I automated my job application process(blog.daviddodda.com) |
I automated my job application process(blog.daviddodda.com) |
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.
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.
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.
and runs this script for ten years, even while employed.
- 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.
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.
This timeline fucking blows.
The most recent place where I applied and my earlier workplace both asked for a video recording early during the recruitment process. I guess employers will ask for in person interviews next.
So you end up using technology to de-evolve society back to tribes.
Still, at least we are other people who are creating this AI technology and all of its application ... so we see the pain up close and we can start to steer it in a better direction that's more healthy for society.
But you know we have to find our integrity first.
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.
Of cause this assumes you are a good fit in the first place regarding your skills. But the latter is usually much easier to filter out
I was looking for work in 2021-2022, and an approach like yours got me a job after interviewing with circa 10 companies. Unfortunately ended up on the wrong side of office politics and had to leave in early 2024.
At the start of my 2024 job search I again tried targeted search, targeting was good enough that I had a circa 1:10 application to interview ratio. It took over 50 companies before I found my current role. The market is much tougher now than it was a few years ago.
I hear there was a time when companies were eager/desperate to hire. Those were good years for job seekers.
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.
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.
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.
1. Why are there so many fake resumes/applications? Who's "applying"? Is it a foreign actor trying to gum up the works?
2. What are people's salary expecations? Are people still asking for salaries of $250k+?
I couldn't imagine being a manager having to sift through so much garbage just to find a candidate that's worth their salt.
It was a Fortune 10 company so plenty of roles and I eventually got in.
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.
"Ask HN: How are those of you over 50 years of age getting jobs?"
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.
I think the hard part is everyone knows that it's bad but no one has any ideas to combat the problem.
Don't blame us for wanting to pay our bills.
As a recent graduate from a developing country, I am truly grateful for the valuable insights gained.
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
And, just to confirm, you got a job?
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.
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.
Using all the top sites as well that are supposed to make the hiring process easier.
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.
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.
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.
Fine tune a small LLM to your past emails, cover letters, resumes and etc. then go ham.
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).
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.
Will be curious to see how many people succeed with this approach. Maybe if everyone does this the sheer volume of shit will at least help realise how broken the current process is on both sides.
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
If you must nag for subscriptions, you might want to try and find a way that does it without interfering with page interactivity.
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.
And yes, I understand that this automation is but a reaction to the way companies handle applications
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.
My other consideration is that I'm running on CPU and don't love depending on cloud services, so I've also been mostly getting stuff out of a DOM where I can... but it's occurred to me that there are scoped reasons to consider this, like deeper parsing from job descriptions, and I occasionally toy with it on stuff like HN posts. The prompt format here is a lot more thorough than what I've tried, and I might have to go back and experiment with this some more. I haven't gotten great consistency with this yet myself, and I'm not sure how much that's my prompting and how much it's that I'm using smaller (mostly ~7B) models. Which LLMs are you using for this -- ChatGPT throughout, or are there others?
I've been trying to avoid too much prior art while working on mine, but I'm definitely interested in hearing more about what you've been building around this.
[0] bhmt.dev/blog/scraping (warning: this is 10000 words + code samples, as it goes from browser console to browser automation and covers a few different side projects)
[1] github.com/chaosharmonic/escape-rope
[2] github.com/chaosharmonic/escape-rope-ui
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.
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.
So it isn't automated at all
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.
---
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
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!
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.
> 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.
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
- If the cover letter is a rehash of your resume, it's a waste of your time and mine. It certainly isn't helpful to your application, and if I have too many well-qualified applicants then it might be harmful.
- Poorly written cover letters suggest that the applicant doesn't care much about this specific opportunity, it's some sort of AI/oversees/... scam, or the applicant can't write well. They're very helpful for me when there are already other data points suggesting identity theft or similar automation (nail-in-the-coffin material). Otherwise, they're not necessarily a negative, but it's rarely advantageous to advertise a lack of some skill, and it does disqualify applicants from some roles.
- Some cover letters are especially compelling. Suppose your resume just has you as a pizza delivery driver, but your cover letter goes over the app you wrote and the data science behind it to optimize your hourly earnings. Suppose your work history is in web tech, but you're actually better at low-level optimizations and are applying here because you think that skill set is a good fit. I prefer varied backgrounds anyway, so you'll probably get some form of screening interview unless there's enough other evidence that you aren't qualified (e.g., junior experience for a senior role) -- I try to bias toward giving everyone a chance while not wasting too much of anyone's time, and I'm fine having a busier calendar to make that happen.
None of that helps you get the job though; it helps you get an interview. If your experience is that you're well qualified and usually land the job once you get into an interview, and if your cover letter has some information your resume lacks, you should definitely add one. If you normally struggle through the interview process, it'd be surprising for you to have an honest cover letter which would help you land the job in the first place, so I probably wouldn't bother.
