".
| abc-1 wrote:
| Nope nothing wrong about it at all. Some company's may
| structure their business in certain ways to take various
| trade offs, exactly how software devs make certain trade
| offs. Then of course there's shady and illegal stuff
| you're getting at, but that's a separate topic.
| robocat wrote:
| Up to 80% of practising engineers in the US are exempt from
| certification: https://www.engineeringnz.org/news-
| insights/how-do-other-cou...
|
| Certification doesn't prevent accidents - the only thing it
| provides is scapegoats for faulty systems.
| lysium wrote:
| What do you mean with licensing? What's the difference to a
| university degree?
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| The paper ceiling is a silly gatekeeping done by those who
| have made it.
|
| I would be in favor of licensing knowing it would probably
| exclude me unless of course it does not require a university
| degree. I was not born into a family of means and being
| autodidactic allowed me to excel beyond my upbringing.
|
| The best path would be to have journeyman type of pathway.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| No.
|
| You'd still need to interview people because there's no
| license that will tell you who the good/great candidates
| are
| lizzas wrote:
| Vocational education vs. academic.
|
| Basically you find a grad right now and make them do a coding
| test. Something is broken there.
|
| A degree could include the vocational qualification as a 1
| year study, but having the vocation qualification alone would
| save youngsters a lot of money and reduce the burden on
| hiring. You could even still interview coding questions but
| the application process can remove the spam/ai bullshit to
| some extent. "Can they code?" is answered.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| And now you've moved the job of administering and
| evaluating coding tests to an organization that only does
| that.
|
| Who would want to work at such a place? Why would I trust
| the opinions of people who work at such a place?
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Licenses should only ever be used to protect consumers. Abusing
| licenses to protect a labor class is a 10th century solution
| and is absolutely immoral
| __oh_es wrote:
| Surely CS degrees should suffice, yet we still have leet code
| testing?
|
| Interested to hear if you have a different thought here
| clippy99 wrote:
| What about honoring our multi-year college degrees. Isn't that
| licensing enough?
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Have you been recruiting people, like at all? It's clearly
| not a strong signal.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What percentage of what you do as a software engineer has
| direct linkage to computer science?
|
| My guess for most of us is "not very much at all", several of
| the best people I've worked with as programmers did not have
| a CS degree, and I've interviewed people with CS degrees who
| could not write a function to sum an array of integers in any
| language of their choosing, meaning "honoring their degree"
| would have been an unwise choice.
| clippy99 wrote:
| What does solving random puzzles from Leetcode have to do
| with day-to-day engineering work? IMHO, the emphasis should
| be on previous experience, CS domain knowledge and systems
| architecture / design. Maybe degrees need to be fixed to
| convey more useful knowledge...
| localghost3000 wrote:
| In my nearly 20 year career, I have never gotten a job by
| applying directly. The few times I've tried it was shockingly
| bad. I feel for anyone where that's the only option they have.
|
| My advice is to invest heavily in your professional network and
| when you have one, treat it like the special garden that it is.
| This takes years to cultivate. I also see people try to come at
| it from a very transactional unauthentic angle which will always
| fail. The right way to approach it is honestly quite simple: make
| friends. Be nice. Help people. Mentor. Etc. Don't expect anything
| from it. People remember that stuff. Opportunities find you.
| drillsteps5 wrote:
| In the middle of fruitless multi-month job search, I manually
| view LinkedIn/indeed job sites daily and look for new positions,
| going through requirements, making sure I have the skills and
| experience (also helps with understanding if I need to upskill in
| certain areas), then look up the company, the industry it's in,
| etc. By the time I'm ready to apply to the position I know I'm
| interested in and a good fit for, there's a few hundred
| applications already (LinkedIn shows the count to the
| applicants). I'm like, how is this possible, it's only been 3
| days?..
|
| Well, that's how.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| well, manual application is also a thing, there are people who
| literally make it their job to apply to job listings. you can
| find people offering their services on r/slavelabour. some
| times they take a flat rate/job application, sometimes they do
| percentage of your first paycheck on new job.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slavelabour/search/?q=job+applicati...
| sroussey wrote:
| Often it's 100 applicants in the first hour.
|
| My advice for both sides: don't use job boards. Use your own
| website.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Or hand out business cards at meetups.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Just for your consideration, in my experience Linkedin is
| pretty much the worst place to look for a job right now if
| you're a real human that actually knows how to do their work.
| Everyone just clicks apply to everything just to see what
| sticks and the signal to noise ratio is absolute garbage. If a
| company has a jobs section on their homepage, that should
| always be preferred.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| A bit like Amazon with vast numbers of oddly named Chinese
| resellers.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I've been told the LinkedIn count is absolutely not what you
| think it is.
|
| I can't remember the details, but I stopped taking it
| seriously.
| 65 wrote:
| The biggest issue for me was filtering through software engineer
| job listings, since I wouldn't be interested or qualified for
| listings using various tech stacks.
|
| I made a Chrome extension for LinkedIn that would filter out
| listings to exclude certain keywords, e.g. "Rust" or "Java" and
| find only listings that applied to me. From there I could
| manually apply and track my job application status. This saved
| much more time. I had a few macros to paste information which
| sped up the process.
| toasteros wrote:
| Scrolling down to the bottom of this post brought up the "please
| subscribe!" nag screen _and also_ immediately sent me back to the
| top of the page. The modal has poor contrast on the close button,
| so it was just confusing.
|
| If you must nag for subscriptions, you might want to try and find
| a way that does it without interfering with page interactivity.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Every job I've applied to has involved me researching the
| company, deciding whether I understood it, was right for the
| role, and wanted to work for them, and then tailoring my resume
| and cover letter to what that role needed. In my life, I've maybe
| sent 25 applications, gotten 6-7 interviews, and been hired 4
| times. Pretty good batting average, and I'm not by any means
| especially qualified or accomplished. For me, automated spam has
| not been the answer, laser targeting has been.
| Uvix wrote:
| How long ago did this last succeed?
| jdbdnej wrote:
| The only applicants I hire are like that. If you cannot show
| you chose this company why would I assume you would like to
| work here?
|
| Of cause this assumes you are a good fit in the first place
| regarding your skills. But the latter is usually much easier
| to filter out
| vacuity wrote:
| I too would like to know more about @karaterobot's specific
| circumstances here, because while I understand your
| sentiment, it's a numbers game for SWE applicants like me.
| Of course there are some companies I would prefer to work
| at, but I don't think @karaterobot's experience is
| realistic right now.
| tripper_27 wrote:
| Seconding Uvix's question.
|
| I was looking for work in 2021-2022, and an approach like yours
| got me a job after interviewing with circa 10 companies.
| Unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of office politics and
| had to leave in early 2024.
|
| At the start of my 2024 job search I again tried targeted
| search, targeting was good enough that I had a circa 1:10
| application to interview ratio. It took over 50 companies
| before I found my current role. The market is _much_ tougher
| now than it was a few years ago.
|
| I hear there was a time when companies were eager/desperate to
| hire. Those were good years for job seekers.
| mathieuh wrote:
| It's the same for me. When I read people say they send hundreds
| of job applications I don't understand how that's even
| possible. Any time I've been looking for a job I usually find
| maybe five jobs that actually interest me and I think I would
| be a good fit for, and then another five that I maybe don't
| quite meet the all the requirements or don't seem that
| interesting but it's near enough that I might as well give it a
| go. I usually don't make all those applications at once because
| I find managing more than about three applications to be a
| hassle.
|
| As far as I can recall I've never not had an interview from an
| application.
|
| I do generally use recruitment agencies so maybe that's a
| factor.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| It's my understanding that most hiring managers have a similar
| AI-assisted filtering tools. So there are humans in either side,
| it's just a bunch of garbage in between
| kqr wrote:
| > Format the response as a JSON object with these keys:{
| "status": "success" or "error", ...
|
| Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key
| last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the
| generation will actually be successful?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yes, you are right. Not to be too snide about it but this is
| not optimal.
|
| You get provably better performance if you let the thing
| analyze the situation / think through the problem / whatever
| before letting it commit to choosing a status like that.
| DavidDodda wrote:
| thanks for the feedback!, that's something I haven't though of!
| divbzero wrote:
| This is pretty cool, though it seems more beneficial as a neat
| demo project than for its actual functionality. First, automated
| job application submission probably doesn't endear you to hiring
| managers. And, moreover, you probably don't want to optimize your
| life for job hunting in the same way that you probably don't want
| to optimize your life for being very good at first dates. Life is
| more fulfilling if you can find what you want and keep it for the
| long run.
| pknomad wrote:
| Agree.
|
| It also feels like it's optimizing for the wrong thing (getting
| past the screening for as many job as possible, regardless of
| fit). I personally felt like the most successful experience I
| had with job search (and retention) is if I knew someone at the
| company and just bypassed the initial resume screening
| altogether and hand-crafted a nuanced resume and cover letter
| with a strong backing from people that knew me.
|
| I realize not everyone has that luxury but I made diligent
| effort to network in and out of work and it has mostly helped
| me filter out bad jobs/fit and save time for both parties.
| quicksilver03 wrote:
| I'd prefer an application to automatically fill in my data in
| those junk ATS systems, such as WorkDay, that pretend to parse my
| LinkedIn profile or a PDF resume and inevitably makes me do all
| the copy-paste twice.
|
| A couple of years ago it was so bad that I stopped applying as
| soon as I saw that WorkDay crap pop up, regardless of the
| company.
| ugurs wrote:
| Workday is a hostile environment for applicants. Perhaps that
| is intended.
| hackernewds wrote:
| If the domain of easy applications is automated entries and
| copy paste, then Workday is indeed the desired tooling.
| LinkedIn Easy Apply serves the applicant, but I can't imagine
| any recruiter loves it.
| itgoon wrote:
| For Workday, use a very simple resume. No columns, no bullet
| points (use asterisks), no tables.
|
| There's usually an option to upload another file near the end
| of the form. After it has filled in the fields using your plain
| resume, delete it and upload the nicer one.
| salomon812 wrote:
| I'm a software manager that has been doing some form of
| interviewing/hiring for 13 years.
|
| I did two rounds of hiring software engineers last year, one in
| spring that seemed normal, and one in the fall that was was
| brutal. The fall hiring had a flood of applicants, and in
| retrospect, most seemed like AI was used in some way.
|
| For the fall round, I suddenly had a higher percentage of
| applicants that qualified after resume screening and initial
| phone screen, but they all collapsed when I did a technical
| round. And failure rate on the technical was much much worse than
| usual.
|
| We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100%
| sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing
| each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but
| I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible
| technical interview.
|
| Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI,
| LLM, or data science. After all, with almost a thousand
| applicants, I needed to sort some how. (To be fair, our use case
| is more esoteric, we're not writing Javascript or parsers, so
| it's not as much of a time-saver.) Large chunks of applicants
| dropped and the process felt more normal.
|
| I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical
| screenings are still done remotely. Before COVID we were 100% on-
| site interviews, but did hybrid after COVID. Now, I'm back to
| enforcing on-site for my group.
| pknomad wrote:
| I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience
| mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large
| volume but also filtering out LLM abusers. We're not opposed to
| people using LLMs, when appropriate. I find that candidates
| inappropriately use it to circumvent the process and that is a
| big deal for me (and our team). We try to do the right
| thing(TM) by the candidates by creating minimal interview
| workloads, asking highly relevant questions that aren't
| "gotchas", and updating their candidacy as soon as possible. It
| doesn't feel like many candidates are interested in returning
| the same courtesy. This kind of behavior means we have to lean
| harder into tapping our existing networks for sourcing "trust-
| worthy" candidates. That puts us at risk for creating
| additional blinders and also unfairly filters out "un-
| networked" candidates. For whatever it's worth, we are remote-
| first org so all of our interviews are done remotely.
|
| One of the things I'm thinking about doing in the future is
| sharing the screen with diagrams and adding irrelevant
| annotations to it (while clearly indicating to the candidates
| that those are irrelevant) as a primitive adversarial AI
| technique. Perhaps on-site interviews is part of the solution.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| Fellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with
| your comment. We decided to stop announcing our engineering
| jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates
| for now. It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said,
| it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know
| about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got
| rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| >mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now
|
| Well, I certainly hope your revival rate is better than
| your hiring success rate.
| teitoklien wrote:
| hahaha, i was thinking the same when i read it, such an
| odd way to phrase it.
|
| "Mouth to mouth" lol
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The English phrase for this is 'word of mouth'
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| What is a "Platform Engineer"? I never heard that term
| before today.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Latest rebranding of "sysadmin", which became "devops
| engineer" or SRE a decade ago. It's the people who shove
| kubernetes, datadog, and CI/CD tools into every corner.
| pknomad wrote:
| Platform Engineers are operationally focused software
| engineers who focus on enablement of other software
| engineering groups through building self-service tooling
| and create unified platform for app deployment.
|
| The cultural focus is placed on enablement of teams
| through self service, whereas DevOps is more about
| reducing silos and SRE is more about doing infra through
| the software engineering lens with metrics (SLO/SLA/SLI).
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| TL;DR: Internal tool builder
| beardedwizard wrote:
| Elitism is alive and well in this little nook. Equating
| platform engineering, SRE and sysadmin to the same thing.
|
| Platforms are often large scale distributed systems,
| dealing with problems like ensuring 100000s of compute
| nodes are in a deployed and in consistent state. Millions
| of lines of code are written, peer reviewed and committed
| to solve this problem.
|
| This mirrors an attitude I have frequently encountered
| from "traditional" or "mainstream" software engineers who
| devalue any work that isn't features, and don't want to
| have to work on problems like "make my feature appear on
| all deployments and work well" - it's just something
| sysadmins do amirite?
| stackskipton wrote:
| In our remote interviews, I've started pasting the question
| into meeting chat that I've already fed into ChatGPT. Mainly
| because some candidates do actually do better with reading
| and thinking but it's also just pure bait to paste into their
| open ChatGPT window. Since I've already got input on my side,
| if they start reading off ChatGPT output, they get a strike,
| two strikes and interview is ended.
|
| However, I do believe onsite interviews is best solution but
| finance obviously screams about cost.
| bdangubic wrote:
| it is surprising there isn't some SaaS bullshit company
| that solves this problem. we have shit like Pearsons and
| whatnots when taking exams, I took few certification exams
| and it was like
|
| - install this thing that takes over my machine
|
| - 360 camera around to show my surroundings
|
| - no phone/watch/...
|
| One would think by now there'd be two Stanford grads with a
| SaaS shit taking care of this for $899/hr
|
| Last interview I did it was obvious candidate was cheating.
| Gave him my cell and told him to call me, no speakerphone
| or bluetooth and hung up Teams meeting - never got a call
| :)
| Terr_ wrote:
| Even as we speak, scams are going on where pretend-
| employers are backdooring the computers of applicants
| that way.
|
| I fear the only applicants who would agree are also the
| ones who can't be trusted with any employee access to
| your corporate resources.
| bdangubic wrote:
| a company would run this... Not your company taking over
| candidate's computer, an intermediary that candidate and
| potential employer are using.
|
| candidates are already using Slack/Teams/Zoom/... now
| they get to use Pouixy or whatever BS name someone in SF
| comes up with. guarantee you this will be a thing in
| 2025, some stanfords are on the case
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| If you (the company) send me a company laptop to use for
| that shit, sure, we can interview that way. It is the
| same deal with Teams and Zoom. None of that shit is
| touching my personal devices, it is strictly limited to
| the work machine.
| bdangubic wrote:
| have you ever taken a certification exam remotely from
| your own computer?
