We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified.
The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview.
However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.)
What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw.
The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen.
I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.
Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience).
In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos.
Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation).
Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager. You might say “well that’s nepotism then since he’s under qualified”, but I’m sure he would make the argument that he got the job because of his “stellar reputation and extensive network”.
It’s an abhorrent situation to be in. Everyone knows he can’t code but because he got hired at such a senior level he’s making high level decisions that make no sense. Give me a qualified rando any time of the day.
I strongly agree with this, and I'm glad you put it so clearly. If you've been in your industry say 10 years or more, you should have built a reputation by that point that makes people say "I want to work with that person again, or I'd recommend that person to a friend who has a job opening". (Important thing to clarify, though, I'm not denigrating anyone who has been out of work a long time. I've seen many categories of jobs in the tech industry where there are simply a lot fewer jobs to go around - it's musical chairs and a lot of chairs got taken away all at once).
I would put in an important caveat, though, and that's for people who are early in their careers. The hiring process really is truly shitty for people just entering the workforce and for people with only one or two jobs under their belt.
There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles.
Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.
1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that
2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
The "smell test" takes longer than you think and often involves an actual interview.
1. ~10% of applications are over-tailored. Really? You did <hyper-specific thing> with <uber-specific details> exactly matching our job description at $BigCo 3 years before the language existed and 5 years before we pioneered it? The person might be qualified, but if they can't be arsed to write a resume that reflects _their_ experiences then I don't have enough evidence to move them forward in the interviewing process.
2. ~40% of applications have obvious, major inconsistencies -- the name on LinkedIn doesn't match the name on the resume, the LinkedIn link isn't real, the GitHub link isn't real, the last 3 major jobs on LinkedIn are different from the last 3 major jobs on the resume, etc. I don't require candidates to put those things on a resume, but if they do then I have a hard time imagining the candidate copy-pasting incorrectly being more likely than the LLM hallucinating a LinkedIn profile.
Those are quick scans, well under 4s each on average. We've used 80 minutes of our budget and are down to 600 applications. Of the remainder:
3. ~90% of remaining applications fail to meet basic qualifications. I don't know if they're LLM-generated or not, but a year of Python and SQL isn't going to cut it for a senior role doing low-level optimizations in a systems language. If there's a cover letter, a professional summary, mention of some side project, or if their GitHub exists and has anything in it other than ipynb files with titles indicating rudimentary data science then they still pass this filter. If they're fresh out of school then I also give them the benefit of the doubt and consider them for a junior role. Even with that leeway, 90% of those remaining applicants don't have a single thing in any of the submitted materials suggesting that they're qualified.
So...we're down to 60 applications. We spent another 40 minutes. In retrospect, that's already our full 2hr budget, so I did exaggerate the speediness a bit, but it's ballpark close. You can spend 2min fully reading and taking notes on each of the remaining applications, skimming the GitHub projects of anyone who bothered to post them, and still come out in 4hr for the lot.
It's probably worth noting, that isn't all to say that <5% of programmers with that skillset are qualified. I imagine the culprit is spray-and-pray LLM spam not even bothering to generate a plausible resume or managing to search for matching jobs. If bad resumes hit 99 jobs for every 1 job a good resume hits then you only expect a 1% success rate from the perspective of somebody reviewing applications.
Here it is, if you are curious:
"Thank you for your interest in the <position> position at <company> in <country>. Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with your application, but we appreciate your time and interest in <company>."
The Resume I am sending out is just an evolution of one that worked very well for me for 25+ years. The roles, as far as I am able to see, are 80%-95% keyword match, with the non-matched keywords being exceedingly superficial. Yes, I haven't listed "blob storage", but guess what else I have used but haven't listed: "semicolon", "variable declaration" and "for-loops". Yet in this day and age one seems to be punished for not doing so.