Might be worth putting a little summary / objective in the resume file itself because of that.
The process outlined in the post also isn't a path to writing a good cover letter. You don't want to just go over your resume again you want to either talk about things that wouldn't be there (e.x. why you want this job specifically, because your 100% applying because this is the unicorn job for you, not because you need money to feed yourself) or expanding on how something on your resume uniquely qualifies you (I worked on this project that's very similar to what your doing)
If it's lining up your resume to the job description (you want someone who can write Scala, I have used Scala in my past 3 jobs) a resume is a better format for that. But that's all the LLM has context to do.
Oh yeah, ideally you'd also tune your resume to the job too.
In 99.9% of jobs in the world, there are zero applicants for who this truly holds. You might be working at a company hiring for a job that's part of the 0.1%, not sure. Otherwise, you're just selecting for those who are willing to lie as blatantly as required.
It just has zero value. A well written cover letter on the other hand would net you a big plus
Also, a bit too long. Make it shorter.
I receive cover letters with typos, the wrong word used, poor punctuation etc. If candidates could use a spell checking it would be a good start.
That's a pessimistic way of looking at it, but I'm not going to claim it's wrong. I think my phrasing made it very clear that in most cases I expect if someone includes something about this their interest is going to be ahem embellished.
All the same look at it from the hiring managers side. Say you have two candidates, who appear to otherwise be equal. One seems to think the job is just like any other. The other actually seems genuinely interested in the details of food brokering, knows of your companies involvement in <big name>'s success and has thoughts on how they can apply their background in data analytics to the challenges you face.
Which candidate do you hire? Or do you really just toss a coin?
I guess it depends on how much freedom an HM has. Where I've worked, the answer has been "more than enough". Which means you can easily ask e.g. a philosophical question. Ask something unrelated to the job, see what kind of person they are. Chance they'll both respond the exact same way is negligible, and you'll very likely come out preferring one of them. Only few people lie when you give them a good question that doesn't sound like it has a "wrong" answer that would get them a minus.
Does this mean you'll necessarily get the best candidate? No, but it's better than selecting on a proxy for willingness to lie, that's how you end up with people far too good at political games, to detriment of the org.
In places where the HM has little freedom, I guess there's little choice indeed. But even then, I'd try to go with whorver sounds most happen and genuine, rather than most interested in the company per se.
We're talking about a cover letter, no one's been talked to yet. The HM has 100+ candidates who have done web applications with Python or whatever qualifies one for said job, and literally doesn't have time to talk to them all. They also can't ask them random clarifying questions about their life. There's 2 data points, cover letter and resume.
I suggested two ways to make your cover letter more than a rehash of your resume and your latching onto one of them.
Here's the thing: you'll notice in my example I didn't suggest you write "I'm deeply passionate about food brokering" (an actual company I've hired software engineers for). That's not likely to move the needle, it obviously nonsense (Even the owner is didn't meet that description), and much like saying "I've got a deep mastery of Python" it's just empty words without something backing it.
Instead I suggested learning about what the company does, thinking about what the job entails beyond just "writing software according to the tickets" and what it actually accomplishes and expressing what about that interests you.
Is that person's interest going to end up exaggerated? Sure probably. But they're actually interested enough to put in the effort to think through that, and that effort, like it or not is a signal. Even the most pessimistic view means at least they were willing to work harder at it.
But look, maybe your applying at a subprime lender or something equally parasitic and are either so desperate that your doing it anyway or just cynical enough to not care, yet still have some moralistic hangup about this. Then don't. I suggested other things you can bring to your cover letter that don't fit on a resume. But if you make your cover letter your resume but in paragraph form (which is all the AI can do, since that's the only data it has), then you've reduced those data points the manager has to decide if your worth talking to from 2 down to 1. You might as well have skipped the cover letter entirely and at least saved them some time. (Actually that's not true, because often a cover letter is expected and they'll ding you for not having it, but including a bullshit rephrasing of your resume for that reason is no less performative than the expression of interest your already bothered by)
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).
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.
An arms race is afoot
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.
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.
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.
I suppose I am supposed to actually fill out my LinkedIn too?
wait shouldn't that already have been the case? lol
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You've gotten 10 phone screens, so you can probably double your activity and get to 20. If you're actually going for jobs you're qualified for, 20 screens should net you ~3 offers, if not more.
My suggestion: record yourself on your interviews and have friends review the recording and offer critique. You have blind spots you need to address to achieve the outcomes you want.
Is the job market just as bad for juniors, people looking to enter the field right now?
I had many of my peers pay people for signing off that they had an "internship" at some companies.