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| No.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you might be slightly more receptive to this idea if you
| have, the company administering the exam needs to ensure
| no cheating is happening so app starts, all your other
| apps are shutdown, you get a call through the app to show
| your surroundings with the camera on your laptop etc
| before exam begins. at no point in time did I find any of
| it intrusive or strange, I wanted to get the exam done
| remotely, they need to ensure that I wasn't cheating
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| > so app starts
|
| I assume this "app" is not open source, correct? Is is
| compatible with Linux systems? Can it run on non-FHS
| distribution?
|
| > all your other apps are shutdown
|
| I admit I am curious about this bit. Does it just start
| killing all other processes belonging to the same user
| ID? Or of all users (since you could get "assist" from
| process owned by an another user)? At least PID 1 needs
| to survive the slaughter, but it _can_ be used to run
| arbitrary code to assist with the cheating. So how does
| it tell what is "an app" it needs to stop?
| bdangubic wrote:
| there is a video on this page showing overall experience
| - https://www.pearsonvue.com/us/en/test-takers/onvue-
| online-pr...
| Gigachad wrote:
| There's a much simpler solution. You do the interview in
| your office and watch them answer without typing the
| question in to chatgpt.
| bdangubic wrote:
| too expensive - no one is doing that anymore
| pempem wrote:
| is it more expensive than what we're dealing with now?
| have we even tallied the human talent cost?
| Gigachad wrote:
| How is it too expensive? It takes the same amount of time
| for the interview, and you presumably have a room
| available in the office to book for the occasional
| interview.
|
| And it instantly filters out all the spam applicants and
| chat GPT cheaters.
| jarsin wrote:
| Startup idea to truly solve this would be large network
| of onsite test / interview centers.
|
| I had to do all my certs onsite in test centers in early
| 2000's. For one I had to drive 2 hours to take the exam.
|
| Seems like those test centers used to be in every mid
| size city in the country.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I don't believe one needs a startup to solve that problem
| - there are already a bazillion certification paths for a
| bazillion tech stacks. The(?) problem is one of trust
| from the hiring org that the certs mean anything, and
| that's where the whole discussion devolves into one of
| (gatekeeping|but muh leetcode|our business problem is
| special|$other)
| jarsin wrote:
| I meant a startup that provides onsite screening /
| verification of candidates for companies. Only pre-
| verifed candidates can apply to company jobs. If the
| candidate is not local, the company can use the test
| center to do a remote screen in an environment where
| candidate cannot cheat. Etc.
|
| I just brought up certs because back in the day you could
| not take those test online due to cheating.
|
| Now in the age of AI you can't do any type of testing
| remote, imo.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I half-way suspected that's what you were going for
| (testing-as-a-service) but my point still stands: it is a
| web-of-trust bootstrapping problem. For example,
| Otherbranch[1] exists, is a startup, and is trying to
| handle pre-screening candidates, but they seem to have
| very few companies that are currently using them. One
| would assume if they were solving a real problem then
| companies would be beating down their door to get real,
| verified, actual people and yet.
|
| 1: see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=otherbranch.com -
| the folks spun out of Triplebyte
| bdangubic wrote:
| this ain't about pre-screening at all, it is about
| solving a different kind of problem. if you have
| experienced it already, you haven't interviewed anyone
| recently.
| mdaniel wrote:
| You are correct, I'm over here stuck on the applicant
| side, feeling like both sides of this transaction are
| suffering from the same lack of trust
|
| I therefore fail to see how introducing another party
| that the hiring managers have to cede their trust to
| solves our mutual lack of trust
|
| If your company (since your reply implies that you are at
| least "hiring manager adjacent") merely needs that
| testing center to start hiring people, I'm totally open
| to going on Monday and starting a company to provide that
| service. I even already have a 4k security camera system
| I can wire up the room to provide DVR access to your
| interview candidate's session
|
| But my _strong_ suspicion is that such a video camera
| enabled room for a fee is not, in fact, the obstacle to
| getting people hired
| bdangubic wrote:
| 11 out of last 12 candidates interviewed read their
| answers from chatgpt or the like. always same scenario,
| video call, interviewer never makes an eye contact and
| obviously is reading answers. last one I gave my cell and
| told him to call me, no speaker or bluetooth on the phone
| and hung up Teams meeting - mate never called back :)))
|
| this is a pandemic already and tool is needed to
| establish that interviewer is not cheating. prior to
| today's tools at interviewer's disposal this was not
| really a thing - today it is a huge thing
| bdangubic wrote:
| too expensive mate... we live in year our Lord 2024 - no
| one is building 2000 buildings that will be vacant as
| everyone is working from home (or India...) :)
|
| this requires a simple saas solution - someone's working
| on this for sure already as it is already a big issue
| jarsin wrote:
| I hear you, and yes old school solution sounds absurd,
| but I suspect interview cheating will be on par with game
| cheating. Even if you install kernel level cheat
| protection systems the game cheater's still find ways
| around them.
|
| These guys already developed an invisible desktop app to
| help everyone cheat on remote interviews.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42348147
| bdangubic wrote:
| no question there will be cat&mouse here but even more
| incentive for some stanford grads to charge premium for
| "unbreakable quantum-proof interview experience" :)
| elashri wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the temperature of even GPT4o-mini is not 0
| so how would you know it is the something like you have. It
| would be hard to be reading an answer, it would feel
| awkward and probably obvious it itself. But I'm just saying
| that some people would have memorized answers to some
| standard questions (they apply to many places as you might
| know).
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Alternatively they might also use a different model that
| has different response traits.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Yea, the newer models wouldn't catch this but there is
| enough candidates going to chatgpt.com and just pasting
| in the question.
|
| As always, it's arms race and one I wish I'd didn't have
| to participate in.
| bitzun wrote:
| I discovered a new tactic where you ask a vaguely worded
| question on a niche subject, such that any seemingly off
| the cuff comprehensive answer must be ChatGPT. Asking
| something outside the candidate's declared experience or
| following up on experience with tech they spoke well to
| will also reveal discrepancies.
| mlloyd wrote:
| When folks are engaging in mass circumventing of pervasive
| processes, it's because the process has broken 'typical'
| attempts to interact with it.
|
| You're being penalized for doing right by candidates but it's
| likely that a lot of those candidates were penalized
| previously when they tried to interact the 'right' way with
| other folks hiring and adapted workarounds as a result.
|
| It's a quintessential arms race. For what it's worth, I
| appreciate that you're trying hard to keep your hiring
| process broad and to mitigate your potential blind spots.
| That's refreshing to hear from a hiring manager.
| photonthug wrote:
| Yep. Hiring managers are flooded with thousands of bullshit
| applications because job seekers are flooded with thousands
| of bullshit jobs, and/or unfairly filtered out of the
| funnel for real jobs. So now it's a matter of sheer
| application volume for candidate employees more than ever,
| who after all are in a rather more desperate position than
| potential employers will ever be.
|
| Besides the arms race with AI on both sides to
| filter/escape being filtered, the other problem is that
| it's completely normal these days to use so called "hiring"
| more as cheap version of advertisement or a growth signal
| to investors rather than to indicate you are actually
| hiring.
|
| I would hazard a guess that the average job-seeking
| application count for individuals has gone up not 2x, not
| 10x, but like 100x in many fields the last few years, and
| similarly for the time involved. And this happens without
| the economy as a whole even being in serious troubles. The
| only people that win here are the staffing platforms like
| indeed and linked-in, and the options in that space and in
| recruitment/staffing generally are decreasing as the
| industry consolidates with M&A. Brutal
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I think there is a sort of just world fallacy employed
| here. It seems more like that there opportunists
| everywhere, and always have been. LLMs have amplified their
| destructive potential.
| jcutrell wrote:
| Remember - the vast majority of candidates who take the time
| to do right by your process get zero reward for their effort.
| You get a reward in the end, so it feels imbalanced. This is
| true for VERY good candidates, as well.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Over Christmas I met up with a friend who teaches part-time at
| a local college. He said he's failed more people this year than
| the cumulative total of his entire past teaching career due to
| LLM abuse.
|
| He doesn't use LLM detection tools, but he says it's easy to
| identify papers with warning signs of LLM use. For some reason,
| using ChatGPT for his specific niche topic overuses a few
| obscure, rarely-used words that most people wouldn't even
| recognize. The ChatGPT abusers some times have these words
| appearing multiple times through their essays.
|
| He's also caught people who cited a lot of different works and
| books in their reports that were outside of the assigned
| reading, or in some cases books that don't exist at all.
| Catching them is as simple as asking them about their sources
| or where they acquired a copy of the text.
|
| I see a lot of parallels in hiring and talking to junior
| software engineers right now. We had a take-home problem that
| was well liked that we used for many years, but now it's
| obvious that a majority of young applicants are just using LLMs
| to get an answer. When we want to talk about their solution in
| the interview, they "can't remember" how it works or why they
| picked their method.
|
| It's really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I
| see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you,
| bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly scare
| away the LLM cheaters, but it's expensive and time consuming
| for everyone involved.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >It's really sad to me as a long time remote worker because I
| see far more blatant abuse from remote candidates. Like you,
| bringing people on site for interviews seems to instantly
| scare away the LLM cheaters, but it's expensive and time
| consuming for everyone involved.
|
| Technology enables scale and reach, which solves some
| problems but also creates its own set of issues. I think
| you're right on with the solution: do things that are anti-
| scale. If you make things a bit more inconvenient, a bit more
| costly, and a bit more local, you create an environment where
| there's space for trust and humanity---values that don't
| scale.
| salomon812 wrote:
| I know the on-site is time-consuming and expensive, but so is
| firing people (at least in United States it is.) I've had a
| few on-site interviews where having them on-site made us
| realize we could never work with them. Given how much time
| they will spend with you, it's totally worth it to spend your
| resources on hiring.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Firing people isn't as expensive as people make it out to
| be. People vastly overestimate the chance of a lawsuit. And
| they overestimate the chance of a lawsuit that makes it far
| enough that it costs significant money even more.
|
| Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or
| misrepresentation) is almost always a better business
| decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.
| salomon812 wrote:
| It's not the lawsuit, it's about the time wasted as a
| manager and salary to the person as you work out if it's
| actually time to fire. Performance Improvement Plans, a
| bunch of back-and-forths. I'm not going to be the kind of
| person that fires quickly, so there's a bunch of sunk
| cost we have to take. Plus, fast firing creates a cooling
| effect among everyone there.
|
| And for what? To save money on hiring? Not worth it.
| floating-io wrote:
| The counter argument is that firing too slowly can be a
| serious drag on morale. Leaving your team to carry dead
| weight can really suck for the team.
|
| Ask me how I know... :)
| salomon812 wrote:
| Okay, so the original argument is about whether or not
| it's worth it to fly people out for an on-site. Hotel and
| airfare: $2000 absolute max. Salary at $100/hr for one
| month for me to figure out it's not going to work out,
| then pull the trigger to fire: $24,000.
|
| I mean, being a manager is hard, but putting in the time
| and money to hire and then putting in the time to make
| sure your team doesn't have a morale drag, it's worth it.
| floating-io wrote:
| The catch is that even in-person interviews are no
| panacea. I agree that it's worth the time to filter -- I
| wasn't really responding to that bit -- but from what
| I've seen, you have to be a _very_ good interviewer not
| to get a bad hire every so often.
|
| I often wonder how many hiring managers are actually good
| interviewers, in-person or not, but I digress...
|
| Seeing the truly bad hires dragged along to the detriment
| of the rest of the team is a sore spot for me, though. It
| happens way too often in my experience.
| chgs wrote:
| In person interview, or even coffee, filters out those
| who don't actually exist and those who are reading
| answers from a screen (chatgpt/person)
|
| Seems to be 90% of the problem reported on this post
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| $17k/month, not $24k?
|
| If you're paying people $290k a year, no kidding you
| should bring them in for an on-site interview?
| salomon812 wrote:
| Oh geez, I see my math mistake. But even at $5k/mo, the
| point still stands.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The fastest that I can possibly fire somebody is still
| _months_ from the date I choose to hire them.
|
| I decide they are the best candidate. A recruiter talks
| with them to negotiate compensation and they accept the
| offer. This takes a week at best, but can take weeks if
| they are choosing between multiple offers. Then they
| choose a start date. They've got a couple weeks at the
| old job, plus probably some time in between roles before
| they start. So 2-6 weeks waiting here. Then they join and
| go through the company-wide onboarding and training
| processes and set up their equipment. Another week.
|
| The first time I actually get to have them do any work is
| 4-10 weeks from the date I chose to offer them a job. It
| now takes me some time to realize they are hopeless and
| misrepresented themself on their resume. Three weeks
| would be an extraordinary outcome here, but it more
| likely that this takes 8+ weeks. Even if the actual
| process of firing them is instant once I've decided that
| it was a bad hire, I'm still out 3-5 months from the date
| I chose to hire them. Any other strong candidates I had
| in the pipeline now have other jobs and I am starting
| from scratch.
|
| That is incredibly expensive.
| salomon812 wrote:
| This. 100% this.
|
| I can't believe any company would look at this story
| (which I've heard variations on from multiple peers) and
| go: "we should save money by not flying candidates out
| for an on-site and use terrible AI tools to sort our
| candidates."
| charlie0 wrote:
| Just hire them as contractors first. Give them a 2-3
| month contract, if it doesn't work out, you just don't
| renew the contract.
| mattm wrote:
| That only works for desperate people. Sr people or people
| with other options would not take that risk.
| charlie0 wrote:
| But we've just established in this thread that even
| senior people are having difficulty findings jobs. This
| has nothing to do with desperation. Temp contract works
| both ways, if an employee doesn't like the company or
| finds another job within the 2-3 months, they are free to
| leave. This is more than fair.
| anon_e-moose wrote:
| Relationships between an individual and a corporation are
| fundamentally asymmetrical. They can only be made equal
| by heavily favouring the single human side.
| A1kmm wrote:
| Also imagine you are a company with a reputation for
| hiring people - inducing them to leave their current job
| - and then often dismissing them quickly afterwards.
|
| That would give many great prospective employees pause
| before applying to work there, because you are asking
| them to give up a good thing and take a chance on your
| company, without commitment.
|
| Far better to screen early.
| jjav wrote:
| > so is firing people (at least in United States it is.)
|
| There's _probably_ some country somewhere where it is
| easier to fire people than the US, but not sure where would
| that be.
|
| There are zero requirements to fire people in the US. No
| reason needed, no notice, no compensation, nothing.
|
| Most (if not all) other countries have varying levels of
| requirements, notice and compensation required to fire
| someone. In the US, nothing.
| salomon812 wrote:
| There's a difference between layoffs and firing. To fire
| an individual, the company must have documentation to
| ensure it's not a wrongful termination. Ironically, it's
| easier to lay-off 100 people because all you need to do
| is demonstrate their division's project is cancelled.
|
| And that documentation takes time as a manager, which
| costs money.
|
| But I admit not knowing completely because I haven't had
| to fire anyone yet. I have talked to legal about the
| process regarding someone not on my team.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a
| wrongful termination.
|
| Companies develop documentation processes as they get
| bigger for myriad reasons, but there is very little to
| worry about in the US in the way of terminating someone.
|
| The only adverse effect most times is increase in
| unemployment insurance premiums, if you do not have
| enough documentation to show you terminated for cause.
|
| Otherwise, 99.9% of the time, the terminated person can
| claim whatever kind of wrongful termination they want,
| they probably won't get anywhere via the courts.
| ghusbands wrote:
| What jjav is referring to is "at will" employment - in
| almost all US states, employees can be fired for almost
| any reason, with no recourse. So the fact you're saying
| that firing people is expensive and time-consuming in the
| US flies in the face of the actual legal environment
| there compared with most other relevant countries.
| jjav wrote:
| > To fire an individual, the company must have
| documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination.
|
| Not in the US. All you must do is tell them they're gone,
| walk them out the door and that's that. You must pay them
| any worked days not yet paid but that's all.
|
| Company HR departments sometimes establish more elaborate
| procedures for firing, but none of that is required by
| law, it's just internal company process.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I'm assuming you're talking about "at-will" states,
| coming from Canada I've heard there are also sane states.
| And even some at-will states have powerful unions no
| doubt.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| In most places, even with strong labour laws, you can
| layoff people for any reason in the first 30/60/90 days.
| And, the US has extremely weak labour laws. Usually, a
| month of severance for each year of service is customary,
| but probably not strictly required.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > When we want to talk about their solution in the interview,
| they "can't remember" how it works or why they picked their
| method.
|
| Sweet! That sounds like perfect signal for "used ChatGPT" to
| answer this question. So, you can send take home test,
| candidate sends reply (many from ChatGPT), then you do quick
| follow-up phone/video call to discuss the code. When you get
| the "signal" (should be quick!), then you immediately close
| the interview and move to the next candidate.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not
| 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually
| reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a
| long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen,
| terrible technical interview.
|
| I think it's very scary when even manual review is still
| yielding you results with horrible technical screenings. I
| wonder at that point if your technical review is very hard or
| specific (specific makes sense, yo did you you are looking for
| esoteric), or if it's just truly that polarized a market. Many
| are laid off and I imagine those qualified with such
| specialized knowledge and anchoring themselves instead of
| searching.
|
| >I also switched to only on-site interviews
|
| Kind of crazy. Not that I mind on-sites, but I haven't even
| heard a mention of on-site in the interview process since
| COVID. And I'm basically applying to any relevant position,
| locally or remotely. Just another curiosity.
| salomon812 wrote:
| > I think it's very scary when even manual review is still
| yielding you results with horrible technical screenings.
|
| It was bad. It was starting to affect my life outside of
| work.
|
| > I wonder at that point if your technical review is very
| hard
|
| My technical review is very hard, but it is directly
| applicable to the work I'm doing. And I've seen some
| candidates just do outstanding based entirely on their
| natural curiosity to look a bit deeper. I've been using a
| form of it for five years, so it's well reviewed.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Speaking as a contractor since 2017, I have given up using
| recruitment agencies in the UK to find work.
|
| I am likely the number one expert, in my field, globally. I
| apply for roles which specifically ask for an SME in my field.
| There is no question here of skills, and it is as certain as it
| can be without actually knowing that I am a light year ahead of
| all other applicants (because there is practically no one else
| actually qualified in my field). I'm not flapping my ego, this
| is how things look to actually be.
|
| I find now I never get even contacted by agencies.
|
| I _think_ they are not reading my CV /application, and I think
| this is happening because they are flooded - hundreds of
| applications in the first hour. They take the first person who
| looks good enough (and they're not good - there are practically
| no people in this field who actually have skills and
| experience, as opposed to just "I've worked with") and run with
| that, and then turn to filling the next contract.
|
| The upshot of this is that it doesn't matter how good you are,
| because your CV isn't going to be seen, not unless you apply in
| the first ten minutes or so.
|
| You have to play that game, and automate your applications, to
| be seen.
|
| So the question is, if you don't want to play that game, how
| now do you find companies who need skills?
| hbbvgn wrote:
| Obviously your field is in no demand at all. Otherwise, why
| would you be searching for employment if you are #1 in it?
| jorts wrote:
| They're a contractor.
| ben_w wrote:
| They gave a plausible reason why.
|
| Marketing is a skill all in itself.
|
| I know this because it is one which I lack, which in turn
| is one of two reasons I didn't go down the contracting
| path.
|
| AI is better at selling itself than at doing the thing.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| It's a type of work where companies normally want permanent
| employees.
|
| Also, it tends to be concentrated in the USA.
|
| However, I see one absolutely perfect contract about every
| month or two.
| lordnacho wrote:
| For something super niche, wouldn't you already know all the
| likely interested people? Why not just write to them
| directly?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| The UK job market is pretty screwy.