I am very principled in not letting any AI anywhere close to my CV, because I think the usefulness of signal it conveys rests solely on it being addressed to and read by human, hence it has to be fully authored and tailored by human too. But these days this idea has completely flipped. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Standing by principles could lead to literal dying. Personally, I made peace with dying, but I cannot allow my family to go homeless. As such, I don't see it below me to go down the path of mass-blasting heavily over-tailored Resumes. If it bumps my chances from 0.05% to 0.2%, that's a four-fold increase that may be the difference between, literally, life and death. The organic job search with my natural skills and authentic ways of presentation I relied on for twenty years is dead.
And different types of jobs require skillsets that aren't adequately conveyed in a traditional resume.
Probably not much yield in going through more than a few hundred.
Shuffle them around, start skimming through and throw out the rest once you realize you’re just seeing more of the same.
Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”
It would be absolutely amazing if employers and recruiters finally were doing exactly this. We are in this dead end precisely because everyone is under false illusion that their pool of candidates has a hidden gem outshining everybody else in existence, and they absolutely need to sift through the whole pool to find this gem. As a result, all pools are never exhausted and only ever spreading, with more and more desperate people sucked into multiples of them.
When I was recently unemployed I started doing that after months of getting ignored by most companies and, in my experience, the only difference is that I got far more acks ("Hi! Sure, I'll take a look at your resume and reach out!") but I got a similar rate of applications-to-interview compared to applying through the official platforms.
Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.
If the job posting lists requirements A-F and you have A, B, D, E, and F, then you'd do both yourself and the company a disservice by disqualifying yourself. Put it in your cover letter if you can't handle the discrepancy.
I'm not going to address either the morality or advisability of being "dishonest" by this standard. I've just seen too many people sell themselves short, when in fact they are exactly what the company is looking for, it's just that the recruiter wasn't able to spell that out in the job description. And it's not necessarily because they were stupid either; if they only put the true minimum necessary criteria into a job post, then (1) they'll get flooded with underqualified candidates who don't even come close to what they need, and (2) they may very well miss out on good candidates because the job looks lame.
Source: I've been on both ends. As a candidate, I mentioned during the interview that I actually had no experience in the required technology X but I had related experience. The interviewer just laughed; it was obvious to both of us that it didn't matter. As someone offering a job (not the hiring manager but sort of), I talked to a couple of people who were hired into other roles in the company and asked why they didn't apply for our position, they seemed perfect for it (to me). Several of them pointed to some specific line item under the requirements that disqualified them. Sometimes it was an item that we'd removed later because we weren't getting enough people in, even though strictly speaking it was part of the job. We would sometimes push the recruiter to add "experience with X, or willing to learn X", but they would push back and honestly I'm not sure I know better than them. They were the ones who had to be the front line filtering through the noise resumes, after all.
There's also the job posts that distinguish between hard requirements and nice-to-haves, using various language (e.g., "bonus if you...").
Most likely this isn't an attribute that most employers actually want, though.
But when the job description contains a lot of very general terms (e.g. "scientific computing") and every part of your job history is just parroting a specific term used in the job description with no details it doesn't pass the smell test.
I absolutely respect keyword-heavy job/project descriptions. You kind of have to do it to make it through filtering by most recruiters. But real descriptions are coherent and don't just parrot back terms in ways that makes it clear you don't understand what the are. You find a way to make a coherent keyword soup that still actually describes what you did. That's great! But it's really obvious folks are misrepresenting things when a resume uses all the terms in the job description in ways that don't make sense.
I kinda think we've reach this weird warfare stage of folks submitting uniquely LLM-generated resumes for each position to combat the aggressive LLM-based filtering that recruiting is starting to use. I assume people think they can do well in an interview if they can just get past the automated filtering. I'm sure some are trying to do 3 and 4 remote jobs at once with little real responsibilities, too, but I find it hard to believe that's the majority. I may be very wrong there, though...
Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z
Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z
Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.
Why do they even bother?
Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview.
So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.