IMO job boards are almost entirely useless. Going to meetups and making friends in open source communities is the way to go.
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.
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!
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.
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
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”?
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.
Meet people and form connections.
I didn't get the job, or even an interview despite that and the hiring manager never bothered to tell me why. (one of their direct reports told me its because i was vastly overqualified)
I feel stuck in a limbo where my title doesn't reflect the seniority i operate at so i'm not getting interview for senior roles based on automated filters i guess, but jobs i do get interviews for, I was told no because because i was overqualified for the role more than once.
This includes being overqualified for the FTE equivalent of my current job as a contractor in the same company and org. But there's no roles opening at the seniority level they'd hire me at and I can't just rage quit on a 6 figure salary just because I should be making double even as a junior as an FTE by now. So they won't hire me for the work I already do but have no problem keeping me on for half the pay as a contractor. But at least I have a job?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that's how.
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.
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?
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.
Oh, and better have those recommendation letters free of any negative stuff disguised as positive feedback.
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.
A couple of years ago it was so bad that I stopped applying as soon as I saw that WorkDay crap pop up, regardless of the company.
There's usually an option to upload another file near the end of the form. After it has filled in the fields using your plain resume, delete it and upload the nicer one.
You'll be shocked to find out which performed better!
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.
Employers can earn revenue from automated applications that aren't qualified. Applicants can earn income from fake jobs until the fake jobs can't afford to post anymore.
Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the generation will actually be successful?
You get provably better performance if you let the thing analyze the situation / think through the problem / whatever before letting it commit to choosing a status like that.
I wonder if the application process will switch up in the near future to people posting their profiles for then company recruiters/AI to reach out and contact since if they post a job they just get 10k automated applications.
- scrape linkedin and apply to jobs based on the result
- take the responses with "positive sentiment" and then contact the linkedin person
Service is now connecting people with companies that already thought their generated CV was close enough to what they want. Call this a "recruitment agency".
That was my first thought when looking for jobs, but maybe I am naive, wouldn't this break their ToS?
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.
This all makes me glad I am not actively looking for a new position. I always keep an eye on the job market though - I've noticed anecdotally the amount of applicants on any LinkedIn position have really amplified the last couple years. I knew the LLM driven application process was coming, but it doesn't make it suck any less.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Come to think of it, this might be a good way for software unions to get a hold in the US. The Union will have a process to validate the competency if its members, and validate their careers, meanwhile hiring managers who are looking for guaranteed engineering quality will be able to find them, and unemployed engineers will be able to find work quickly, only bye the may benefit from the power of collective bargaining.
Kinda like a recruiting agency, but without for-profit motives and the shareholders will be the union members.
I don't see any downsides, except dkr the usual "corrupt men on top" problem which plagues any hunan organization, though mandating that leaders have extencive industry experience could slightly mitigate that.
But it comes with requirements like 4-year degrees, having worked under a PE, etc.
1) They didn't waste my or their time. Interviews rounds clearly progressed towards a hiring decision.
2) Their version of an AWS-style "loop" was a half day with people I'd be working with directly in various capacities. Questions were directly relevant to work culture and function.
3) After the first couple of rounds (recruiter screen, then first tier) all interviews were in person at their office. Interviews were conversational, open, and honest on both sides.
4) The final interview round with the hiring manager was structured as a round of questions to find possible match among the choices of equivalent openings I was likely qualified for.
5) At offer time, I told them what I'd work for and they told me what they couldn't exceed. We discussed total package and wiggle-room. The final offer they made had both no surprises and was also better than other incoming offers.
The position is not specifically rare in my industry, but I am specifically well qualified for it. None of us had worked together before, but we did have some shared clients so they were able to check my bona fides.
In comparison:
- AWS's process, while highly structured and tries for impartiality, is a massive time suck for all involved and as a result is kind of a mindless assembly line. However, it's kind of a good first interview among many companies since it preps you well for everybody else.
- There's more to this story, but briefly, I had two prior near interviews through a strong internal referral and another recruiter who put me into the wrong funnel then disappeared along with the position.
- There's also more here involving friends and former colleagues but to put it short, Google's process is stupid, disconnected, and broken while being far too self-congratulatory. It's a surprisingly good match for what they appear to be as a company externally, and from what I hear, how they are these days internally.
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...
and to be honest, I was too nerves to think about if it was risky or taboo.
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.
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.
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.
Like completely fabricate what they need for a plausible answer from thin air.
As of now they do more harm than good.
I downvoted your post because this is a complete nonsequitur.
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.
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.
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.
I see plenty of people with poor technical skills claiming to be senior. They seem to be real enough though.
Right now my approach has been focused less on proving my skills, and more on proving I'm a real person. Hah.