|
| I got made redundant back in March, applied for a bunch of
| stuff I matched profile for and maybe got 5-6 interviews off
| the back of it.
|
| The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract
| role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job
| to fall through because the client apparently never got
| budget signed off for the position.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| > The worst was the agency that lined me up for a contract
| role, got me to fill out all the paperwork only for the job
| to fall through because the client apparently never got
| budget signed off for the position.
|
| I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a lie.
|
| I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I
| think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as I
| do hear it.
|
| I've also had on three occasions agents call up after a day
| or two and tell "something about the budget, so the rate is
| now less than expected".
|
| In two cases I came to know the agency was simply lying,
| and was keeping the difference for itself, and I expect it
| to be true also in the third.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| I saw this on contract jobs which require a US security
| clearance. Maybe its frequent with single-customer
| projects.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > I could be wrong, but I think that might have been a
| lie.
|
| > I've heard it before, too, and I've come to doubt it; I
| think it too unlikely to be heard with such frequency as
| I do hear it.
|
| Maybe but it sounded plausible, this would have been a 3
| month contract with Moodys in Canary Wharf so not some
| rinkydink outfit. I could just be gullible but they
| gained nothing from stringing me along
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I had a recruiter basically hold onto me after I passed more
| than one technical screen, even though I clearly did get all
| the way through the hiring process at either role. They were
| maintaining a pool of competent people.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Did not get?
| riwsky wrote:
| If only they could crowd source/gpg web of trust such a
| designation.
|
| We solved this for email by aggregating spam/not spam ratings
| from tons of recipients. It'd be great if we could do that
| here.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| I'd be willing to sign someone's (possibly incomplete)
| background check if I worked with them for six months.
| Seb-C wrote:
| That's why I don't answer LinkedIn recruiters anymore, unless
| they can show me a clear opportunity that matches my profile.
|
| Every time I answered their bait and they "just wanted a
| quick phone call", it was clear that they only were
| interested in filling their database.
|
| Then I get spammed by them with irrelevant automated offers
| forever, unless I block them completely.
| umvi wrote:
| Same experience, we are getting absolutely flooded with
| hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants who are presumably
| using some sort of automation/AI to adapt their resumes to the
| position yet they are very weak when it comes time for a job
| challenge or tech screening
| cj wrote:
| > I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial
| technical screenings are still done remotely.
|
| Pro tip for anyone hiring engineers for remote positions:
|
| Tell the applicant that there "might be" an in person technical
| assessment, even if you know the process will be 100% remote.
|
| The amount of fake candidates at the moment is insane. The only
| thing that makes fake candidates self-select out is knowing
| there's the possibility that they will be required to be
| somewhere in person.
|
| Another trick I've used is saying "Oh, you live in Flint
| Michigan?? We happen to have an employee 20 minutes away, would
| you be open to meeting them?" And then suddenly they drop out
| of the interview process.
|
| There are a lot of foreign scammers exploiting the WFH trend in
| the US to the point where it drowns out real candidates. It's
| really bad.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I agree with this approach.
|
| In this field, unless you're hiring a junior engineer, you
| can have a reasonable expectation that a potential candidate
| will fly out for an interview even if it's a 100% remote job.
|
| If they refuse, well, there's a chance it's just because they
| can't afford to. The chance is far greater, though, that you
| dodged a bullet.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| To be clear, you expect candidates to fly out on their own
| dime just for the interview?
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| It's more about the reaction by obvious scammers.
| Teever wrote:
| You're talking about the entity trying to make people
| spend a nontrivial sum of money, time, and effort to get
| a job, right?
| dallasg3 wrote:
| What's the scam? Get a job they can't do...continue to
| get paid?
| cj wrote:
| 1 paycheck of just a few thousand dollars USD is a lot of
| money in other countries.
|
| The scam is hold on to the job for at least 1 paycheck.
| It's a expensive for companies to (legally) fire people,
| so if you get hired you typically can get at least a few
| grand even if you do zero work.
| michaelt wrote:
| Due to the wealth disparities involved, a month's Silicon
| Valley money is a years income for a scammer in a poor
| country.
|
| So just produce LLM-level code, make excuses, say you're
| learning the code base, get lots of help from colleagues,
| turn in mediocre work, and if you can hang on for three
| months before they fire you - that's decent money!
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Hell, you might even get promoted to management!
| dallasg3 wrote:
| > So just produce LLM-level code, make excuses, say
| you're learning the code base, get lots of help from
| colleagues, turn in mediocre work
|
| If they switched from doing all this to pressing people
| for estimates.
| roland35 wrote:
| I think the expectation is that any travel is paid for by
| the company. I've even had a per diem given to me to pay
| for meals as well.
| ghaff wrote:
| That was always the norm for me.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Not candidates for a position I'm hiring for, no.
|
| But positions that I'm applying to? I'm senior enough now
| that if I can't negotiate a paid-travel interview,
| clearly I either don't care enough and should cross that
| opportunity off my list, or it's tempting enough that I
| don't care.
| kortilla wrote:
| I can't imagine you actually work in the US in software and
| expect candidates to pay to fly out for an interview.
|
| I would withdraw from the process immediately if I
| encountered a company so cheap
| paradox460 wrote:
| Not only withdraw, but post publicly about said company.
| That's so beyond the pale it's gotta be a joke
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I've flown myself out for interviews at companies that
| were dream jobs. Think: sports industries, not insurance
| companies. They tended to be small and didn't have the
| resources to put together reservations (and would have
| taken months to figure out budgeting situations)
|
| Yes, I wanted to work for them so badly it was well worth
| the risk. Sometimes you see opportunities and want to pay
| for them.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >They tended to be small and didn't have the resources to
| put together reservations (and would have taken months to
| figure out budgeting situations)
|
| This makes no sense. If they can't afford a one-off line
| item like travel arrangements, how can they possibly make
| payroll reliably? You're describing either a company with
| no financial buffer, or one that's asking prospective
| applicants to subsidize them.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| To be honest the DC intern economy runs on rich parents
| willing to subsidize their kids rubbing shoulders with
| power.
| chgs wrote:
| This is a completely separate problem. Not as bad as in
| the U.K. but you still have the situation where wages low
| down in many industries are so poor you can't afford to
| take the job unless your parents subsidise you (either
| they live close enough to give you free housing or they
| pay your rent for the first 5 years)
|
| Once you "make it" then you have your six figure salary
| and are good to go.
|
| This is by design to ensure the right people get the
| jobs.
| gbear605 wrote:
| I agree, though you should pay. The scammers aren't going
| to take you up, because they know that the in person will
| catch them out.
|
| Obviously that's a financial burden to the company, but
| minimal compared to the long term costs to the company of
| an employee.
| biztos wrote:
| What do you mean by "can't afford to?"
|
| Because you can't possibly mean you think candidates are
| going to fly out for an interview at their own expense.
|
| Traditionally (i.e. pre-Covid) flying out a senior
| candidate was the standard signal that both sides were
| taking the process seriously. And for competitive hires,
| the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were
| taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for
| dinner were all very important indicators.
|
| I've been working remote since 2009 but I kinda miss the
| old ways.
| neilv wrote:
| > _the quality of the hotel and the restaurants they were
| taken to and the seniority of the people who joined for
| dinner were all very important indicators._
|
| I maybe once misinterpreted this. I was flattered to be
| having dinner with the well-regarded co-founder and two
| other highly-ranked people, but I thought the nice hotel
| and the fancy restaurant was just their everyday
| extravagant lifestyle.
|
| Despite being obviously unfamiliar and uncomfortable with
| the affluent lifestyle conventions, I did get the offer.
| Had I known that the nice restaurant and VIPs might be
| specifically to say that they valued me, I would've been
| more likely to accept the offer.
| rahkiin wrote:
| Positive reading: cannot afford the time (off from their
| current employer, away from family, ...)
| bovermyer wrote:
| Speaking from the point of view of an interviewee rather
| than an interviewer... I would pay for flying out to
| someplace for an in-person interview on my own dime, if I
| thought I would get a reasonable return on investment.
|
| If the interviewer _expected_ that I would pay for a
| cross-country (or cross-border) flight myself, that would
| cast a shadow on the opportunity for me.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I live in Europe and work for a company based in the USA.
|
| I probably wouldn't have had this job if the job listing
| had said that in-person interviews might be required,
| because if I read that back then I probably would have
| thought:
|
| 1. Flying all the way to the USA is expensive.
|
| 2. It takes a lot of time.
|
| 3. I'll be exhausted from the flight when I arrive.
|
| 4. There's probably a bunch of other people applying for
| this job. What's the point in flying all that way for a
| job I don't even know if I'll get hired for.
|
| In reality of course, there are other people working for
| that same company that live in Europe, including people
| in managerial roles, so if they had been the type of
| company to ask for an in-person interview they probably
| would have asked that I meet in a neighboring country.
| Not that I fly all the way to the USA for an interview.
|
| Luckily for me, the job listing never said anything about
| any in-person interviews so I never started thinking
| about what it would mean to maybe have to fly to the USA
| and therefore I happily proceeded to apply for the job
| and after a take-home assignment and a few remote
| interviews I got hired :)
|
| And now in present day, if I were to apply to a job in
| the current market I would probably apply even if the
| company was far away and mentioned that in-person
| interviews might be required. After all, it might not
| necessarily mean that long of a flight even. They could
| also have people working in countries near to you. And if
| the in-person interview does turn out to be too far away
| well you can always say no at that point. And in order to
| not waste too much of your own time you can keep applying
| and interviewing for other jobs in the meantime also, all
| the way up to when you finally get hired and have a
| contract for work signed.
| theonething wrote:
| You're reasoning doesn't make sense.
|
| You're saying that if an employer expected you to pay for
| the flight for an interview, that would be a red flag.
|
| But then you say that as an interviewer, you would be
| willing to pay for the flight for an interview (if you
| thought it would be reasonable ROI).
|
| The situation where you would be willing to pay for the
| flight implies that the employer would not pay for the
| flight (or else why would you pay for the flight?). So
| according to your own logic, that would raise a red flag
| (because the employer won't pay for the flight and
| expects you to). Then why would you be willing to pay for
| the flight to interview at an employer that is raising a
| red flag for you? Makes no sense at all.
| hansvm wrote:
| I have no idea _why_ they wrote that up, but the points
| do separately make sense. They're willing to pay for a
| flight in the abstract, just not in the current timeline
| where employers know they're supposed to pay for it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, flying someplace for interviews used to be pretty
| much the necessary stage for interviews after (maybe) a
| phone interview.
| brewdad wrote:
| On the employer's dime though.
| ghaff wrote:
| Correct.
| nosioptar wrote:
| > What do you mean by "can't afford to?"
|
| Cat boarding is pricey. I couldn't afford it right now,
| even for a very short trip. I doubt any job would offer
| to pick up the tab.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I presume your cat is like all other cats and shits
| inside the house.
|
| Get an automated food/water dispenser, save yourself some
| money.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| For seniors maybe but for juniors it's not rare to have
| to fly out in your own dime unfortunately.
|
| For finding my first job I had to pay for a few trips
| myself (flights and hotel).
| semiquaver wrote:
| Just to counter your anecdote with another of equal
| value, the only time I've ever traveled for an interview
| was for my first software dev job when I had zero
| experience. Flight and hotel was paid for by the company.
| I've never heard of anyone other than an employer paying
| for interview travel expenses.
| jland10 wrote:
| I have 15 YOE and I am a very qualified senior candidate,
| at least IMO.
|
| There is no world where I would take an interview that I
| had to fly out and stay at a hotel on my own dime. That
| would 100% sound like some sort of scam job to me.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| Seconded.
|
| Fly out and hotel yes, on own dime, no.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| I've seen the movie Dead Man. No way am I paying my own
| flight and lodging costs for a potential employer that
| has no accountability to me.
| cj wrote:
| Can't edit the comment anymore.
|
| But it's implied that the company would pay for all travel.
|
| The "gotcha" is that the company would also see the
| departing airport, which exposes foreign candidates posing
| as US citizens.
| runako wrote:
| > it's just because they can't afford to
|
| Wait, is this another norm that corporate America broke in
| the last couple of decades? Do people now expect to pay to
| fly to interviews? When did this happen?
| ponector wrote:
| I have a better idea: pay to get through every step of
| the recruiting process, with steep increase for each
| stage. Who paid the most - get the job!
| swang wrote:
| i saw a tiktok where the guy had his phone propped up but not
| in view of his webcam, and basically the interviewer's mic
| was going through his phone on some llm and the llm was
| spitting out responses for him to reply to the soft questions
| his interviewer was asking. the interviewer also made him
| "quickly" turn on his screen sharing so he could see that his
| computer didn't have anything assisting him.
|
| i haven't done an interview in a while, it's kinda crazy all
| the things people are pulling now for interviews on both
| sides. the process feels really broken.
| jakewins wrote:
| But like.. what happens after this supposed trick? I don't
| understand how they wouldn't just be fired after the first
| week if they can't actually do the job?
|
| Is it that they are applying to places where you don't pair
| program?
| neilv wrote:
| The reality is that most developers are bad at their
| jobs.
|
| Also, there's the "fake it till you make it" thinking.
| Mawr wrote:
| That's assuming the interview process tests for job
| performance with any sort of accuracy.
| wryoak wrote:
| In my ten years I've never worked at a place where
| pairing was the norm. I would love to experience that
| kind of culture
| rr808 wrote:
| Agreed, I've worked in a dozen firms now in many
| different teams and never seen anyone pairing.
| Chirael wrote:
| If it's remote, sometimes they'll pay someone else to do
| the work and pocket the difference. And/or the job may
| just be a ruse to get credentials in the org because it's
| an espionage target or to use as a launch point to go
| after an espionage target.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Most places have such chaotic onboarding that it would
| take a few months to truly get signal that the employee
| knew nothing.
| paxys wrote:
| Get hired. Go through onboarding. Collect your hiring
| bonus. Get a few weeks for your first project and fail at
| it. It gets written off as "they're just new here". Use
| some "unlimited" vacation time. Get more projects and
| keep failing at them. Get put on a new team because the
| eng director wants to give you another chance, and repeat
| the whole process. Eventually get put on a PIP. Show no
| improvement at the end of it. Accept a severance in
| exchange for "resigning" and signing an NDA/liability
| waiver.
|
| At a large company it is possible for this entire process
| to draw out for 3-6 months, and you collecting >$100K in
| in that period.
| the_snooze wrote:
| Signing bonuses almost always have clawback provisions,
| and I've never heard of someone getting severance from
| being fired for cause (performance). The only way I can
| see your scenario playing out is if the employee has some
| kind of real leverage over the company (e.g., family
| connections, political backing, etc.).
| paxys wrote:
| > Signing bonuses almost always have clawback provisions
|
| Written on a piece of paper, yes, but no company is
| actually going to sue you in court to recover it. It will
| cost them more than the value of the bonus to do so. And
| they know you have already spent the money.
|
| > I've never heard of someone getting severance from
| being fired for cause (performance)
|
| At large tech companies it is standard for people going
| through the PIP process to get the option of taking a
| severance and walking away (and waiving their right to
| sue the company) instead of waiting for their manager and
| HR to draw up the paperwork to fire them.
| ponector wrote:
| In most cases in corporations you are not interviewed by
| people you will be working with. Interview stage is a
| generic assessment by random people. Yo simply need to
| pass them. Also they are usually asking questions not
| related to the real job.
| etimberg wrote:
| Generally that's why the soft skills questions generally
| want a response in a STAR (situation, task, action, result)
| format. It's a lot harder to lie about a story and keep
| yourself consistent through a back and forth.
| koliber wrote:
| I do technical hiring for remote senior Java roles. I have
| not noticed a fake applicant problem. Can you share more
| about it?
|
| I see plenty of people with poor technical skills claiming to
| be senior. They seem to be real enough though.
| ikiris wrote:
| In fairness, its probably a lot harder to tell llm java
| code from human made java code.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| People who are serious about doing remote work are going to
| pass on anything that indicates hybrid. The simplest
| screening technique is to give instructions within the job
| post to submit via email rather than the job board form. Even
| before LLM slop became the norm people were spamming their
| resumes with Easy Apply.
| apitman wrote:
| What do you do when a real person says they'd be happy to
| meet your fake employee?
| cj wrote:
| were honest with the candidate about why we asked the
| question.
| la64710 wrote:
| What exactly you can do as a HM to make the life of a job
| seeker easy? I dare say nothing except to just make the quality
| of response better. Even after six rounds of interviews
| candidates who are not selected get not a single positive
| feedback and is treated like scrap with a soulless rejection.
| Beleive me as a job applicant I have zero sympathy for the
| corporates that hire me and I will use every thing at my
| disposal including AI to be more efficient in any way I deem
| fit. The job is just a business transaction to me and I don't
| care about your high and mighty lecture as a HM. GTFO.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment. I am curious how this person
| will fare when they return to the job hunt. Then, they will
| see how adversarial the process has become, even for highly
| qualified candidates. Suddenly, AI looks like a good idea to
| game some of the process.
| salomon812 wrote:
| Since I think I'm the person you're referencing, I really
| do want to give good feedback, but experience has shown
| it's really perilous (discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533899)
|
| And I know how adversarial the process has become. I have
| friends looking for jobs plus I try to get to know my
| candidates. And I have my recent hires and their stories.
|
| I want to make it a better process but I'm so burnt out
| figuring out how to make it better. Some people talk about
| professional 3rd party recruiters but I've been burned by
| those as well. When it comes to dating and hiring, both can
| be pretty brutal.
| twelve40 wrote:
| fwiw the article seems to describe a pretty mild type of
| automation to deal with tons of job ads and mundane stuff like
| cover letters that often get completely ignored by all sides,
| so why not try to automate that in good faith? didn't find
| anything about fake or cheating or misrepresenting one's skills
| in there.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| That's what I see, too. I see someone who is easy to manage,
| as opposed to someone leaking AI slop into production.
| charlie0 wrote:
| On-site interviews. This is not ideal, but is the way. As long
| as you're willing to shell out on my flight and cover the
| expenses, I'll fly anywhere for an interview.
| paulluuk wrote:
| > Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI,
| LLM, or data science.
|
| As someone who graduated in the field of AI (so it's on my
| resume), and is now working in the Data Science field, often
| with LLMs, this hurts. Although I'm not sure what role you're
| hiring for, so perhaps I wouldn't be in the list of candidates
| anyway.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| I worked on a side project that generated the AI resume and cover
| letter. I did a controlled experiment applying for jobs with the
| generic vs AI customized resume. The AI customized resume out
| performed the generic resume by 4x.
| https://customizedresumes.com/custom-vs-generic-resumes
| jdbdnej wrote:
| That's like comparing your "AI customized resume" to shitting
| on the hiring manager's desk
|
| You'll be shocked to find out which performed better!