One possibility for a free and impartial services would be via government funding. Unemployment insurance is paying out a few hundred per week per person, cutting that time down even a little could pay for a decent background check. That doesn’t get you a job specific resume but it should be good enough for an initial screening for most jobs.
Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.
This is a you failure. Let's say you have a team of five. Five of you can't scan through 200 resumes? Be better people I guess, you would not have wanted to be treated like that yourself.
During the DotCom bust I ended up getting a taxi license in NYC and driving yellow taxicabs on 12-hour (standard) shifts for over 18 months. During the GFC, I got trained in HazMat handling and joined contracting companies as an employee cleaning the beaches after the BP oil spill for a year. In both cases, I re-entered the software engineering market as a high-demand candidate and made even more in base and total comp than I had previously.
I am over 50 now. I never transitioned to a management position. Still, I do plan to re-enter the software engineering market when the current winter ends and spring next arrives.
[0] I work with agentic AI on my own projects. Due to limited context windows, even the best models like Claude Opus or Alibaba's Qwen-coder require much more expert handholding than people let on. Even with good context engineering and memory tools.
We have an increasing amount of immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job, in combination with the tech sector shrinking, as well as companies as a whole being much more careful when hiring.
There would need to be some explosion in the amount of tech jobs, in order for everyone to be able to get one. However, I just cannot see what could cause something like this in the near future.
Don't underestimate what access to the best medical care in the world will do, regardless of your lifestyle.
I'll admit it's tactless, but as a presumably European in your other comment what have I sacrileged against God? You asked an economical question it's hard to make economical decisions with repeated 90 day deadlines.
ZIRP is one example of a decade-long trend that is ending.
According to wikipedia[0] there doesn't seem to be any significant uptick in H1Bs. Is that what you were referring to by "immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job"?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_visa_tables_and...
April 18, 2017; EO 13788: Buy American and Hire American (H-1B reform)
Still waiting on that one. Just need a favorable administration back in office.
I think that a slight increase in autonomy of other western countries could go a long way
Pretty bold. Things like manufacturing haven't recovered and we're seeing similar outsourcing in tech.
For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family because they are kind and considerate and people don't mind having them around. A lot of street homeless have mental or substance issues that make it hard for them to coexist with other people.
I've had the luxury, working in tech, to have lost a job and had the opportunity to take a few months off before searching. Even this was incredibly stressful in practice, but I never had to worry about losing my place of living.
You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"?
And yeah, the paycheck-to-paycheck stat blows my mind. Somehow the standard American experience has become the latest model iPhone (financed), a new car (financed), a rented home, 4-5 meals out weekly, and almost zero money in the bank. And all this in a country with some of the weakest social security in the developed world. I'm sure the half-trillion dollars spent on advertising every year has something to do with this.
Depends -- how safe is their parents' home?
That answer can vary, for a lot of reasons.
It doesn’t.
No, but this is also not ideal for many reasons
I have a friend going through this right now, actually. The biggest challenge is that her parents don't live anywhere near a strong job market. So the decision for her is "be homeless in a place where jobs are available" or "have a home but no access to employers"
It's not ideal
Think about it, I'm guessing the guy welding the beams in your kid's school isn't making a quarter of what you make a year. Yet he has to be reminded every day that he's an economic failure vs what do you do, javascript? Early stage startup ideas? I bet it was pretty good in 2006-8.
The majority of software engineers aren’t earning anywhere close to 4 times a union welder’s wages.
People like to share it because they are LLM like and just repeat things without looking at the data. “Hallucinations” are the common way that humans experience the world. World models born of pure fiction.
Also wtf I know journeyman ironworkers. They own homes in Oakland. People act like this is some poverty mode existence. Their lives are fine.