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?
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.
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.
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.
However, I do believe onsite interviews is best solution but finance obviously screams about cost.
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.
> 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.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.
Regardless, if ChatGPT is tailored enough, or a custom model is created, I can't think of any way to detect if an LLM has authored something generic. The lazy college student will probably get caught, but the cunning one not so much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?”
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.
We know from the irrelevant offers that many professionals have automated the processes for casting a net. How it is a problem if individuals do that in reverse?
You're missing the point. The primary people who suffer for this environment isn't hiring companies—they'll eventually work through all the resumes and find someone who will be qualified to fill their open roles, it's just much more expensive—the primary people who suffer for this is qualified employees who now have to work that much harder to stand out from a sea of garbage.
Your odds and my odds of having our resumes thrown out summarily are 100x what they were a few years ago, because time-per-resume has dropped dramatically. That's the fallout from this trend to be concerned about, and we're the real victims of it, not the hiring companies.
Now it’s ATS’s turn to fix its own mess or someone else will. Start creating private benchmarks. Select from problems that LLMs can’t easily answer and use those for screening. Complaining that the genie won’t go back into the bottle isn’t a productive use of time.
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.
The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.
The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.
The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.
The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.
I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.
Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?
I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait until next year to see if I can get that now while still carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new positions.
I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as possible.
There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that increase.
You can't have many of these experiences before you become jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't get rewarded for it.
I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If that means spamming LLM applications for the next position, then so be it I guess.
Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that many people get far more money for far less effort than a Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all levels below where I'm at).
All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the world really works, so can you really blame people for getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken advantage of and be a sucker - do you?
I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not really how things should work, should it?
I see sovietization everywhere in the country now.
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).
The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.
Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.
I mean, 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.
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.
This is just a natural response to the automatic screening methods that have been used by the hiring side for years. Finally the sides have more equal power again in this arms race started by the hiring side.
Of course the consequence is that everyone loses and is worse off than if this arms race never started, but you (not you personally, hiring managers in general) should have thought about that before screening automatically. This is on you.
It's absurd, and only getting worse.
win-win-win situation for every party, they got me my last two jobs in Vienna
Idea 2: Bid to have yourself reviewed for the job. Money goes in escrow pool.
Apply like a bot, work like a bot.
There's noise all around happening.
Maybe the problem is that spamming people is free.
We don't even have the job posted publicly anywhere and we get >100 submissions per day. Many are duplicates. I've found some that with some minor research turn out to be foreign organized crime. A large number of them had the exact same cover letter with changes in the names and past jobs.
Not only is it difficult to find candidates that actually fit the job role, it's hard to go through any that are even real people.
I've told many friends of mine to use connections and not online job postings because it's basically impossible right now with the automated resume submission companies.
And then the candidate management tools such as lever told me that no, every one of those candidates that applied were real people -- even when I provided proof that at least 40 of them were linked to a single organized crime group out of China.
During interviews, candidates use tools like HDMI dual-screen setups, ChatGPT, Otter AI, or Fathom AI to cheat and secure jobs. These consulting firms even fabricate green card verifications and other documents, enabling them to crack most interviews unless the candidate is exceptionally unskilled.
Once hired, these companies often delegate the actual work to individuals in India, paying them as little as $500 while profiting $4,000–$5,000 per month from the arrangement.
We uncovered this issue when we began conducting on-site interviews. While these candidates can handle medium-level LeetCode problems during virtual evaluations, they struggle with basic tasks, like implementing a LinkedList or solving simple LeetCode problems, in person.
Alarmingly, these consulting companies are becoming more sophisticated over time. This raises a critical question: how can genuinely experienced candidates compete in such a landscape?
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.
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.)
But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.
Either the market needs to come up with a good solution that encourages good behavior from both sides or the governments can step in and start regulating.
How could regulations help?
Both sides already have good incentives to match positions to candidates; yet we are collectively failing.
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.
...
"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.
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...
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.
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.
I saw this as a marketing kind of problem, your conversion is based both on number and quality of your leads.
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.
hate the game playa ;)
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?
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 core problem is not that the systems suck but that so many people in IT lost their jobs in the last 2-3 years so that they don't have a choice other than to spray-and-pray (in the end of the day you need to put the food on the table).
Things won't improve until hiring recovers (increase in labor demand), and some IT professionals probably will pivot to other industries (decrease in labor supply), as it happened in 2000 and again in 2008.
I 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.
I'd like to know more about a manual approach.
I think both approaches are valid. I took the automated approach to online dating, married now. So that worked out.
Taking the automated approach for companies will probably work in a similar fashion as online dating. However, unlike online dating, I feel very strong targeted approaches have a chance of working better as long as you get to the interview stage.