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| What's so bad about a "generic" resume? I assume this means
| one that just honestly describes your experience rather than
| tailoring it to the job applied for to make it seem you're a
| better fit than you really are. It's up to the person
| (hopefully) reading your resume to decide whether you're
| enough of a potential fit to take to the next step (technical
| screening call?).
| jdhdbdbdn wrote:
| A cover layer is there to show how you fit the role. This
| cannot be done with a genetic cover layer
|
| Telling facts about yourself is done in the CV, not cover
| layer
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but the parent was talking about customized
| resumes, not cover letters. The cover letter of course
| needs to be customized, else it serves no purpose.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't want to hate on your side project, but the AI is
| clearly hallucinating things to fit the job description. In the
| ServiceNow result (first I saw with an interview/reject
| difference), the custom resume claims Jenkins experience, which
| is in the job listing but nowhere in either the AI base or
| generic resumes. Same for NinjaTrader and distributed systems +
| Scala + Github Actions, Upside and data engineering, BigTime
| and C#.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| The AI resume - was it a real human resume which was optimized
| in some way for the role specification, or was it generated
| from scratch for the role specification?
| trod1234 wrote:
| I have a very nuanced view on this.
|
| While I'm partially glad someone put this together and did this,
| having seen firsthand what an utter shit show that job hunting
| has been for the past two years with no offers, dismal conversion
| ratios (x100 -> x10000), and this with a decade of directly
| applied professional experience in highly regulated sectors, as
| well as having all my colleagues amazed at the competency of the
| work and solutions I put out (which has just been going to waste
| these past two years).
|
| I'm still only partial on this; however, because I don't think
| this does anything but make the problem anything but much worse
| in the long run for everyone.
|
| Individuals using this are simply just treading water with
| assistance while drowning others like them (without), and
| businesses will adapt to the flood of applications (by not even
| manually reviewing them) and bad actors will simply increase the
| noise.
|
| The people left out (those not using AI), will not find any work.
| No work, no prospects, despite education, investment, and direct
| experience; this is unacceptable and leads to unrest, and
| eventually something akin to 1776. Similar jobless conditions
| were present leading up through the 1760s prior to the American
| Revolution.
|
| I think it should come as no surprise that this is a hellscape
| when you depend on work to get food and other life necessities,
| and businesses that adapt sign themselves up for deflationary
| spirals of doom (not being able to find qualified applicants).
| People won't put up with it. You see people turning to crime in
| California over retail thefts, and then laws being passed making
| it more draconian, then violence becomes commonplace. Its a
| vicious cycle and its preventable if one is rational enough to
| see it.
|
| The process people have been using is not good at qualifying
| people, and really most of what people are looking in specific
| jobs is magical thinking that doesn't correspond to their actual
| requirements. Time is limited; on both sides.
|
| Now what is the underlying problem? It is that the same mechanism
| used by RNA interference in a cellular network, is being created
| by AI in a communications network from both sides of the
| participants creating interference so labor relations is
| sabotaged and fails from interference. I would not be surprised
| if many of those ghost jobs out there are actually digitally
| fabricated by China. They have the most to benefit from
| destroying the underpinnings of western society and driving
| people crazy in a pre-war footing setting.
|
| If people are unable to regulate themselves, and this first goes
| to the producers in an economy, then laws need to be made so that
| those unintelligent people don't destroy society for everyone
| else.
| a3w wrote:
| "part 1", I hope he will do a "part 20" or ex post look at ideas
| like - start at 500.000 USD/year salary - go down until you get
| positive responses
|
| and runs this script for ten years, even while employed.
| submeta wrote:
| I did this as well and landed a job in 3 months. The most tedious
| part before I automated the process was copying and pasting
| relevant infos into my cover letter, updating stuff, creating the
| word document for the cover letter and a copy of my resume in a
| folder for that company/offer. Also, I auto added job details to
| a Notion table (a Kanban board) where I tracked open
| applications.
|
| The whole process took me previously half an hour to 45 minutes.
| Afterwards it took me less then 2 minutes. I didn't apply for
| more, but could write an application in a fraction of time. And
| then focus on researching the company and the job.
|
| Chatgpt made the whole process super smooth. We live in wonderful
| times.
| raminf wrote:
| I remember talking to techie friends about this a couple years
| ago. With the advent of AI screeners, it would only be a matter
| of time before candidates figured out how to craft and rewrite
| not just their cover letter, but their whole resume to
| semantically best-fit a job listing. It could even A/B test for
| the best response.
|
| Everyone laughed and said it was too much work. I predicted it
| would be a YC company before long.
|
| Only a matter of time before AIs will be talking to AIs to have a
| technical interview and negotiate salary.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| For hiring managers, if you getting a flood of resumes here is a
| possible solution for a filter: unpopular things and manual
| instructions.
|
| 1. Manual instructions. On the application submission page
| mention something like: _All resumes or cover letters must copy
| and apply the following statement or will be dropped from
| consideration._ This tests that candidates actually read and
| follow the instructions and rejections can be automated with a
| simple string search.
|
| 2. For that 1% of candidates that do follow instructions that
| during the technical filter phase of interviewing they will be
| required to do something unpopular as a demonstration of prior
| coding experience. In my case as a JavaScript developer it was
| walking the DOM from one node location to another. I was able to
| filter 22 candidates down to two and that doesn't include the
| larger number that dropped out.
| darkwater wrote:
| The first one would be solved just as easily by an LLM though.
| internetter wrote:
| > they will be required to do something unpopular as a
| demonstration of prior coding experience. In my case as a
| JavaScript developer it was walking the DOM from one node
| location to another.
|
| Is this open book? I can walk a DOM in many ways. With my eyes
| closed, I could hack something using `childNodes` and
| `nextSibling`, but the best way would be the the TreeWalker
| class, which I have previously used, though I couldn't write a
| working implementation on a whiteboard without briefly
| consulting MDN for a refresher. If you're just filtering
| candidates based on if they've memorized the ever-growing web
| standard, you're going to lose a lot of good candidates.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Yes, that is the entire point of why something like that is a
| good filter. It is stupendously simple and trivial to
| demonstrate live in code. The REPL of the browser console
| even helps with suggestions. Yet, 95% of people writing
| JavaScript would rather commit seppuku than try it live
| during an interview.
| binary132 wrote:
| Congratulations, you are part of the problem.
| neilv wrote:
| It's lucky for some people that I'm not hiring right now, because
| I'd probably perma-denylist anyone I caught sending me LLM-
| generated text, especially for something that's supposed to be
| one-to-one, like a cover letter/email.
|
| That is such a obvious imminent plague upon society, in so many
| ways, and the only thing I can do is nip the few buds that are
| within my reach.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I feel the same way, but it's actually not easy to detect LLMs.
| Anyone who experimented with writing styles and been using them
| for a while, can easily create texts that are indistinguishable
| from a real person.
|
| Fine tune a small LLM to your past emails, cover letters,
| resumes and etc. then go ham.
| hb-robo wrote:
| Right, and the last thing you want is false negatives here.
| hbbvgn wrote:
| If you automate your application process, you risk getting a job
| you do not want O_o
|
| Talking to a company is mainly to determine if you want to work
| there so I really don't get why you would want to automate it
| ramon156 wrote:
| Hate how this has become the job market. I finished my degree in
| July but was only able to find a job in November. Might not sound
| like a lot but it took almost 50 manual job applications, all
| with varying experiences.
|
| I couldn't imagine being a manager having to sift through so much
| garbage just to find a candidate that's worth their salt.
| TSUTiger wrote:
| Roughly 15 years ago when I entered the job market, I spammed
| my resume to 36 roles within a single company so 50 doesn't
| sound too bad.
|
| It was a Fortune 10 company so plenty of roles and I eventually
| got in.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I graduated from a second tier uni in 2001. It was hell finding
| my first real job (more than two years). I had to move across
| the country to find it. After that, no one ever cared about my
| shit uni again!
| some_random wrote:
| This is one of the big reasons why it's so hard to get an
| interview these days, it's pretty lame.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| This is basically the email spam problem all over again.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| This is blogspam - the author opened the blog barely a few days
| ago and filled it with content that at the very least is AI
| "assisted" content.
| jpcom wrote:
| >Automated job application process
|
| And, just to confirm, you got a job?
| clippy99 wrote:
| I love the system he built, but the kicker would be to enable
| auto-filling and submitting on the various career portals. I
| question the efficacy of submitting job applications via email in
| 2024 (but perhaps I'm in the wrong industry.)
| MrMember wrote:
| I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring
| managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the
| current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking
| for a job what _should_ I be doing?
|
| I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six
| months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev
| experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I
| haven't used LLMs at all in my resume, cover letters, etc. I only
| apply to jobs that I believe I meet the requirements for and that
| I would likely accept if given an offer. How do I signal that 1)
| I am a real person 2) I really do have the job experience and
| skills listed on my resume, and 3) I really am interested in the
| specific job I'm applying for. Because doing this my hit rate has
| been abysmal. I've had maybe 10-12 initial phone screens (never
| an issue, I easily make it past these). Past that I've had maybe
| 3-4 interviews that get into the later rounds. From that I've had
| zero offers.
|
| So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me
| nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun"
| approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I
| vaguely fit the requirements? The only other way I've seen
| suggested to signal that I'm a real person with real experience
| is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I
| almost never do).
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Did you get (or asked for) feedback from the interviews you
| failed? Hiring managers / recruiters are sometimes quite
| transparent on this front.
|
| Ask them if it is possible to re-apply in a few months.
|
| Show your resume to friends and colleagues you trust and ask
| for honest feedback.
| yosito wrote:
| Personally, I've just been getting generic rejection
| responses from no-reply email addresses. There's no way to
| get feedback. My guess is that they're just sending out mass
| rejections for anyone except a few candidates they've
| selected to interview, and the other 1000 applications just
| get automatically tossed.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I was just hiring for an associate role recently and we got
| more than 800 applicants within a day, and our recruiter
| had a short list within a few days. If we gave everyone
| individualized feedback we wouldn't do anything else for
| months. You might need to pay someone to look at the roles
| you're applying for and the resumes you're sending in for
| the kind of feedback you're expecting.
| hansvm wrote:
| Did more than a few ask for feedback?
| yosito wrote:
| I'm not the OP, but I've paid many people for feedback,
| and I actually have a very strong resume when a human
| being looks at it. I suspect that I'm being filtered out
| automatically because I don't meet the parameters of some
| automated system, probably on some relatively arbitrary
| metric set by the recruiter or hiring manager to filter
| the thousands of applications they receive.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your
| job?
|
| Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev
| that is not open to this technology...
| MrMember wrote:
| >If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your
| job?
|
| My job isn't writing resumes and cover letters.
|
| > Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a
| dev that is not open to this technology...
|
| lmao this is exactly the issue. There are hiring managers in
| here saying they're trying to filter out people using LLMs in
| applications and you're telling me to use LLMs.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a
| dev that is not open to this technology...
|
| The person you're replying to is a senior, not junior
| candidate.
|
| For junior devs who are still learning, LLMs are a great
| force multiplier that help them understand code faster and
| integrate new things.
|
| For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might
| save a couple hours per week, on a good week. I would
| consider extremely heavy LLM use a much larger red flag for a
| senior level position, than not using them at all.
| bb88 wrote:
| Github copilot still sucks for writing complex code
| (algorithms or database queries, e.g.). Or trying to do
| unpopular things (like custom electronics using particular
| micros and driver chips).
|
| For unit tests, it's a godsend. Particularly if you write
| one unit test, and then it can write another in the style
| you wrote.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| LLMs can't write unit tests. They can't even tell what
| you intend. If your code is already correct, you don't
| need the unit test, if it's not, the LLM can't write the
| unit test. If you thing an LLM can write tests for you,
| you can be replaced by an LLM.
| lukan wrote:
| I don't think the concept here is blindly taking the
| output of the LLM and calling it a day. One can test, the
| test.
| bb88 wrote:
| I've had about 33% luck with unit tests coming out
| perfect. Usually the issues are small problems that are
| easily fixed though.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > If your code is already correct, you don't need the
| unit test.
|
| I don't know where you work where code is written once
| and is never changed again, but enjoy it while it
| lasts...
| bb88 wrote:
| Worse is when a protocol or shared state condition is
| modified.
|
| E.g. suddenly some fresh out of college know-it-all sent
| crap into your function that you weren't expecting. Then
| he went to management to blame you for writing such
| shitty code.
|
| Thing is you wrote unit tests around that code and the
| shitty know-it-all deleted them rather than changing them
| when he modified the code
|
| This is why management needs to understand code.
| josephg wrote:
| What? Is that a real example? Are you seriously working
| with people who delete your tests, misuse your code then
| complain about you to management?
|
| Is your workplace filled with high school students? I've
| never seen anything so petty and immature in my
| professional career. I hope management told them to grow
| up.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Recently on HN there was a thread debating the utility of
| having required code reviews for PRs.
|
| I'm firmly on team "require a coworker to say okay before
| merging", and this is exactly why.
| WD-42 wrote:
| > if your code is already correct, you don't need the
| unit test
|
| This is a hot take. I'm 100% not onboard with.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Correct. Unit tests are not only for the current version
| of the code, but also to prevent regressions in future
| versions of the same code.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| IMO, the main use case for LLMs in unit tests is through
| a code completion model like Copilot where you use it to
| save on some typing.
|
| Of course, there are overzealous managers and their
| brown-nosing underlings who will say that the LLM can do
| everything from writing the code itself and the unit
| tests, end-to-end, but that is usually because they see
| more value in toeing the line and follow the narratives
| being pushed from the C-level.
| jcutrell wrote:
| I've been in the industry for something like 15 years. I've
| been using LLMs to help me create the stuff I always wanted
| but never had time to make myself. This is how LLMs can be
| used by seniors to great effect - not just to cut time off
| tasks.
| globalnode wrote:
| Same here (not in the industry though). I recently got a
| personal project done with the help of LLM's that I
| otherwise wouldnt have had the time or energy to research
| properly if it wasnt for the time savings.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've done so many tiny hobby projects lately that scratch
| 10+ year itches, where I've said so many times "I wish
| there was an application for this, but I'm too lazy to
| sit down and learn some Python library and actually do
| it." Little utilities that might have taken me a day to
| bring up a bunch of boilerplate, study a few docs, write
| the code switching back and forth from the docs, and then
| debugging. Today that utility takes me 30 minutes tops to
| write just using Copilot and it's done.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I kind of feel like it is the inverse in many ways.
|
| As an experienced engineer, I know how to describe what I
| want which is 90% of getting the right implementation.
|
| Secondly, because I know what I want and how it should
| work, I tend to know it when I see it. Often it only takes
| a nudge to get to a solution similar to what I already
| would have done. Usually it is just a quick comment like:
| "Do it in a functional style." or "This needs to have
| double check locking around {something}."
|
| When I am working in the edge of my knowledge I can also
| lean on the model, but I know when I need to validate
| approaches that I am not sure satisfy my constraints.
|
| A junior engineer doesn't know what they need most of the
| time and they usually don't understand which are the
| important constraints to communicate to the model.
|
| I use an LLM to generate probably 50-60% of my code?
| Certainly it isn't ALWAYS strictly faster, but sometimes it
| is way way faster. On of the other things that is an
| advantage is it requires less detailed thinking at the
| inception phase which allows my do fire off something to
| build a class, make a change when I am in a context where I
| can't devote 100% of my attention to it and then review all
| the code later, still saving a bunch of time.
| margalabargala wrote:
| I'm not making numbers up here; the controlled studies
| that have been done agree with me.
|
| See here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstrac
| t_id=4945566
|
| Worse/less experienced developers see a much greater
| increase in output, and better and more experienced
| developers see much less improvement. AI are great at
| generating junior level work en masse, but their output
| generally is not up to quality and functionality
| standards at a more senior level. This is both what I've
| personally observed and what my peers have said as well.
|
| Out of curiosity, which LLM code tool do you use?
| cloverich wrote:
| interesting paper and lots of really well done bits. As a
| senior dev that uses LLM extensively: This paper was
| using copilot in 2023 mostly. I used it and chatgpt in
| that timeframe, and took chatgpts output 90% of the time;
| copilot was rarely good beyond very basic boilerplate for
| me, in that time period. Which might explain why it
| helped jr devs so much in the study.
|
| Somewhat related, i have a good idea what i can and
| cannot ask chatgpt for, ie when it will and wont help.