However, saying that the median American household has ~$200k net worth doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing great. A lot of the burden of funding retirement falls on the individual in the US, meaning if you're 60 and only have $200k of net worth in a M/HCOL city you're still potentially kind of fucked.
up until recently, you didnt know the definition of homelessness that is used in the data. how are you making claims about the data? which data? what does it say?
since you know journeymen, you might want to ask them to meet their apprentices. That way, you could visit the apprentices homes that theyve bought, and can definitely pay the mortgage on by themselves.
or, if they dont have any, you could try to meet some CNAs at the local hospital? or the person at the grocery til?
its wild you dont think poor people exist.
BoA says 25% are paycheck-to-paycheck based on their internal data, which is still pretty nuts.
Median net worth is almost $200k. People in this country are so wealthy.
How is that actually defined by whoever measured it?
Does that include digital nomads who don’t have a permanent residence?
What about their wife and children? Do they get to stay with them too?
I didn't say that they're thriving and living their dream, just that they're still a couple rungs above homeless.
A lot of my friends' parents rely on their support. If they lost their jobs their parents would be in trouble, too.
This is one of the most out-of-touch HN comments I've seen in a while. Most people are not nearly as privileged as the community on these forums. Not even all the people posting here are fully removed from the risk of being out on their ass. Some have moved from other parts of their home country (think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market). Some have moved from other parts of the world to where they are and have no one upon whom they can impose. Plenty have huge student loans and are so fresh out of school that they're at the edge of the many rounds of layoffs affecting the tech industry in the last few years and lack enough experience on their resumés to land a new position before their finances run out.
I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back. And I've only been talking about people on these forums, the "fortunate" types.
If they've failed to find a job for long enough that they're about to be homeless, does it really make sense to remain in the most expensive housing market in the country?
I think it's equally out of touch to imply that if you select a random person from across America (the richest country in the world) you will land on someone who is an inch from homelessness, with no close family or community, massive debt, and living in terror of the next layoff. Certainly there are people in that situation, but to imply that it's somehow the median American experience is to caricature the country.
All I said is that "most people" have rungs to fall back on, not "everyone".
There are rungs which are available to the population at large, so all of us have those privileges. For example the armed forces are recruiting. They will put a roof over your head and food in your belly, as well as give you medical coverage.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/08/lowest-homeownership-rate-...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf (page 22, “Financial Assets” section)
I recently stumbled upon a YouTuber grousing about losing her six-figure tech job. She was in full freakout mode about budgeting etc. but something didn't seem quite right. Then she disclosed she's married, financially stable, husband still has a great job, etc.
It made me stop and think how there's people out there delivering groceries, putting on an apron, all so they don't have to switch to eating cat food by the end of the week.
OTOH ex-Googlers are worried they might be forced to switch to store-brand mineral water within weeks.
One of my friends has given up on finding a software job and become a handyman to make ends meet. I get that not everyone in tech is loaded. I just don't think holding your nose and gagging at the "reek" when you deliberately read about someone who has six months of savings is a productive or useful reaction.
Interesting way to characterize GP's response when all they did was use a word in a very common way.
- "Hey, I applied, could you hire me?"
- "I have a compsci, I'm qualified, I sent a resume"
- "can I use you as a reference?"
I don't envy anyone looking for a job right now.
When I was hiring somewhat recently, I talked to a worryingly high number of people that didn't know what role they're applying to, had perfect resumes and were taking the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude to its limit. I mean I get there's a sales aspect to an interview, in a way, but this was pushing it way too far. It was a very frustrating experience.
A lot of the recent advice has pretty much destroyed the hiring process, in my humble opinion. It swings from solving hard computer science problems to testing trivia to being a political round-table. I keep on wondering how much worse can it get before a reset is needed.
Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
HN has been huge for my career personally, so I made this site to help make it easier to find stuff that's good for you: https://hnresumetojobs.com/
Sincerely wishing you the best of luck.