Targeted approaches don't work with online dating as the biggest issue is figuring out with whom you have chemistry. For work, there's no such thing to figure out - not to the extent as it is required like romantic intimacy.
What would a targeted approach to online dating be?
From GP:
> spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there
Replace "where I want to work" with "who I want to date" and it sounds concerning.
A great way to test this is to wait for the email inviting you to an interview.
The emotional rollercoaster of selling yourself on a company only for it not to work out hurts too much. It's also a cost borne only by the applicant. It's easy to want to kick that can down the road until you're sure that you have a shot where some part, at least, is within your own control.
It will never be entirely down to your own performance and actions. Lots of job descriptions out there are for roles without a budget, or at companies with hiring moratoria, or where there's already a successful applicant waiting for a formal job offer.
The effort you put into researching an application, IMO, should be a function of the effort required by the applicant to proceed and the respect given to applicants by employers. The effort for a phone interview is very low. The respect is near zero.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slavelabour/search/?q=job+applicati...
My advice for both sides: don’t use job boards. Use your own website.
I can't remember the details, but I stopped taking it seriously.
In a similar way, recruiters post ghost jobs to gather data and make companies look like they are growing.
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?
Certification doesn't prevent accidents - the only thing it provides is scapegoats for faulty systems.
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.
I would be in favor of licensing knowing it would probably exclude me unless of course it does not require a university degree. I was not born into a family of means and being autodidactic allowed me to excel beyond my upbringing.
The best path would be to have journeyman type of pathway.
Basically you find a grad right now and make them do a coding test. Something is broken there.
A degree could include the vocational qualification as a 1 year study, but having the vocation qualification alone would save youngsters a lot of money and reduce the burden on hiring. You could even still interview coding questions but the application process can remove the spam/ai bullshit to some extent. "Can they code?" is answered.
Interested to hear if you have a different thought here
My guess for most of us is "not very much at all", several of the best people I've worked with as programmers did not have a CS degree, and I've interviewed people with CS degrees who could not write a function to sum an array of integers in any language of their choosing, meaning "honoring their degree" would have been an unwise choice.
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.
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.
I’m glad it’s a trivial amount of effort for you, I guess.
As for the fave 5 idea - I don't see an easy way to game this if it's tied to a single user account. You would only be seen as prioritizing the company to the employer if you're actively prioritizing them. Most people are applying to way more than 5 companies simultaneously and don't know where their application stands for the company. It would be too risky to try and rotate it continuously.
Telling facts about yourself is done in the CV, not cover layer
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.
I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.
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.
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.
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.
And resume refinement representing and reformatting essentially the same information has always been a commonplace trick to improve your odds. My simple first pass resumes around that time must have never seen the light of human eyes because optimizing things around such systems, adjusting formatting, pushing docx versions, and so on increased my return response rate per submission for the exact same information. People just tend to forget they’ve gone through such processes or are moving positions through networking. The cold market has been abysmal for quite some time, even if you’re qualified.
Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.
Aye, this. Got all of my jobs historically though word of mouth. Sat next to someone at a wedding reception, or talks at a Linux User Group, or colleagues from one job going to the next and pulling everyone with them, etc.
cold applying was brutal. worked out, eventually, but it feels/felt like such a waste of time.
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."
is it "fear mongering" or is it reality?
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).
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!
At a small company, a chat over lunch that you didn't even go into thinking of it as interview may be enough.
Ask me how I know in both cases :-)
What about situations where you were laid off and can’t really wait months to get a new one?
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
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.
Enjoy. It's Nobel prize material.
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.You'd still need to interview people because there's no license that will tell you who the good/great candidates are
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.
Wild.
(Thanks for sharing this info btw.)
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).
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
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.
Also, it tends to be concentrated in the USA.
However, I see one absolutely perfect contract about every month or two.
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.
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.
Your comment is like "why use AES256? People can still brute force it." Sure... good luck
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.
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.
Our society is poor at creating scales and then selecting a cutoff point for illegality. There are 0b10 types of people: binary thinkers and grey area thinkers.
All-or-nothing thinking (often also referred to as ‘black and white thinking’, ‘dichotomous thinking’, ‘absolutist thinking’, or ‘binary thinking’) is a common form of cognitive distortion or ‘unhelpful thinking style’. People who think in all-or-nothing terms may also act in equivalently extreme ways. They may veer, for example, between complete abstinence and ‘binges’, or between extreme effort and none.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.
Reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He just made stuff up all the time. Turns out, the answers never actually mattered, people were just bored at their desk and wanted to give the appearance of doing work. I think he's in management at Apple now.
Clearly management material.
We all know that.
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.
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.