| That is partially usage related and partially dev
| experience related. I usually ask it to not generate full
| examples, only minimal snippets which helps quite a bit.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Another factor not brought into consideration here may be
| that there are two uses of "senior dev" in this
| conversation so far; one of them refers to a person who
| has been asked to work on something they're very familiar
| with (the same tech stack, a similar problem they've
| encountered etc.) whereas the other one has been asked to
| work on something unfamiliar.
|
| For the second use case, I can easily see how effectively
| prompting a model can boost productivity. A few months
| ago, I had to work on implementing a Docker registry
| client and I had no idea where to begin, but prompting a
| model and then reviewing its code, and asking for
| corrections (such as missing pagination or parameters)
| allowed me to get said task done in an hour.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| So I often use Github Copilot at work usually with
| o1-preview as the LLM. This often isn't "autocomplete"
| which generally uses a lower end model, I almost
| exclusively use the inline chat. That being said.. I do
| also use the auto-complete a lot when editing. I might
| create a comment on what I want to do and have it auto-
| complete, that is usually pretty accurate, and also works
| well with me since I liked Code Complete comment then
| implement method.
|
| For example I needed to create a starting point for 4
| langchain tools that would use different prompts. They
| are initially similar but, I'll be deverging them. I
| would do something like copy the file of one. select all
| then use the inline chat to ask o1 to rename the file,
| rip out some stuff and make sure the naming was
| internally consistent. Then I might attach additional
| output schema file and the maybe something else I want it
| to integrate with and tell it to go to town. About 90% of
| the work is done right.. then I just have to touch up.
| (This specific use case is not typical, but it is an
| example where it saved me time, I have them scafolded out
| and functional while listening to a keynote and in-
| between meetings.. then in the laster day I validated it.
| There were a handful of misses that I needed to clean
| up.)
| mp05 wrote:
| > For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that
| might save a couple hours per week, on a good week.
|
| I'm an industrial engineer who writes software and
| admittedly not a "senior dev", I guess, but LLMs help me
| save _much_ more than just a few hours of week when
| crapping out a bunch of Qt /Python code that would cause my
| eyes to glaze over if I had to plod through it.
| condiment wrote:
| The flag you want to see from a senior is reasoned examples
| of how they use it effectively. Ask for stories about
| successes and failures. By now, everyone has some.
| sibeliuss wrote:
| You've got this completely backwards. A Jr with an LLM is a
| recipe for disaster. They don't know the tech, and have no
| clue what the LLM is spitting back. They copy code into the
| abyss.
|
| Meanwhile, a sr with an LLM is a straight up superpower!
| margalabargala wrote:
| Here's a recent study showing junior devs seeing far
| higher gains from LLMs than seniors: https://papers.ssrn.
| com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| It is the opposite. Juniors can only solve toy tasks with
| chatgpt.
|
| Someone with experience can first think through the
| problem. Maybe use chatgpt for some resarch and fresh up
| your memory first.
|
| Then you can break up the problem and let chatgpt implement
| the stuff instead typing everything. Since you are smart
| and experience you know what chunks of code it can write
| (basically nothing new. only stuff you could copy pasta
| before if you had somehow access to all code in the
| internet yourself).
|
| TLDR: It is way faster to use it. Especially for
| experienced programmers. Everything else is just ignorant.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| What is consensus at the end, I have heard people say that
| is good for seniors but for juniors is detrimental.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| >If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your
| job?
|
| I downvoted your post because this is a complete nonsequitur.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| If you reply to a comment I believe it cancels your
| downvote.
| lukan wrote:
| For the ranking order. The post itself will still get
| greyed out, or flagged after enough downvotes.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| That is so mean. I actually cried for 5 minutes.
| RobRivera wrote:
| What company have you hired developers for?
| 77pt77 wrote:
| LLMs just lie way too much.
|
| Like completely fabricate what they need for a plausible
| answer from thin air.
|
| As of now they do more harm than good.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Doesn't seem like your resume or approach in applying to open
| positions is your problem. It seems like you're not connecting
| well with the interviewers in some way.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| And how does one know how to connect with interviewers when
| every individual is different, and when there is no feedback
| from the interviewer's side?
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Some people are able to do that subconsciously. If your not
| one of them you should probably learn some basics in how to
| read body language.
|
| Then you should also apply some mirroring. I wouldnt overdo
| it with body language, but mirroring with spoken language
| can be quite powerful (and is more stealthy). Normally
| there are many different ways in our language to express an
| idea. Try to do it in a way that is natural to your
| counterpart.
|
| Look at what you can infer from the appearance of the
| interviewer. Maybe you can also find out more about him
| before the interview. What generation does he belong to? Is
| he conservative/progressive/whatever? What programming
| languages is he familiar with? ...
|
| Does he look rather old and conservative? - Maybe dont talk
| about your love for the newest tech hype. Put an emphasis
| on your good cs fundamentals.
|
| Is he a Java programmer? - use the word interface
|
| Is he a Haskell programmer? - use the word typeclass
|
| Is he a nice guy? - try to be nice
|
| Is he not a nice guy? - dont be too nice
|
| etc...
| belinder wrote:
| I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the
| amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me.
| I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same
| generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking
| at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link.
|
| Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving
| for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if
| they had something in them that made it seem like a real
| person, e.g. a personal hobby section. I think a lot of people
| discourage writing that but I argue it makes you stand out in
| an ocean of fake and copy pasted junk.
| hibikir wrote:
| And that's not even enough: A few weeks ago I had to
| interview someone who had what appeared to be a realistic
| profile. Everything that came out of their mouth was from
| chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when
| they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and
| how everything we said was being read in.
|
| At this point every remote internet checklist has to include
| checks for humanity, because the percentage of straight out
| fakes is too high. Even the questions to ask me at the end
| were GPT provided.
| silisili wrote:
| Start every interview asking the candidate how many rs are
| in strawberry.
| lukan wrote:
| Apparently outdated, ChatGPT 3.5 answers correctly here.
| silisili wrote:
| Try raspberry? Both fail for me, but I'm not a paid user.
| lukan wrote:
| I don't pay either (anymore), but is correct as well.
| (Via chatgot android app)
| wisemang wrote:
| From iOS app, paid 4o
|
| > There are 4 Rs in "razzleberry."
| vijucat wrote:
| Follow up with, "Please check again"
| the_af wrote:
| ChatGPT-4 (free) on Android just told me:
|
| > There are two "R"s in the word "cranberry."
| lukan wrote:
| Same for me.
|
| Good example to illustrate how LLMs work, if it is not
| correct for cranberry, but correct for raspberry or
| strawberry.
| hackernewds wrote:
| you're not on 3.5 anymore
| lukan wrote:
| Well, I use the free version and just checked, but I
| cannot even see what model is used.
|
| Either way, if my cheap standard unpaid ChatGPT version
| gives the correct result, I don't think it counts as a
| valid catch anymore.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Anyone affected by this and in the US might consider
| calling or writing to their congressman. The time to do
| that is now when the demand is high to bolster jobs but low
| for excessive laws. Nobody innocent is going to be wronged
| if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put
| a stop to.
|
| The fake job applicants are only siphoning resources from
| the economy at the high expense of all other parties
| involved. The ones who are getting screwed the most are the
| applicants, some of whom are concerned about making ends
| meet and getting auto-rejected constantly despite decades
| of experience. No one should stand for it.
| roenxi wrote:
| If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire. As far
| as I can tell the advocacy is for either companies to be
| empowered to sue people who apply to work with them
| (seems like madness) or to set up a situation where the
| government enforcement arm pro-actively goes out and
| harasses unemployed job seekers. Either way that sounds
| like a recipe for disaster for unemployed persons.
| belinder wrote:
| AI has made hiring especially in technical industry an
| absolute shit show. I agree with parent comment that
| ideally government could do something about it but agree
| with you on how would you even do that. Maybe if they
| required all the job board companies like indeed and
| glassdoor and LinkedIn to properly vet candidates else
| those companies would be fined, but it's hard to imagine
| a solution that doesn't also hurt unemployed legit human
| beings
| aperrien wrote:
| And then you run into problems on the corporate side:
| fake job listings to build up resume databases for
| comparison shopping of applicants. Regulations in this
| area should have to cut both ways.
| chefandy wrote:
| This the end game that Silicon Valley created. An
| automation arms race between two competing groups that
| were initially trying to save a little time or cut down
| on staffing but escalated it to the point where the
| default approach would be considered unforgivably
| assholish 15 years ago, people that don't buy into it at
| least somewhat are drowning in bullshit, and nobody's
| happy-- _but on paper_ everybody's got record
| productivity!
|
| With LLMs, this same exact scenario is playing out in
| other realms. Look at writing and publishing. Sure you're
| on top of the world before everyone else catches up, but
| when they do, there's now just a boilerplate of
| exponentially expanding bullshit and counter-bullshit
| that everyone has to circumvent to do _anything._
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| This has already happened long ago with Google search
| results. The first tier of results is won by reasonably
| well-funded entities that provide a legitimate service,
| and have the means to optimize the signals feeding the
| search rankings, putting them higher than the next tier.
|
| The second tier of search results tends to be dominated
| by imitators that don't really add anything of value (SEO
| spam, blog posts that tell you how to write a for loop in
| Ruby despite knowing full well that the reader already
| had no problem finding that information, etc.)
|
| Then finally at the bottom are the little guys who try
| their best, but haven't learned yet that it's a waste of
| time to try to self-publish any content because there's
| too much actual spam masquerading as content, and Google
| can't tell the difference.
|
| The search results effectively became a list of content
| approved by a single publisher (even if automated) rather
| than a melting pot of freely-expressed ideas.
|
| I sincerely hope that we can prevent the similar
| nullification of the software developer's career
| accomplishments as carrying any weight, but I am starting
| to have doubts. If it even goes as far as the erosion of
| incentives to accomplish things, then we may actually end
| up needing that AI to do the work for us, as there will
| be few people left who give a shit.
| chefandy wrote:
| Yes, that's a good example, and I share your concerns.
|
| As an aside, I shudder thinking about what a heavily
| 'SEO'd' LLM experience would be like.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Yea, I couldn't tell if the original comment was satire
| but the number of phishing ads that existed in the past
| for bogus positions, to pool candidates for later hiring,
| to farm market rate data, and who knows what else...
| makes me have very little empathy for the employer side.
|
| It's been a mess for awhile due to economies of scale
| benefiting the hiring side to manipulate and abuse the
| market. The fact it's become more affordable for job
| seekers to do a bit of the same is just ironic.
| mjevans wrote:
| I would REALLY love if job postings had to go through a
| government clearing house. Only real jobs get posted.
| Only real applicants can apply.
|
| Bonus: jobs would have to be classified according to a
| single government standard, so it should be possible to
| search for a good job match by at least limiting the
| field and (allowed) location(s).
| chii wrote:
| making the jobs application (and hiring) market a single
| market will make it more efficient, and cut out a lot of
| middlemen inefficiencies. I like it.
|
| You as a hiring company can pay to have a 2nd website,
| but posting it to the gov't portal is a requirement. The
| information, such as conditions, salary (range),
| experience, location etc, are all in standardized format.
| If you're found to be lying, it's a federal crime
| (because of fraud and interstate commerce for example).
|
| Applicants also must have gov't issued ID (such as social
| security), so you cannot be fake.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| If you look at some of the problems of USA Jobs, you may
| not actually want this.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire.
|
| It's actually a constant them on HN to imagine that
| passing laws will magically make problems disappear. The
| realities of enforcing the law or even identifying
| perpetrators are imagined to be the easy part.
| dgfitz wrote:
| People seem to want to pass laws that treat the symptoms,
| not the cause.
|
| "You keep getting the stomach bug. Here take this, it'll
| calm your stomach. No no, you can keep eating that
| expired cheese, it's all good"
| ddalex wrote:
| > you can keep eating that expired cheese
|
| Why are you anti French ?
| dgfitz wrote:
| My oldest kid hate experiencing vomit, she transferred
| that on to me as a "gross gross thing" and it was the
| first thing that came to mind.
|
| I'm a huge fan of French onion soup.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Ah, the ol' "manufacture an argument that wasn't made,
| then shoot it down it in front of an audience" trick. I
| suppose I'll be advocating for the outlawing of those
| kinds of comments, and anything else deemed as
| misinformation next.
|
| A more realistic scenario would involve no enforcement by
| the government (except perhaps in extreme cases, like
| with the 'spam king' back in the day). ChatGPT's terms of
| service would already cover it under the "shall not be
| used for illegal activity" language, and it would be just
| enough of a deterrence to benefit a larger number of
| people without creating new problems. But I wasn't
| advocating for a specific solution, just a call to a
| congressman. Despite their faults and flaws, they're
| probably still going to do a better job than I am at
| making the call, or maybe it won't even be a priority for
| them and they'll do nothing.
| mavelikara wrote:
| I think the GP is suggesting that making, distributing,
| and profiting from such software should be made illegal.
| If an engineer can make this software, they are probably
| a good fit for many jobs in the market.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| I'm suggesting that you should call your congressman and
| say that getting a job is a problem right now and
| automated applicants could be contributing to it (we
| don't know the full story, but making noise about it
| might at least inspire some investigation by those who
| have the ability to get the facts). I don't think it
| should be a crime to automate a job application, and I
| have no problem with it from an ethical point of view
| long as the application is made truthfully and in good
| faith by a reasonably qualified applicant and there is
| real intent to follow up on it.
|
| But if that isn't the case, there's no reasonably good
| safety mechanism to mitigate the massive amount of harm
| that a determined bad faith actor could cause to the
| economy.
|
| But making false claims about your work history (as could
| be the case with the one using ChatGPT to answer
| questions) is a problem, isn't it? And it's wonderful to
| see these rebuttals made against a hypothetical something
| that already happened.
| https://www.lawdepot.com/resources/business-
| articles/legal-c...
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| > situation where the government enforcement arm pro-
| actively goes out and harasses unemployed job seekers
|
| Why wouldn't this be a desired outcome? Unemployment
| doesn't give a carte blanche to send spam.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made
| into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to.
|
| Good luck.
|
| The applicants doing fake job applications do not care
| about your laws at all. Many might be in foreign
| countries. They might plan on applying with stolen
| identities.
|
| Making a law isn't going to change a thing. Even if you
| did, what company is going to spend resources tracking
| down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a
| job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore
| in their backlog forever?
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| > Making a law isn't going to change a thing. Even if you
| did, what company is going to spend resources tracking
| down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a
| job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore
| in their backlog forever?
|
| I missed the part where I included that or any strategy
| on how it would be used as a deterrent. Clearly that's
| not how it is done as you pointed out, but you make it
| seem as if laws have no value at all, which is a rather
| naive take. Fraud is already illegal FYI.
|
| I don't have a solution, other than to make a call to the
| people who are elected to find those solutions, if they
| are able to. If they can't or won't, then it is a good
| thing that phone call was free anyway.
| saagarjha wrote:
| How exactly does someone who applies with a stolen
| identity get anything out of doing so?
| Tteriffic wrote:
| Absolutely correct, just making laws themselves have
| little effect over anything. Enforcement is the key. For
| most laws that step is an afterthought. But there are
| creative ways to do it.
| ddalex wrote:
| > applicants doing fake job applications ... stolen
| identities
|
| What I don't get is what's the economic incentive for
| this behaviour
| redmajor12 wrote:
| But this chaos fits Big Tech's claim that there are not
| enough American workers, so they can then turn around and
| onshore H1Bs from the hiring manager's hometown back in
| the old country.
| geye1234 wrote:
| Hundreds of comments, and this is the first one that
| mentions perhaps the primary root cause of the situation.
| brookst wrote:
| Do you work in tech? Have you ever seen any pressure to
| create LLM-driven chaos with the goal of increasing
| support for encouraging immigration in future years?
|
| It's too elaborate of a Rube Goldberg strategy to take
| very seriously. Companies struggle to achieve simple,
| clear, short-term goals in tight-knit, well-aligned
| teams. Ain't nobody got the skill to pull off that level
| of conspiracy.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| There often isn't a nefarious scheme. Humans are better
| at spotting patterns than they are at mass coordination.
| prmoustache wrote:
| then move abroad and get your dream job there?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Huh? Is this a 'love it or leave it' comment? I genuinely
| don't understand what you're meaning to say here.
| prmoustache wrote:
| What I mean is unless your ideal is autarky or USSR under
| Joseph Stalin, it is hypocritical or ingenuous to expect
| having a market where you can sell goods and services
| worldwide but not allowing workers applying and getting
| jobs worldwide for same companies. That is called free
| market.
|
| So if you happen to think you are missing jobs because
| they are given to people living in another country, you
| also have the choice to play by the same rules, relocate
| there and apply for the same job. Or ask for a lower
| salary where you already are to be competitive. This is
| fair competition.
| bdangubic wrote:
| ha lets see...
|
| _In economics, a free market is an economic system in
| which the prices of goods and services are determined by
| supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such
| markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of
| government or any other external authority._
|
| if you think america is "free market" I have some Enron
| stock to sell to you :)
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT
| It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they
| shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and
| how everything we said was being read in.
|
| Wouldn't you notice a lag between your question and the
| candidate's answer if the candidate had to type your
| question into chatGPT?Or does the candidate use some
| software/tool with transmits your question to chatGPT
| directly?
| bdangubic wrote:
| there is no lag, voice to text to chatgpt then read the
| answer
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Thank you. (Haven't been up to date with the hype.)
| tugu77 wrote:
| > At this point every remote internet checklist has to
| include checks for humanity,
|
| I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an
| interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to
| be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in
| reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with
| the person and would want to work with them. If some
| ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken
| anyway and everybody joining your company can expect
| colleagues selected by this sub-par process.
| davidclark wrote:
| > If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is
| broken anyway
|
| This is pretty unfair and seems like victim-blaming when
| we have companies spending billions of dollars to create
| these programs with the specific intent of trying to pass
| the Turing test.
| brookst wrote:
| There's a bit of an echo chamber on HN where people
| convince each other that all LLM-generated text is easy
| to identify, riddled with errors, and "obviously"
| inferior to all real-human writing. Because _some_ LLM
| writing fits those criteria and is easily identified,
| these folks are convinced they can identify _all_ LLM
| writing and anyone who can't must be a dunce.
| tugu77 wrote:
| I didn't claim anything about identifying writing. That's
| a strawman. I'm talking about humans talking to each
| other. Even if it's in a zoom call. Any interview process
| that doesn't include that is broken, and that's my claim.
| Echo chamber or not.
| brookst wrote:
| Apologies for misunderstanding you, then. Agreed that
| human to human is critical, especially for identifying
| culture fit (not homogeneity of course, just interaction
| styles like openness, etc).
|
| I do think people cheat video interviews with LLM help,
| but in-person should always be required anyway, even if
| it's via proxy ("meet with a colleague from our Madrid
| office").
| tugu77 wrote:
| How widespread is LLM cheating during video interviews
| these days? Honest question.. How do people even do it?
| Let an LLM app listen in and suggest avenues of
| discussion and lists a bunch of facts on the side to
| spice things up?
|
| Even if that's the case, isn't it just a matter of
| conversing in a way that the LLM can't easily follow?
| tugu77 wrote:
| An interviewer is a "victim"? Maybe they should just, you
| know, _speak_ to their interviewees. At least in 2024
| that 's hardly faked by an LLM. Therefore, if you are
| fooled, you cheaped out, and you are hardly a victim.
| davidclark wrote:
| Someone being deceived is a victim, yes.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I left LinkedIn years ago, because everyone and their dog was
| copying my entire profile.
|
| I was happy for that info to go to potential employers, but
| not to random company and its canine friend.
|
| Then MS bought LI and I was _so_ glad I 'd left years ago
| already.
|
| I've seen one of two places have mandatory URL fields for
| LinkedIn profiles.
|
| One of the impressions I've been getting is that if you do
| not fit exactly into an recruitment agencies process, you're
| DoA, and I have begun to suspect the _only_ work they do is
| look at LinkedIn.