Yes, but I think it is overly reductive. As a candidate, you’ve to now apply for a magnitude more of jobs. Tailoring resumes per job takes time, and given how many more I’ve to send, this doesn’t scale.
Additionally, whatever ATS system is being used might auto-reject it because the algorithm decided it’s not a match. If tailored resumes increased hit rate, that would be a different story but that is not the case.
This 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...
Thanks to the automated systems put in place on the hiring side, you often never see the applications of many of the people genuinely applying because your stupid automated filters determined they weren't qualified.
Less than 1/100th of 1%.
You should also see what I had to say about the history of slavery, and wage slaves, and what anyone can expect from them. The TL;DR is that what you are looking for no longer exists if it ever did, because you have adopted a scorched; salt the earth strategy for finding labor.
What you call lazy, may actually be incredibly hard working (given the current environment) to even get to the point where you see them. Is it their fault you didn't recognize them for the value they could potentially provide? If you pay wages comparable to an office assistant for skilled labor, why do you expect to get anything more than what that first role provides? The economics of things are important.
You need to re-calibrate unreasonable expectations (delusions) back to some more close to reality.
?? 1 in 1500 is 1/15th of 1%, which is more than 1/100th of 1%...
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.
> 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
I already saw "work" offers where YOU have to pay them their salary. As in, to employer, for the "opportunity"
Who would want to work at such a place? Why would I trust the opinions of people who work at such a place?
I acknowledge that some feel their contributions are at that level, but that doesn't mean it's the norm.
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.
I know a few mechanical engineers and they haven’t seemed to have the same hurdles. One works in the car industry, a few others in industrial areas, they all switch jobs by simply applying online to their desired companies.
I know some accountants and people who work in logistics who cleared lower bars to get interviews, though I suspect the accounting shortage had some to do with the former.
Finance is very networking heavy but clearing their interview process in some respects sounds easier than the leetcode engineering grind but that may not be representative of the situation as a whole.
Networking never hurts, no matter the industry but tech has a self inflicted wound around hiring practices few other industries seem to have
I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).
If recruiting departments really suffer at parsing about 50 apps per day per recruiter, I can see why this got so bad so quickly.
Afaik, any kind of slush-pile reading (including grading, which is probably the best researched) tends to get less fair as the process wears on the reader.
GP isn't optimizing for finishing the pile, but for making the most of what's in it.
I want to give everyone a fair shake (including reading cover letters) and for me, resume fatigue sets in if I read more than 50.
Of course my guess could be way off, but what you are saying is definitely the exception to the common narrative nor does it match what I've seen.
> AI screening
There's been aggressive keyword filtering since long before LLMs exploded.
I 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...)
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.
Software is not a religious text. There is good software and bad software and good and bad ways to make software. Usually the devil is in the details and context matters a lot in practice, so it's hard to just write down the answer to all things in all scenarios.
But in a technical interview things are pretty cut and dry. There are in fact right answers and wrong answers and if an interviewer is nitpicking during an interview then they are in fact not doing their job as an interviewer well. If they do the same thing on the job then they are at best a mediocre engineer.
Of course later, in time, countries impacted more people. Population grows with time, and any rational comparison along these lines would need to be normalized against population, but the truth in the ambiguity of the latter phrase doesn't make the former phrase true.
The inquisition lasted quite a long time (1478-~1820), it has been attributed to the collapse of Portugal/Spain as a national superpower of the time (which was dependent on sea power), the brain drain from fleeing refugees (mostly Jews) was also quite impactful (for France), and it was self-financing. The events became less about heresy, and more about seizing wealth domestically, while creating an environment of persecution for cover. The impacts of it are still felt today in those localities where it was worst.
In terms of the many domains important for measuring the health of a country, these events dramatically impacted the state of things towards the negative across multiple critical domains, as well as their neighbors.
Its improper to discount, minimize, and nullify (through fallacy) both events and their effects, that have been well established by experts without providing some proper basis.
Characterizing it solely as propaganda in isolation isn't a valid characterization. Many people died, or were imprisoned and abused, and the surviving records show this.
According to wikipedia (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisizione#L'Inquisizione_sp... they put to death 826 people, so that's less than 3 people per year and less than 2% of the people they judged.
We know this accurately because it was a legal proceeding that left paper trails which can be studied.
Your claim that it led to the collapse of portugal and spain seems quite wild. And certainly doesn't explain why you think it had no ill effect in protestant countries that kept burning people for 200 years more.
Not yet!
I am sure 12+ years of experience should be able to do it easily.
> 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.
It's not perfect, but it's far from zero in my experience.
I'm now on the side of the table where I frequently make personnel decisions: hire, promote, offer a new role, offer a new assignment, merit adjustment, expand a successful team, disband or merge an unsuccessful team into another, transfer in, transfer out, put on a PIP, etc. Most of the good things on that list go to people who demonstrate ability and results, and rarely do those results come without effort. Most of the bad things on that list go to people who demonstrate an inability to deliver results, which is sometimes related to a lack of effort.
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.
Is it that they are applying to places where you don’t pair program?
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.
Also, there's the "fake it till you make it" thinking.
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
IIRC "nepotism" is specifically family/relatives, and the larger Venn-diagram circle would be "favoritism."
Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.
You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.
Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.
The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.
When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.
Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.
This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.
In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.
There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.
Population levels are not the same, this comparison is without basis.
You also assume the formal documented executions are the only deaths where people were killed and died, they are not.
About 5 minutes of 'proper' research based in method, will establish that you are mistaken and don't know what you are talking about. This is the problem when you try to have an AI think for you, you get it wrong, and potentially become delusional.
The inquisition lasted almost three centuries. At its height, Spain had a population of about 7.5 million people. Many prosecutions occurred, but few executions as part of trials. The majority of people died from maltreatment, torture, and executions (absent trials) and these records are sparse in the historical record, but there are credible records to support more died than were executed.
The mortality rate was also significantly higher than it is today, and the families of the accused individuals often died from poverty as a result of fear from guilt-by-association (if you were to include that, most don't). Additionally, the Spanish inquisition inspired surrounding countries to similar acts of terror, and in the Latin America's as well. We are only talking about Spain here. The full global death count as a result of the inquisition is much much higher.
You can find established historical material linked at: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/39443/what-was-t....
This is the sixth result down on google.
Well, I certainly hope your revival rate is better than your hiring success rate.
“Mouth to mouth” lol
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).
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?
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.
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.
You must work in a super specialized industry, then
But arguably, a candidate who hasn't ever had to contemplate the concept of "linked list" but can derive the necessary ideas on the spot given the basic design, has some useful talents.
Hiring fast and firing fast (for lying or misrepresentation) is almost always a better business decision than being ultra defensive in the hiring process.
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.
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."
And for what? To save money on hiring? Not worth it.
Ask me how I know... :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As always, it's arms race and one I wish I'd didn't have to participate in.
- 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 :)
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.
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
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.
this requires a simple saas solution - someone’s working on this for sure already as it is already a big issue
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.
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.
> 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?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.
I guess that would work in societies where this was legal - not sure if I know of any though.
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.
And it instantly filters out all the spam applicants and chat GPT cheaters.
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.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't this be a desired outcome? Unemployment doesn't give a carte blanche to send spam.
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?
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.
What I don’t get is what’s the economic incentive for this behaviour
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.
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.
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?
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.
See here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_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?
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.
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.)
This is mostly because if i don't know that i'm asking for the wrong thing, the llm won't correct me and provide code that answers the wrong question and make things up to do that if needed.
Sure i learn by debugging the llm's nonsensical code too, and it solves my "don't want to watch a 2h tutorial because if i just watch the 10minutes that explain what i want to learn, i don't understand any of the context". But it's not much faster with the llm since I need to google things anyway to check if it is gaslighting me.
It does help understanding errors i'm unfamiliar with and the most value i found is pasting in my own code and asking it to explain what the code should do, so i find errors in my logic when it compiles but doesn't have the desired effect. And it will mention concepts i'm lacking to look them up (it won't explain em clearly but at least it's flagging them to me) in a way youtubers earely do.
Still haven't made up my mind if it is a net positive as it often ends up getting on my nerves to wait 10min for a fluff intro before it gets to the answer. Better than a 20min fluff video intro on youtube maybe?
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.
I don't know where you work where code is written once and is never changed again, but enjoy it while it lasts...
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.
This is a hot take. I'm 100% not onboard with.
Meanwhile, a sr with an LLM is a straight up superpower!
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.
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.
These guys already developed an invisible desktop app to help everyone cheat on remote interviews.
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.
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.
I don't fill my my resume with a bunch of spam buzzwords for every adjacent technology I've ever used, because certain things are kind of implied by other things. If I put "set up multiple clusters across different Linux systems", I don't also cram in "systemd, bash, upstart, scripting, ls, cp, du, nohup", despite the fact that I know how to use all of those things, because I think they're implied by "me setting up Linux clusters".
A software engineer reading my resume would come away with a decent understanding of what skills I have, but a recruiter who doesn't know anything outside of keyword-matching and hitting the `fwd` button in Outlook (which appears to be most recruiters) will see "HE DOESN'T KNOW BASH, SEE HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON HIS RESUME."
Now, of course, most of this is on me, it's up to me to learn how to play the game, whether or not I like the system doesn't really change anything, but as far as I can tell, the "solution" to this is to turn my resume into a low-quality SEO-spam piece of shit so as to try and satisfy the most incompetent person who might read it.