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Well LinkedIn does a lot of stuff around making sure the
| accounts are for real people. Kind of helps with many of
| the issues people are complaining about. I mean they can
| improve it, but they do some level of effort.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Who cares if someone is copying your profile?
|
| Having an established LinkedIn profile with their simple
| identity verification tool is such a trivial amount of
| effort for de-risking your job search that it's hard to
| justify boycotting LinkedIn at this point.
|
| If an application looks suspicious for some reason, I'll
| look for their LinkedIn profile as the second step. If I
| can't find one or if the profile is also questionable, I
| move on. LinkedIn is far from perfect, but it's at least
| some signal in a world where the noise level is rising
| fast.
| acheron wrote:
| LinkedIn locked my account for no reason awhile ago and
| apparently want me to send a photo of my ID to some
| sketchy "verification" third party. No thanks.
|
| I'm glad it's a trivial amount of effort for you, I
| guess.
| gooob wrote:
| > only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link
|
| wait shouldn't that already have been the case? lol
| irrational wrote:
| I haven't been job hunting since around 2002, so I'm
| completely out of the loop. Why are people submitting fake
| resumes? Are they hoping to get hired despite having no
| skills beyond using ChatGPT? But, what happens after that?
| They don't have the skills to do the job, so what was the
| point of getting hired?
| wruza wrote:
| I can only think of a multiple-salary for onboarding period
| scam, where they llm all their job and get fired everywhere
| after a month with a couple years worth of money. You can't
| really fire a hired guy without paying them at least once
| in US, can you?
| hansvm wrote:
| You (almost always) have to pay them for any work they
| actually did. If you catch a North Korean citizen day 1
| of onboarding, you're obligated to kick them out
| immediately, and you might have to pay them for the few
| hours they were there. If you catch them before they
| start, you (usually) don't have to pay them.
| Aurornis wrote:
| A growing scam involves people applying to remote jobs
| under fake or stolen identities. The work is then done by
| someone else or an agency that assumes the identity and
| collects the pay. They know it won't last long so they try
| to target companies that look like someone could become
| another generic name on a spreadsheet for a year or two.
|
| There's also a rise of "overemployed" people who farm out
| second and third jobs. Again, they don't care about
| anything other than collecting paychecks for a while until
| they go through the long onboarding, ramp-up, and PIP
| process, by which time they may have collected $100K for
| doing barely any work. They use fake backgrounds and
| resumes as a way to avoid their primary employer getting
| notified and as a sort of filter for companies who aren't
| looking closely at the details. If you can trick them with
| a fake application, you'll probably be able to trick them
| in the interview and then trick them into paying you for a
| long time too.
| hansvm wrote:
| You can often work days to years before people catch on
| that you are (a) unqualified, (b) underqualified, (c) not
| legally allowed to work in a particular jursdiction, (d)
| overemployed, (e) leaking company secrets to ChatGPT, ....
|
| On top of that, you have a number of people who are just
| trying to get hired and perhaps are skilled, but the market
| is so shitty (in part because of the AI resume slop) that
| they're resorting to various services to lessen the
| workload of shotgun resume posting. If you pay a person to
| send out resumes, you get email notifications that the
| resumes were submitted, and that person was just asking an
| LLM to spit out a resume, you'll be hard-pressed to figure
| out that the resumes are fake (and so on for a variety of
| other similar reasons, where spray-and-pray resumes are
| sent out in moderate good-faith but the resumes are BS).
| CalRobert wrote:
| What if we don't like linked in? Is it effectively mandatory?
| Amezarak wrote:
| Well, that's some handy information. I had no idea any
| employer would care one whit about my LinkedIn, or that a
| personal hobby section was considered anything but totally
| superfluous and irrelevant.
|
| I suppose I am supposed to actually fill out my LinkedIn too?
| 7thpower wrote:
| What did the working LinkedIn link help validate?
| lethal-radio wrote:
| Just wanna say keep at it! You're getting interviews and
| sometimes it just takes time for the stars to align into an
| offer.
| a13n wrote:
| Run LeetCode problems until you can crush the technicals
| lolinder wrote:
| A lot of companies are reevaluating the technical interviews
| because they're too easy to cheat at now unless they're on
| site on your hardware (or on a physical whiteboard).
| easterncalculus wrote:
| The idea that the problem is primarily (or even substantially)
| the fault of employees is laughable. HMs put up all the hoops,
| and keep immeasurably more power in the process from start to
| finish.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Because adding shit to the pool doesn't help. The jobs aren't
| there, and crapping in an empty pool doesn't help any more than
| pissing in a full pool.
| mooreds wrote:
| > So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting
| me nowhere?
|
| I'd go the other way, towards more schlepping and less
| automation[0].
|
| Are you reaching out to anyone in your network and asking if
| they know anyone who needs your skills?
|
| Are you joining communities (online or offline) that match up
| to your skills and interests?
|
| Doing either of these, so that you can be warm intro-ed to
| hiring managers by someone who knows you (or maybe knows
| someone who knows you) will typically get you to the front of
| the line.
|
| That's the approach I would take if I were looking today. Too
| much noise otherwise.
|
| 0: Works for startups: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
| all2 wrote:
| This is generally how I've gotten jobs. People who know
| people, or gladhanding at an event.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It seems like the best strategy is automation for both job-
| seekers and employers and upshot is awful for everyone. So, the
| sum individually optimum behaviors might not be optimal for a
| group. Well, back to the drawing board, humanity.
| klysm wrote:
| It highly depends on what kind of job you want. What kind of
| company do you want to work for?
| bane wrote:
| It's absolute insanity. Something has to give, or we're about
| to see some big changes in how hiring is done.
|
| I don't want to retype my recent experiences, but I have a
| thread from about 6 weeks ago that goes into my specific
| details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137229
|
| I was in a good position so I could take my time, but I
| honestly don't know what I would have done if I had _needed_ a
| position quickly.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| All of you are being fed nonsense. During my 10 years of
| being a salaried employee I interviewed for only the first
| one.
|
| All of the rest including Faang companies I went in without
| any interviews by knowing people and pulling strings. You
| shouldn't have to "apply" for anything.
| kraftman wrote:
| what if you don't know people or have strings to pull?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| You start looking at industries you are interested in,
| then look at companies which are on an upward trajectory
| in those industries, look at people who recently joined
| those companies, find their github / blogs / emails.
| Start talking to them about some common ground.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| You can get away without _applying_ , yes, if your network
| is strong enough to get referred wherever you want to work.
| FAANG and similar companies absolutely will not hire
| software engineers without interviewing them, since the
| cost of a bad hire is too high.
|
| What I have seen on occasion, especially for more senior
| people, is a carefully constructed charade. We're not
| interviewing you, that would be so uncouth, we're just
| having a chat!
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Software should have some universal competency baseline, like
| a license. If AI resume spamming is that straw that breaks
| the camel's back then so be it.
|
| The best defense against AI would be a license number that
| identifies a person uniquely, provides their relevant job
| history from a database, proves some minimal common
| competency baseline, and confirms conformance to some ethical
| norm against known liabilities.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| Every certification I have is numbered.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I've often thought that this would be an actually useful
| use of Blockchain tech.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting
| me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun"
| approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I
| vaguely fit the requirements?
|
| I'm in a big semi-private Slack where people have been
| discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since
| before ChatGPT).
|
| The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try
| automated applications and embracing LLMs. Their response rate
| is dismal, but they make up for it with shotgun volume.
|
| The catch is that when they finally get a job, it's usually at
| a company that sucks. Some place with incompetent hiring
| managers who can't tell the difference between LLM slop and a
| genuine application. Interview processes that leave so much
| room for LLM cheating that all of your coworkers are going to
| be LLM jockeys too.
|
| So you can try it. You might get something out of it, which is
| better than nothing. However, if you're expecting a good job at
| a good company then it's not going to deliver what you expect.
| fasa99 wrote:
| This is just the first pass. There are second pass strategies
| that could improve and are even more insidious: - review your
| generated CV pre-submission, make changes, do this a lot.
| Eventually you'll have a training set to fine-tune the model
| - throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks. That's your
| training set for that job. Now you have tuned the hiring
| manager's preferences. Follow up with your actual CV. Side
| benefit is it will jam up other candidates.
|
| An arms race is afoot
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is just fear mongering. If a job posting got spammed
| with 200 fake resumes from multiple fake applicants then
| the first thing we're doing is cancelling our job postings
| with whatever service is so poor that it can't reject basic
| spam attacks like this.
|
| Honestly, I think people vastly overestimate how much
| hiring managers use AI for filtering. Blaming AI for
| rejections has become a common coping mechanism because
| it's easier to think that a broken AI filter rejected you
| instead of the company making a valid decision to go with
| someone else.
|
| > throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks
|
| If your experience wasn't good enough the first 10 times,
| doing another couple hundred rounds of LLM word
| manipulation isn't going to make it better.
| evilduck wrote:
| Hiring managers don't have infinite time and resources,
| they'll just pursue other more fruitful avenues where a DoS
| attack isn't possible.
|
| This is a great way to entrench the recruiter middleman
| further though, because paying them a 20% cut to bypass the
| bullshit is already what they sell (and sometimes deliver).
| coldtrait wrote:
| Where are these places where the interview processes allow
| for LLM cheating? I'm desperate.
| evilduck wrote:
| Unless the place has had 100% turnover in the last two
| years it sounds a bit dubious. Even some of the worst
| places to work that I know of haven't churned through their
| entire development staff since ChatGPT first released.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so
| I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions.
|
| Is the job market just as bad for juniors, people looking to
| enter the field right now?
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably worse from what I understand. Seniors are more
| specialized but also (hopefully) have a network.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Most likely. I was seeing people with a few years experience
| willing to accept a fairly junior role. As a result we passed
| on some people that I would've hired and trained in years
| past.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| I'm a junior; even getting internship in my city was
| impossible. And it's a requirement to graduate.
|
| I had many of my peers pay people for signing off that they
| had an "internship" at some companies.
| chamomeal wrote:
| It's always hard for juniors, but it's always possible as
| well.
|
| IMO job boards are almost entirely useless. Going to meetups
| and making friends in open source communities is the way to
| go.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Makes me wonder if we should just mail in our applications by
| snail mail at this point.
| geye1234 wrote:
| I've wondered the same.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Or, better yet, literally knocking on doors.
| cellu wrote:
| I tried that too e.g. messaging talent recruiter managers
| on LinkedIn - never got a reply or "accepted" to start
| chatting
| bfung wrote:
| > I really am interested in the specific job I'm applying for.
|
| Are you doing anything that shows and differentiates your
| interest isn't the same as all the automated "interest"?
|
| Ex: understand deeply some parts of the industry the company is
| in and how it can be improved w/tech? Or is it just "rust is
| cool"?
| blakeburch wrote:
| I've personally found that even when I do my best to exude
| interest in the industry/company through custom question
| responses or the cover letter that auto-rejection is still
| the most common end result.
|
| I'm still amazed that the applicant tracking systems don't
| provide employers with stats like "time spent on application"
| or "time spent on website researching". At least this would
| be a signal towards higher interest.
|
| Heck, I'd love a "fave 5" system for employers. Something to
| flag extreme interest in working for their company. Companies
| would probably love to have a list of high-intent people to
| recruit, regardless of their current employment status.
| Clubber wrote:
| >to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to
| know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I
| almost never do).
|
| You ask your friends/past colleagues if the company _they
| currently work_ for has any openings. If you 've worked hard,
| solved problems and are good to work with, it's a good way to
| get further employment.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| Today, the hardest part is to get to said first interview,
| because we are all flooded with fake resumes. Incomprensible
| amounts. So what you have to do is not send blind resumes, but
| get a warm intro from someone with a connection to the company
| that vouch that interviewing you will not be a total waste of
| time. Networks have never been more important.
|
| Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say
| what you are doing wrong.
| josephg wrote:
| > Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say
| what you are doing wrong.
|
| Yep. But this question has answers. You just don't know what
| they are. Ask some friends to help you practice by getting
| them to give you mock- interviews and get feedback about what
| you need to do better. If you're unemployed, you have time.
| Be resourceful and you should be able to figure out where the
| problems are.
|
| (That said, solving your problems may be much harder -
| especially if you're going for senior roles. I have met
| plenty of people who have 10 years experience who are nowhere
| near qualified to work as a senior engineer.)
| harimau777 wrote:
| What do you do if you don't have any way to get a warm intro?
| People still need to get a job even if they don't have
| connections.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| I've been looking for a few months. I've got 20 years of
| professional dev experience, including in an eye-catching
| domain and haven't used LLMs in the process either.
|
| Since university I have never not been offered the first job
| I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the
| firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my
| rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche
| into the wider world. I've put hundreds of tailored
| applications in and basically had nothing (literally a few
| interviews with Canonical, which is a complete car crash of a
| process and an HR screening call for a role on half my previous
| income where she said they were struggling with the number of
| applications, that I didn't hear back from).
|
| It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I regret I don't have any
| answers, but good luck with your search.
| noen wrote:
| Similar story here. 20+ years experience in leading dev, pm,
| and UX teams. Launched multiple 0-1 market leading products,
| worked with dozens of Fortune 500s.
|
| Applied to more than a hundred positions - one phone screen
| and one interview.
|
| Then I just went to my large network and within a week I have
| multiple opportunities - companies _creating_ positions so
| they can hire me.
|
| Spoke to a number of colleagues in recruiting and who are
| hiring for their teams - the number of ghost jobs, and frozen
| but posted positions is staggering. Something is
| fundamentally broken in the hiring world today.
| kubb wrote:
| If this is a true story, then it means there's no point in
| applying at all. You should just go full LinkedIn, and
| networking, preferably when you still have a job.
|
| I'm not gonna do that so I'll just keep my job until
| layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and
| belatedly start connecting.
| cylemons wrote:
| Is going to the company in person an option?
| newsclues wrote:
| Networking to make contact that can help you get past the HR
| filter is the new skill set that is essential not job
| application automation.
|
| Meet people and form connections.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| > The only other way I've seen suggested to signal that I'm a
| real person with real experience is to know someone in the
| company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do).
|
| The last company where I worked, employee referrals were the
| preferred mode of hiring. The referring employee would also
| benefit, on successful completion of the new hire's first year.
|
| You might want to revisit this aspect.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| My advice is to contact recruitment agencies.
|
| HN hates recruiters, especially the cold calling kind on
| LinkedIn, but it has worked great for me. Every other job of
| mine has been through a recruitment agency and they have been
| responsible for the highest pay increases and they have been
| better to talk to about available budget for the role than the
| employer
| asymmetric wrote:
| Recs on specific agencies?
| chamomeal wrote:
| Sorry about your search, and sorry to be another reply that
| you've already been inundated with, but in my experience job
| boards are nearly useless. Especially now that every job on
| LinkedIn has hundreds (or even thousands!!) of applicants. I'm
| sure indeed/zip recruiter/dice are all similarly flooded.
|
| During my last job hunt I applied to nearly 300 jobs. Then I
| recruiter I met at a tiny JavaScript meetup messaged me about a
| position, and boom. New job.
|
| It's just one anecdote, but it changed my perspective, that's
| for sure. When I'm getting serious about my next hunt I'm just
| gonna attend tons of meetups and get real active in open source
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| I think that's the gold standard for finding engineering
| (software) and work. Get out into the world by attending
| meet-ups about technology and start contributing to real
| world open source projects or volunteer at the many projects
| looking for devs. It may not be a job overnight but it will
| keep you busy enough to not stagnate and you will also open
| yourself to bumping into someone who may be looking for
| someone at one of the meet ups.