If a posting gets 500 applications (which is about how many apps the last 4 roles I’ve listed got before we closed them) and we have an engineer spend 5 minutes per resume reading through each resume, that’s a full week of engineer time spent on screening alone. That’s not a good use of time when most of the resumes are a straight no.
I’m assuming your writing style is different in professional environments, but if it’s not, and I saw even like 10% of the snark you’ve put here, I’d instantly dismiss you unless we were hiring for a principal into fellowship IC role and you were a 100% match.
If you’re writing your resume to be read by software engineers or sysadmins, you’re writing for the wrong audience. That’s not their fault for being “incompetent”, it’s yours.
Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...
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.
>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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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..)
... Legal action on what basis, exactly?
Dumb example, say you didn't hire someone because they wore a Marilyn Manson Antichrist Superstar shirt to an interview and you think that's not appropriate attire for an interview, and suppose you put that into your feedback for the rejection letter.
Now the candidate has a specific "I was rejected for this shirt". They might come back and say "Actually I'm a satanist and this shirt is part of my religion, so I'm going to sue you for religious discrimination". Suddenly you have a lawsuit on your hands, simply because you thought they were dressing unprofessionally.
Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and I doubt that there are a ton of Marilyn Manson fans trying this, but it's just to show my point: It's much safer to simply leave it vague with something generic like "while we were impressed with your qualifications, we've decided to pursue other candidates" email. They can maintain plausible deniability about the reasons they rejected you, and you don't really have fodder to sue them over that.
That said, I absolutely hate how normalized ghosting is in the job world. A candidate isn't entitled to a job, but I do think they're entitled to a response, even if it's just a blanket form rejection.
- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.
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.
1: see https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=otherbranch.com - the folks spun out of Triplebyte
I don’t write it to be “read by software engineers” per se. I describe my skillset and things I have worked on. I don’t load it with a million buzzwords of every single noun that I am aware of.
I acknowledge that I probably play the game “wrong”, insofar that there’s any “right” way of doing it, but I don’t have to like the game, and I certainly am allowed to think that it’s very frustrating that I have to fill my resume with SEO spam of synonyms because most recruiters are unwilling to learn anything more than basic keyword matching.
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.
And I say that even while writing this comment in Firefox
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.
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.
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.
Seems to be 90% of the problem reported on this post
If you're paying people $290k a year, no kidding you should bring them in for an on-site interview?
The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
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.
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 :)
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”).
Even if that's the case, isn't it just a matter of conversing in a way that the LLM can't easily follow?
“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”
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.
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.
I'm firmly on team "require a coworker to say okay before merging", and this is exactly why.
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.
I think the description I remember on glass door was that it was "high school all over again".
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
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
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.
"School" is quite variable.
Weak signal: you only went to class and did OK in them.
Strong signal: you had an internship, or undergrad research experience, or part-time employment as a TA/tutor, or have a completed project to show off, or some kind of non-trivial community/group/club/fraternity leadership.
Really strong signal: you published a paper with someone I know and they recommend you to me.
Most people are looking at whether you just went to (whatever they consider) a top tier university.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
They seem much better at producing bullshit that’s difficult to filter through, than performing actually useful work.
The sad truth of the situation is that all the incentives for a company point in the direction of giving no feedback at all. This isn’t because hiring managers are sociopaths.
It's just common decency. "Sorry, we're not continuing" is not going to get you sued.
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?
> There are two "R"s in the word "cranberry."
Good example to illustrate how LLMs work, if it is not correct for cranberry, but correct for raspberry or strawberry.
> There are 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”
Either way, if my cheap standard unpaid ChatGPT version gives the correct result, I don't think it counts as a valid catch anymore.
Coca-Cola and Toys R Us have found them useful for making terrible commercials cheaper than making terrible commercials by hand and way cheaper than making good commercials that actually improve their brand image. Seems weird they’d do that for immensely expensive holiday television spots rather than throwaway 5 second YouTube spots or something but hey — I’m clearly not a corporate genius.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get an automated food/water dispenser, save yourself some money.
For finding my first job I had to pay for a few trips myself (flights and hotel).
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.
Fly out and hotel yes, on own dime, no.
Obviously that’s a financial burden to the company, but minimal compared to the long term costs to the company of an employee.
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.
I would withdraw from the process immediately if I encountered a company so cheap
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.
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?
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.
As an aside, I shudder thinking about what a heavily ‘SEO’d’ LLM experience would be like.
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.
Total: 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”
No changes—still 4 Rs! Let me know if I can clarify further.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe in Europe, in the US it's an email.
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!
If they switched from doing all this to pressing people for estimates.