| ghaff wrote:
| Whether you consider this "networking" or not, the approach
| is to know relevant people in whatever way. Code, write,
| talk to people at events, etc. Ideally before you really
| need a job though because, as you suggest, it's not an
| overnight thing.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Both this and the OP you responded to are good advice if
| you aren't in a situation where you needed a job yesterday.
|
| What about situations where you were laid off and can't
| really wait months to get a new one?
| ghaff wrote:
| The advice is probably to promptly ping obvious
| connections (which is what I did when I was laid off and
| it worked out). Failing that, depending on financial
| situation, either do unpaid work or become a barista.
| no_wizard wrote:
| That's grim, to say the least.
|
| I also think it's more proof that tech hiring is broken.
| When good candidates can't reasonably get in front of
| hiring managers without an "in" that means they're
| missing out on a lot of really good candidates.
|
| Think that's the part that bothers me about tech hiring
| right now. You can't even really get away messaging a
| recruiter at the company to start a conversation, I've
| heard from friends that recruiters simply don't respond
| in most cases and I've heard from a few recruiters I know
| that they won't consider it anymore because it became
| swamped with spam
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think this is something about tech
| specifically or even something recent. Most hiring has
| always been about knowing people and/or some other signal
| rather than walking off the street other than in a really
| would-be employee's environment.
|
| ADDED: To be fair, it's probably the fact that, in tech,
| junior people coming in without any real credentials or
| otherwise out of the blue at this point probably face a
| lot of headwinds--especially relative to the last decade
| or so.
| hilux wrote:
| I think that getting a good job nowadays requires having a
| strong referral.
|
| The referral is not sufficient, but unless you have an MIT PhD
| in Machine Learning, or similarly rare and in-demand
| credential, it is necessary.
| mock-possum wrote:
| I am in the _exact same situation_
|
| And I wish I had something encouraging to tell you, but I
| don't. I'm extremely broke and getting ghosted on application
| after application, or turned down months later via robot email.
| Never any human contact any step of the process.
|
| I'm looking at getting into another industry, tbf.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| be creative in any kind of technical assessment
|
| some people think SWE is about "logic". it is, in part, but the
| "engineering" in software is much more of an art than it is in
| other branches, like construction
|
| the current sota AI is great at logic and terrible in
| creativity and actual engineering. if the technical assessment
| is not designed for you to show your creative engineering side,
| do it yourself, do more than you were asked, think about what
| would be relevant to that company in terms of engineering
| creativity and offer that
|
| that's the best way I know of showing you're a real engineer,
| not an LLM operator, it's worked well for me in the job search
| process
|
| good luck!
| balls187 wrote:
| > what should I be doing?
|
| The current hiring market mirrors online dating.
|
| Swiping right as much as you can (as a man) will get you more
| matches for sure, but is unlikely to result in a long term
| relationship.
|
| There isn't much you can do. It comes down to two things: luck
| and timing.
|
| I do think there are actions you can take to improve your odds,
| but you gotta figure out what will work best for you. If those
| actions were somewhat obvious, I'd imagine thousands of others
| are doing the same thing.
|
| > know someone in the company who can vouch for me
|
| It didn't take long to establish myself as a relatively skilled
| engineer in a discord community specific to a mobile
| development framework. I was able to help many junior engineers
| solve issues. If I was looking for a job, that community may
| have provided me an opportunity to at least get my resume in
| front of a few hiring managers.
|
| Me personally, with all these seemingly out of work programmers
| who are likely as skilled. or more, I'd look to network with a
| few of them and do something interesting. Start a programming
| community that lets engineers self organize and launch a
| projects. Keep the bar to join very selective much like those
| dating apps that target VIPs and elite people.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| As a candidate, I strongly believe in not applying, in letting
| the company find you. Applying is a waste of time.
|
| Also, one can get falsely accused of using ChatGPT in online
| interviews, so just don't start if the role doesn't have at least
| one on-site round. If you get ghosted or falsely accused anyway,
| report it on Glassdoor at once. Always also report the questions
| you were asked.
| internetter wrote:
| > As a candidate, I strongly believe in not applying, in
| letting the company find you. Applying is a waste of time.
|
| Easier said than done, innit? I'm privileged enough to have a
| relatively highly trafficked blog, as well as some social media
| following, so this could possibly for me, but plenty of
| candidates who are arguably more qualified than me don't have
| either.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| There are simpler ways besides the standard social media,
| namely: LinkedIn, StackOverflow, GitHub. Among these,
| LinkedIn ought to be sufficient for 99% of candidates. It has
| landed me all of my new jobs over the last decade.
| jarsin wrote:
| > If you get ghosted or falsely accused anyway, report it on
| Glassdoor at once
|
| And why is glassdoor trustworthy?
|
| I worked for a company that laid off 75% of their long term
| staff with zero severance right as glassdoor was getting
| popular. They off course got a bunch of deserving negative
| reviews. Within one year the company had buried all the bad
| reviews in a sea of obvious fake reviews.
|
| Can't imagine what llm's are going to do for the entire fake
| review industry.
| bckr wrote:
| If any students or aspiring career-switchers are paying
| attention, now is a great time to start 10Xing your networking
| game. Stand out by being known.
| HenriTEL wrote:
| What do you mean by being known?
| aantix wrote:
| The current hiring situation is so broken. Because of AI and
| automation.
|
| One developer job on LinkedIn - 1100 applicants, 1000+ don't even
| live in the right region, so clearly it's automated and they're
| not reading even basic requirements.
|
| Next time - video interviews all the way through. Any hint of AI
| in the interview process, they're done. If a different person
| shows up for the first day of the job, they're done.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| LinkedIn? Anyone who has a LinkedIn profile is automatically
| rejected. Signals low quality.
| frizlab wrote:
| Why do people ask "please" to an LLM is beyond me. It's a
| machine, it does not care about politeness! Treat it as a machine
| ffs.
| krapp wrote:
| Because for some weird reason it tends to work.
| frizlab wrote:
| Has this been properly analyzed?
| krapp wrote:
| Probably. By whom and to what end I have absolutely no
| clue.
| slig wrote:
| Have a look at this analysis by @minimaxir about offering
| tips to LLMs: https://minimaxir.com/2024/02/chatgpt-tips-
| analysis/
| madmask wrote:
| So I don't lose the habit when talking/writing to people
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| "Please" is for your sake, not the bot's.
| riffic wrote:
| Roko's basilisk
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Why do people ask "please" to an LLM_
|
| did you ever notice how your google-fu got worse over time, as
| google adapted their technology for the mass market? I predict
| your LLM-fu will also deteriorate.
|
| I'm not saying "good for Google, what they did there", I'm
| talking about how you will experience the world.
| xcke wrote:
| I dont fully get something here. Being a good Engineer is a trait
| I would seek in a candidate, not really the actual hard skill
| knowledge.
|
| That is changing every day, and if you are a life long learner,
| you will master it. I get that domain specific experience
| matters.
|
| For example I passed the CCIE 10 years ago but today using Aider
| and LLMs to boost up Network DevOps related developments. I think
| using LLMs for code generation is a powerfull use case , is not
| really cheating, but a new way of working. Why would an employer
| not value this, and hiring managers, why are you not testing
| candidates in open book format on real world issues, giving
| candidates access to the latest State of the art LLMs, instead of
| using good old puzzles?
|
| Today in development and Infra engineering space it might make
| more sense to ask candidates to build something real instead
| asking for a motivation letter and if they used Sonnet 3.5 v2
| that is just a proof for trying to be effective.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| So did a million other people. Think your bit is better than
| everyone else's? Think it will matter even if it is?
| fijiaarone wrote:
| So did a million other people. Think your bot is better than
| everyone else's? Think it will matter even if it is?
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| Not very smart of him to post that while looking for a job. I
| know it is nerd smart but it is not real world smart. Any
| prospective employers looking for any excuse to reduce the number
| of candidates will find the blog post and reject you.
|
| And yes, I understand that this automation is but a reaction to
| the way companies handle applications
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Kinda funny that LLM creates an personalized cover letter which
| in the end will be deciphred to list summary by another LLM
| because this will be automated in no time.
| lizzas wrote:
| https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n...
| remram wrote:
| Article link: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-
| read.html
| eredengrin wrote:
| With so many comments on the state of the job market, I'm
| surprised to not see even one mention of career fairs. It's quite
| common for universities to host these and while they have their
| own set of disadvantages, it seems they could also provide a lot
| of value in the current market. The physical presence would
| ensure that it's a real person and it makes cheating
| significantly harder. Deciding a time and place would allow lots
| of companies and applicants to meet within a few day period so it
| would be pretty efficient. A larger sized fair might last for a
| week or two and most companies would stay the entire time while
| applicants would just buy a one or two day pass. They could
| potentially even do in person interviews within the same period
| which would further save on hiring costs. Have a few of these in
| each region per year, it seems like it would be doable, it's just
| a matter of getting everyone on board (of course, easier said
| than done).
|
| You could maybe even use the fair as a screening to give
| applicants a boost in future online applications - if they seem
| like a good applicant after talking in person but perhaps not the
| exact fit needed for current open positions, just flag their
| career account internally as a verified high quality applicant.
|
| Short of career fairs, verifying identity and employment history
| might be valuable and it seems like LinkedIn or some competitor
| should be able to do this. If a company can verify itself through
| a reliable process and then publicly mark accounts of employees
| who have been employed there for whatever duration, that seems
| like a low hanging fruit. In fact it sounds so obvious that maybe
| there's a reason they haven't done this yet? Any reason someone
| could think of for why this isn't already happening?
| xyst wrote:
| > Submit resume + cover letter
|
| Does anybody here actually read _cover letters_? I almost never
| submit them, unless required. I feel it's a remnant of pre-
| digital age where you would apply _in-person_ and the cover
| letter makes it _feel_ personal.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I write a cover letter if there's a field for it. I don't know
| if it matters.
| captainmuon wrote:
| Yes, I absolutely read cover letters. But I work in Germany
| which has different customs around applications, so maybe
| that's the reason.
|
| We get a lot of low effort applications so I look for something
| why the candidate wants to work at our place. Did they research
| the position at least a bit before applying? Do they have an
| idea about the work, and does it mention how they can
| contribute?
|
| If it looks like copy-paste or completely AI generated, there
| is a big chance that it goes to the round storage bin.
| haspok wrote:
| > ...why the candidate wants to work at our place.
|
| Sorry to be blunt, but - to earn some money to feed their
| family? Just like applicants are not unicorns, neither are
| companies - unless you are FAANG nobody really cares about
| your shitty company really. (Maybe not even if you are
| FAANG.) If the CV matches the JD, why do you have doubts if
| they have an idea about the work? They obviously haven't the
| faintest idea, but how could they (unless your code is open
| source).
|
| From the applicant's perspective, they are applying to
| multiple places at once. Investing emotionally at step 0
| (when they don't know if their CV will even be considered) is
| taxing, and unfair. Once there is a connection, you can
| expect them to invest more, but not until then. Because they
| will apply to 10 places, get ghosted by 5, get an automated
| NO response from 4 (usually a month later), and maybe, MAYBE
| they get an invite to the last one. Get a conversation
| started first and THEN expect investment.
| captainmuon wrote:
| It's totally fine if somebody just wants the money. We are
| all in it for the money to some degree or another. No need
| to fake enthusiasm. Actually, many applicants I see want to
| work part time (e.g. 2/3) and just want something to pay
| the bills and be able to pursue their hobbies.
|
| But I'd like to know, why did you send your application to
| our company and not one in another industry?
|
| I work for a university data center. Many of my colleagues
| have a scientific background. If not in academia, they
| could do coding, R&D, devops, science communication,
| product management, finance or many other things. They are
| 'lateral entrants' in any profession.
|
| If people can't answer "why did you apply here
| specifically", it means one of two things: They don't have
| a clue what their job would be, and they and we are likely
| to be dissappointed when they show up. Or: they sent their
| application to everybody indiscriminately. That signals
| that they likely aren't a good match for the skills needed,
| and also that they have a high rejection rate.
| Kerbonut wrote:
| I wonder if a type of escrow service could help solve the problem
| of hiring managers getting flooded with low effort applications
| and simultaneously solve the problem of applicants being passed
| over when they are obviously the most qualified for someone else
| who looks good on paper but who is actually mediocre.
|
| There could also be a case for some kind of ante that applicants
| have to contribute to when they apply. Pass the different levels
| of interview and you get a portion of the pot. Make it to the job
| acceptance and win the pot and if you accept the offer you get
| what the employer staked.
|
| Maybe something like that could help solve this issue. Either way
| we definitely need more structure and better defined processes
| for both sides of the job hiring process (looking for a job as a
| prospective employee, and hiring to fill a position). It would be
| great if we could automate this in a way that is mutually
| beneficial to everyone involved and had more transparency in the
| process. Right now there is zero accountability on either side,
| and as TFA demonstrates, the balance of power has shifted towards
| the applicants recently.
| dangus wrote:
| OP wants to automate the email send but should not do that.
| Sending bulk automated emails is a big no-no.
|
| There's a big reason why OP was fighting with providers to set up
| something to what amounts to marketing email without an
| unsubscribe link...because it's not something you're supposed to
| do.
|
| I don't think you should automate talking to a recruiter, anyway.
| At most this system should just generate email body and allow OP
| to review and send it out manually.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| That being said flagging e-mails coming from known IP ranges of
| those e-mail providers seems like a pretty good idea for ATSes
| to detect non-human spam.
| harimau777 wrote:
| What's the alternative to application spam if someone doesn't
| already have contacts and doesn't live in the city where they can
| attend meetups to network?
| hb-robo wrote:
| From what I can tell? Traveling to those meetups, which is a
| serious expense.
| macawfish wrote:
| Okay so people keep calling these "fake applicants" but the new
| reality is that for a good number of our roles realistically any
| old person person with good communication skills and some basic
| critical thinking skills will be able to functionally replace us
| given a some good AI tools. It will continue to look like these
| are "fake applicants" until you accept the new reality, which is
| that quite soon this whole thing will be smoothed over into a
| normalized surplus of "programmers".
|
| This is just the beginning and it shouldn't really be a shock to
| anyone who's been watching this unfold over the last five years.
|
| That said, we really don't need to rip each other up over this.
| This latest golden era of good old fashioned programming is
| winding down. Look ahead to what's coming next! What are the
| challenges we will face now?
|
| Get creative and stay open minded about what you're capable of
| and willing to do. Be proactive and use your imagination with all
| this new stuff. Don't take real relationships for granted,
| cultivate them. Don't isolate yourself!
| ok123456 wrote:
| With all the automated scamming on both sides, maybe showing up
| to the place dressed well to drop off a resume isn't an
| antiquated idea after all.
| hb-robo wrote:
| I tried this during peak Silicon Valley days. I remember two
| things:
|
| 1. I got laughed at for wearing a suit by t-shirt devs
|
| 2. Around 40% of the places did not allow people to walk in the
| door at all.
|
| I would be pleased with this kind of "analog" solution to this
| noise though, even as someone who missed the previous in-person
| paradigm entirely.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Hiring is so broken now that it might be worth trying.
| ein0p wrote:
| I know this form of procrastination and action avoidance. :-)
| Never in my life have I applied to more than 3 companies, and
| never in my life did I need (or receive, as a hiring manager) a
| cover letter. My CV was always quite sufficient. The most idiotic
| part of the whole process (besides the interview loop, that is)
| is that I can't just submit my LinkedIn profile and be done with
| it, every single company insists that I enter my info (which is
| quite extensive, 25 years in) into their system manually. For
| resume I just export my LinkedIn as PDF these days.
| vvladymyrov wrote:
| I really miss StackOverflow Careers because they had exactly
| this feature - I enter my career details once and SO Careers
| allow me to generate nice CV in PDF format. Personally I've
| found couple great jobs though SO Careers, it is sad that SO
| decided to shutdown Careers business.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| In general, people have numerous reasons for posting fake ads for
| applicants.
|
| I would say the signal-to-noise ratio is so low now, that entry
| level positions at any firm are impossible for domestic
| applicants.
|
| * Contract rules in institutions that show your faculty
| interviewed at minimum 3 external applicants before tabling your
| preferences
|
| * Corporate youth-employment tax credits that incentivize purging
| anyone over 32 to save money
|
| * Immigration scams that need to show at least 5 domestic workers
| don't qualify for the company needs (usually list proprietary
| internal software and languages the public never hears about...)
|
| * Staffing agencies posting nonexistent positions to run a lead-
| generation scheme, and legally exclude applicants from their
| product pool via a contract catch-22
|
| * 10% of your towns population arrived in the past 3 years, and
| understandably will say/do anything to get their Visa secured
|
| * Cons illegally farming data for their AI/LLM project, and
| various other scams
|
| We need more investment bankers and CEOs that work for regular
| wages.
|
| Fun Times =3
| n_ary wrote:
| Without reading any comments below, I want to praise the author
| for fighting fire-with-fire. From what I hear from my new
| colleagues and ones laid off, the landscape got pretty dystopian.
| HMs want to minimize their effort to 1% by happily renting LLM
| services which work 10% of the times and put up weird
| garbage(please record a 10min video to tell us why we should hire
| you, please also upload a cover letter that we clearly never
| read, please state your salary expectations, please choose a time
| slot when we can reach you but all time slots will be effective
| working hours only, please paste all your social media links) in
| addition uploading the resume+cover letter and then again pasting
| your top 10 skills and experiences. Then you get an auto reject
| 30min later or after a prolonged screening call only to see that
| opening taken down in 2 days and reposted after a week and repeat
| the same for months. What I hear from my friends and colleagues
| and insane all in all and I have zero sympathy for any HM and
| would be happy to start a new startup with LLMs to automate them
| away entirely.
|
| Am I too cynical? Yes, because I do not like people who play
| games with desperate people.
|
| (Now please all HR/HM downvote me because I told your truth).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I want to praise the author for fighting fire-with-fire.
|
| On the contrary, I think these automated application games are
| most likely to land interviews with the companies doing LLM-
| based hiring and interviewing.
|
| From what I've seen, the automated job application results are
| generally pretty bad. The few companies that get interviews are
| just bad at screening and interviewing, so even if you get in
| you're going to be working with a lot of other people who self-
| selected into a company with a bad hiring process.
|
| > HMs want to minimize their effort to 1% by happily renting
| LLM services which work 10% of the times and put up weird
| garbage(please record a 10min video to tell us why we should
| hire you,
|
| I'm in a big Slack where people ask advice on hiring and
| interviewing. I can think of only one time someone asked about
| applying to a company asking for videos, and the advice was
| universally to skip that company.
|
| I think these things happen very rarely, but angry internet
| culture never forgets and before long people act like these
| weird practices are happening everywhere when they're
| definitely not.
|
| I can't even imagine what hiring manager would _want_ to have
| to sit through 10 minute videos of each candidate. The whole
| thing doesn't make sense and it's definitely not common.
| n_ary wrote:
| Not sure about US, but here in EU, most big ones use LLM(or
| AI!) based platforms to rank and summarise applicants. While
| I do not have a public stats, but I can tell it from my
| friends' account that a rejection takes 1-3h after
| submission.
|
| > I'm in a big Slack where people ask advice on hiring and
| interviewing. I can think of only one time someone asked
| about applying to a company asking for videos, and the advice
| was universally to skip that company.
|
| I would very much like to name and shame but these are
| actually fairly prominent on my side of EU. When a bunch of
| people is laid off and they have a family to feed(or even a
| newborn recently), desperation can lead to not skipping
| regardless of whatever junk particular systems put up.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Good summary. Wish I could upvote you many times over.
| sagarpatil wrote:
| You can use firecrawl.dev to get markdown content for any page
| you want. It's open source and you can host it locally.
| dimaor wrote:
| the only thing worth using LLMs here for is the cover letter.
|
| maybe I'm wrong but turning HTML into structured data example by
| using an LLM is bug prone and lazy.
|
| the real challenge parts are pretty basic as well..
|
| don't get me wrong I am not judging automation, but using LLMs
| for these trivial tasks is IMO a waste of time as a software
| engineer.
| grantcarthew wrote:
| I recently automated this process, however, in a very different
| way.
|
| - CLI run for every job you want to apply for (this is important)
|
| - JavaScript (Deno) with Puppeteer to run the JS for the page
|
| - Create a directory for all the artefacts <yyyy-mm-dd-ms-
| pagetitle>
|
| - Save the webpage link (artefact)
|
| - Take a screenshot of the page (artefact)
|
| - Extract the HTML (artefact)
|
| - Convert HTML to Markdown with a CLI (artefact)
|
| - Send Markdown to the Grok API to extract just the Job
| Description as Markdown (artefact)
|
| - Send Job Description and Autobiography to Grok API to generate
| a Resume (artefact)
|
| - Send Job Description and Autobiography to Grok API to generate
| a Cover Letter (artefact)
|
| - Use pandoc to convert the Markdown Resume and Cover Letter into
| Open Document Format (LibreOffice) (artefacts)
|
| The important differences here are:
|
| - You need to find the job you are interested in. Why automate
| this?
|
| - Run the CLI `job-hunter https://job.site/jobid` (50sec runtime)
|
| - Open the ODF documents, review, edit, save (human involved is
| important)
|
| - Use a bash script running LibreOffice CLI to convert ODF
| documents to PDF
|
| - Review the PDFs
|
| - Manually click the apply button on the site and upload the
| documents
|
| I also keep a spreadsheet with the details for each job I apply
| for so I can track interactions, think CRM for job applications
| and recruiters. This could be automated, however, I got a job so
| have lost interest.
|
| Points of interest:
|
| - Markdown is a fantastic format in general, but for LLMs as
| prompts and documents, it's awesome.
|
| - If you just curl the page html, you don't get the recruiters
| email addresses in most cases, hence the use of Puppeteer.
|
| - Having all the artefacts saved on disk is important for review
| before and after the application, including adding notes.
|
| - By using an Autobiography that is extreme in detail, the LLM
| can add anything and everything about you to the documents.
|
| - Use Grok and support Elon. OpenAI can stick their "Open" where
| it fits.
|
| - I don't end up having to format the documents that are
| generated as ODF files, they look great.
|
| I can apply for around 10 to 20 jobs in a day if I try hard. Most
| of the time it is around 5 because I am doing other things. They
| are only jobs I'm interested in though, and I can customise the
| documents. Also, If I am applying for a job that includes AI, I
| add a note at the bottom stating it has been generated by an LLM
| and customised.
|
| There's probably more interesting points, but you get the idea.
|
| My TODO list includes a CLI switch to only open the page in a
| Firefox profile so I can authenticate to the page. This removes
| the stupid "automate auth on ever job site" issue. Simply
| authenticate and keep the cookie in the hunter profile.
|
| The repo is private for the time being, but I could make it
| public.
|
| Edit: formatting.
| madduci wrote:
| > So I went old school - manual HTML copying. Yes, it's
| primitive. Yes, it works. Sometimes the simplest solution is the
| best solution.
|
| So it isn't automated at all
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Cross posting a comment I left
|
| ---
|
| Just wanted to share that I've been working on a schema for job
| descriptions.
|
| https://jsonresume.org/job-description-schema
|
| I released about 6 months ago, hopefully some of the models use
| it in their training data. So you can just say "make an example
| JD, return it in the jsonresume job schema"
|
| ---
|
| Just realized I should call it jsonjob or something
| DavidDodda wrote:
| man, thank you for this comment!
|
| I have been using reactive resume for sometime now, but never
| know it was built on this standard.
|
| you actually saved a lot of research time from my next project!
| lisp2240 wrote:
| We should use this to flood companies with applications for
| people who don't exist and make it impossible to find real
| candidates. Then maybe they'll reform this dumb process that
| doesn't work well for anybody.
| BadCookie wrote:
| Companies would just lean even harder into hiring only friends
| of current employees, but I appreciate the sentiment.
| surume wrote:
| This is genius
| ruuda wrote:
| I'm an engineer at a company of about 70 people (about half of
| that engineers), and I personally review most applications to our
| engineering roles. About 60-70% of applications we receive are
| low-effort or automated spam of the kind generated by the author.
| We have screening questions that ask to describe a personal
| experience in your own words, specifically without LLM, and yet
| almost half of the applications we get have LLM answers, or a
| cover letter that is just an LLM-generated reflection of the job
| ad. Regularly the same candidate applies to all engineering
| roles, and then a few weeks later again, and again.
|
| We use Recruitee, and ironically it doesn't have good automatic
| ways of filtering out the kind of spam generated by the author.
| On busy weeks, I spend about an hour per day screening and
| responding to applications. About half that is wasted on low-
| effort applications and automated spam generated by people like
| the author, and a significant part of that are repeat offenders.
| Nowadays I send one warning, and then I ask Recruitee support to
| ban the person, which due to implementation reasons on
| Recruitee's end prevents the person from applying at any company
| using Recruitee. It's harsh and I often feel bad about it, but
| after having to deal with this nonsense for multiple years now,
| I'm so sick of it, and I just ran out of patience.
| pluc wrote:
| This is part of the fucking problem. It started with recruiters
| using AI to filter candidates, candidates caught on and now use
| AI to massively apply to jobs, overflowing the response rate, so
| recruiters have no choice but to use AI. Meanwhile I've manually
| applied to over a thousand jobs that I am explicitly qualified
| for, I have 25 years of experience, I have tried writing resumes
| and cover letters specifically for the job I am applying to and I
| maybe got 5 calls back.
|
| This timeline fucking blows.
| atoav wrote:
| I am not a hiring manager, but I will occasionally get asked to
| help with technical candidates in our org.
|
| Any slight hint of AI prose could mean a direct No from me, let
| me explain why.
|
| Our process is fair IMO:
|
| 1. one CV (if you apply to jobs you should have that one already)
|
| 2. a cover letter that shows that you know how to map your CV to
| our org and the free position. That cover letter could be text in
| the email you sent the CV in
|
| 3. (if invited) an 30 to 45 minute interview with a roughly 1:10
| chance of getting in.
|
| If you think you need to game that fair of a process you are the
| wrong hire anyways. That means the approx ten people who get
| invited are invited based on their (vetted!) CV and on their
| cover letter. That means your cover letter is read by a human who
| will judge your text.
|
| I am not a fan of artificially driving up the effort canidates
| need to make when applying. I just want to know they informed
| themselves about my org and gave a few thoughts about the
| position they applied for (what job it is, why they like it, why
| they would do a good job etc.) - thst _should not_ be a high bar
| to clear, but over 80% of candidates struggle even with answering
| that.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Unfortunately the power balance is in the side of companies;
| people do need them (eating and sleeping somewhere is generally
| considered a good thing), companies do not.
|
| Don't blame us for wanting to pay our bills.
| k0ns0l wrote:
| There is much to reflect upon from these interactions (I
| thoroughly enjoyed every moment--thank you, HN!).
|
| As a recent graduate from a developing country, I am truly
| grateful for the valuable insights gained.
| captainmuon wrote:
| When I see posts like this, I think either I'm doing something
| wrong or they're doing something wrong. I never wrote hundreds of
| applications. When I'm looking for a job, I investigate a couple
| of companies where I'd like to work, write a handful of thought-
| out applications, and generally get at least a response, in most
| cases an invitation for an interview. Granted, I have a
| university degree but I guess many people here have one, too. I
| also live in a medium-sized German town, but if anything that
| should make it harder to find a job, not easier.
|
| Isn't there right now a shortage of skilled tech workers? I feel
| like right now the hiring criteria in many places is "whoever
| comes through the door". I know we'd probably hire anybody who
| knows how to code, is reliable, and can work in a team.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I suspect Germany is different. I see here work is much more
| word-of-mouth, and so I think LLM spam hasn't taken off,
| because most jobs are not much advertised as they are in the
| UK/USA. People are like "I know someone who can do that" and
| then a friend let's you know there's some work you could do.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I also live in Germany, and my experience is that while there
| might be a shortage, unless the CV experience from the last
| year reflects what HR is asking about, it doesn't matter, even
| you happened to do that lets say five years ago.
|
| Oh, and better have those recommendation letters free of any
| negative stuff disguised as positive feedback.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| There is an abundance of tech workers. There is a shortage of
| good tech workers. It is incredibly difficult, at the resume
| stage, to tell the difference. When you post a job online, you
| get hundreds of applications in a few days.
|
| Imagine you are a good tech worker. You applied to a company,
| along with 200 other people. Your resume gets swept into the
| trash because they had to automatically delete several
| applicants and your resume somehow didn't make the cut based on
| a simple heuristic, or maybe you got unlucky and they just
| delete the bottom half without looking at them
|
| What do you do now? Do you spend a lot of other time and repeat
| this process next week, or do you just lower your standards and
| apply to 200 other companies?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >There is a shortage of good tech workers.
|
| I wish someone quantified what 'good' is. Ask 2 tech workers
| to rate each other and they are most likely to rate each
| other mediocre by each's standards. Each would nitpick on
| what the other didn't know.
| jdhdbdbdn wrote:
| This does not match my experience. Most of the time it's
| quite clear who is a high performer/multiplier in a team
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Missing the point by a large margin...
| chamomeal wrote:
| At the resume stage?
| rockemsockem wrote:
| If they're both nitpicking then they are in fact both
| mediocre at best.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| You cannot say either way. There was a point I was trying
| to get at: Devs access each other just as several
| religions people do : one's own religion is the best, and
| that there cannot be any other right way to do things.
| This why the whole hiring/interview process is broken.
| captainmuon wrote:
| If you are not FAANG or some other large company, the
| question is not if somebody is "good". It is if they are
| "good enough".
|
| I feel there is often a bimodal distribution of applicants.
| Those who can do the job and those who are completely not
| suited. There is a shortage of workers, so you try to get
| as many as you can from the first bin. It doesn't matter if
| they are 10x rockstars or Joe Blub.
|
| You just try to sieve out the ones who apply for a DevOps
| position and then it turns out they are "good with MS
| office". Or those who neither speak the local language nor
| English good enough to communicate with anybody. Or those
| who show up on day 1 and are clearly not the person who
| interviewed.
|
| I's a luxury to have more than 4-5 good candidates who
| you'd have to rank. (But to be honest, I'm in education /
| public sector and the pay here is not competitive with big
| tech...)
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >It is if they are "good enough".
|
| Thanks, that is the right way to put it.
|
| I was picking on the person who was saying that there are
| not enough good candidates, where I have worked in most
| cases they were good enough, so it baffles me when people
| frequently say that there are not enough good candidates.
| I'm just wondering if my sample data is different from
| others . Again I think quantification of what is good
| enough will go a long way example: Must be a able to
| solve the fizz/biz example.
| codiogo wrote:
| This is the second post I read talking about the current state of
| hiring. I haven't applied for a job in 15 years. I have 20+ years
| of experience and chose the worst time to find a job. I had to
| hire several people over the years and always felt it was hard.
| But now from the perspective of someone applying, I see it's way
| harder. Maybe there is also an opportunity there.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| I made jokes about having a dead man's trigger that would
| automatically send out resumes as soon as a paycheck was not
| deposited on schedule. This is half of it right here.
| codelikeawolf wrote:
| > The secret to good cover letters? Context.
|
| I know a lot has changed since I had to look for a job (a little
| over 4 years ago), but I disagree. The cover letter is the only
| opportunity to show some of your personality, not that you read
| the posting and tweaked your template to include details about
| the specific job you're applying for.
|
| I have found that a good cover letter can be a game-changer. I
| landed my first dev job because the hiring manager/senior devs
| loved my cover letter. It's a great filtering mechanism for
| whether you'd be a good fit. I always throw a little humor in
| there, because I am not a very serious person and don't want to
| work at a place that expects me to be. When I had to do some
| hiring earlier this year, I would spend a few extra minutes
| reading cover letters to see if I could spot one that included
| something unconventional, but no dice. Every single one just
| followed the boring template from a cursory Google search of "how
| to write a cover letter".
|
| Your resume isn't going to convey anything about whether you're
| the type of person that I want to work with. I had 200 resumes
| from people that were all capable of doing the job we were hiring
| for. If you're competing with 199 other equally skilled people
| based on resumes, a good cover letter could be a competitive
| advantage.
|
| That being said, I know it's a very different hiring landscape
| these days, so my perspective could be completely wrong. But I
| imagine there are probably still hiring managers out there that
| take the time to read cover letters. If I decide to start looking
| for a new job at some point, I'll be spending a few extra minutes
| on my cover letter.
| hb_lifer wrote:
| I saw the prompt snippet and thought the same as you. Honestly,
| giving it samples of your prior cover letters you've written
| yourself would be a vastly more personal touch emulating your
| writing style and personality.
|
| Anyhow, problems with the spray and pray aside, applicants
| should match the effort the hiring managers puts in. Which is
| automating the first few passes, and last mile is human read.
| As in, proofread your own generated cover letters.
| time-less-ness wrote:
| Find someone over the age of 50 and ask them how to get a job.
|
| First point: you won't like what they say. You won't like it at
| all. You'll probably absolutely hate it, and even start to hate
| him a little in the process.
|
| Second point: you'll have a job in under 6 months.
| rizs12 wrote:
| This should be a Ask HN. Do you want to post it?
|
| "Ask HN: How are those of you over 50 years of age getting
| jobs?"
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I'd certainly feel free to use any tactic their sales team would
| use.
| b8 wrote:
| Yeah, there's commercial services such as ApplyAll that
| automatically applies to jobs for you for a fee. Workday is the
| worst to automate. Companies can add in unique required questions
| such as "tell us two extraordinary things you've done", so edge
| cases like those are common.
| slashdave wrote:
| Dare I ask: what did people do before the internet existed?
| Spivak wrote:
| In person networking, it still works and the ratio of signal to
| noise has only gotten higher post-internet.
|
| SW/Hacker types have this on easy-mode compared to other
| industries because of how many professional / enthusiast groups
| we have floating around in every city. We do our jobs outside
| of work for fun. That's doesn't work for an accountant.
| Companies seem to vastly prefer recruiting from these events
| and they get you past the screens. I've never once not gotten
| the interview emailing or name dropping the event / company rep
| I talked to.
| gerdesj wrote:
| The internet but not the www existed when I started out. Cover
| letters were handwritten, the CV was typed and the lot was
| posted or delivered by hand.
| ttul wrote:
| Someone should build an engineer-matchmaking service with a fresh
| revenue model that can challenge LinkedIn, whose platform is now
| so heavily optimized for profit-taking that it leaves both
| employer and job searcher unsatisfied.
|
| Using LLMs to write your applications is a sound idea. But why
| not have a platform do this for everyone in the equation? I would
| much rather - as a hiring manager - put my qualifications into a
| service and have it automatically and intelligently find great
| candidates, than dig through 1,000 ChatGPT-customized cover
| letters with yet another LLM cover letter bot...
|
| Seems stupid to not put something in the middle that the
| employers pay for that automates both sides of the market to
| everyone's benefit.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| All platforms like that have failed because fundamentally
| companies don't trust others with hiring, unless you can very
| quickly get rid of someone (body leasing).
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