Otherwise oof, that sounds like volatility only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
Is this not the purpose of a job? I've had 3 long-term jobs/contracts since the pandemic, for a total of 2.5/5 years, and that's a better rate of the prior 6 years before that. Idk what their story is, but I think it's pretty typical for people who've had stable careers for one reason or another to assume it's within someone's control how often or how long they're able to work for. Sure, sometimes you're just job hopping or intentionally taking risks on early startups, but if the job goes away—depending on many factors—the ability to turn around and get another one can take a laughable amount of time, and the awareness of the perception of "the signal for prospective employers" compounding that difficulty makes it harder the longer it takes.
I try not to think about it, but there's been numerous times where I've been a year or more out from losing a job due to layoffs or financials or whatever, and getting rejected by even the least desirable place in the 4th+ round of interviews, usually by that point shifting my energy from applying/interviewing to looking at trade school. Imo it's always been brutal out there if you don't know someone running a startup who'll hook it up right away.
In my personal experience, as of the start of my current job and every time prior, in 10 years I'd accumulated no savings, always draining it to nearly zero by the time I'd get the next one. Ain't pretty.
I've had some extended periods of unemployment. Only advice I can offer is to strengthen existing social connections and put yourself in situations where you can meet new people. I've gotten work before from people I met in random social contexts. I guess you could call this "networking", but I hate that word. It's good to reduce your isolation, whether or not it directly lands you a job.
Email in bio if you want to chat. Maybe I can help.
This hurts. As someone who's been unemployed, struggling with mental health issues, for far longer than I'd care to admit in such a forum, I struggle with the question of when it's just been too long to realistically get back into it.
I wish you luck
Hope you find something soon !!
I wish you all the best and hope you find a job too.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.
This is solely done to reduce/delay pension payments by pushing the old unemployed into lower social security / forcing them to live off of their savings.
No one in any industry is looking for geratric 70 year olds.
I feel like the underlying issue is less with age and more with ossification. If you're a world expert in Visual Basic but don't want to learn that "fad" TypeScript, well, get used to being unemployed.
If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
And you have to do it for decades. You need to be able to tough it out through the worst of times (like the dot-com bubble, financial crisis, covid, and random political chaos like tariffs.)
You have to tune out the noise and always remember that on a long enough timeline, the market only goes up. And if you think it's "different" this time, it won't be for long.
Life never gets easier with age. I guess that's just something we all have to come to terms with eventually.
It's not that things get easier, they don't and I realize I can't do what I could at 28 but my attitude about life has changed. Less chasing sex, less impulsive actions, less neuroticism. More contentment and acceptance. Also I have seen a lot of ways to be screwed over by now and zillion personality types and I can smell potential problems a mile away.
On the downside I took what would have been a very minor fall in my 20's a few weeks ago and my shoulder still hurts. I'm not "old" like fallen and broke a hip but I would have been fully recovered after a few days 20 years ago I think.
One piece of advice for young whippersnappers: Age comes up on you a lot faster than you think when you are young. Take good care of your body, your teeth, your gut and your mind and don't put off eating and sleeping right and losing those extra pounds. Solid, lasting relationships are worth more than possessions and status too in my opinion. Those are easier to build when you are young.
HAHAHA. I have so much more "fu" money now, it really takes a lot of pressure off. Something goes wrong? I can solve it with money. Stranded somewhere? Just pay. Friend in trouble? Help out.
Pretty sure that short term trends drive it more than long-term visa holder counts.
- basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR
- everything is optimized for engagement, not outcomes, so there are lots or meaningless things to do (basically anything on linkedin). You might as well do some of them to stay sane but they'll never get you a job
- what's valuable is networking and getting the opportunity to speak to a real person who might want to work with you. There are always lots of jobs, even when there are no jobs, but there are trust problems, process and bureaucratic issues, and incompetence (all of HR/talent) that need to be navigated
- sort of redundant, anything that's easy (like Easy Applying to a job) is useless. Hard, uncomfortable prospecting, involving real people, increases your chance of success
When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client."
FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place).
Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume.
So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider.
(Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
I consider myself exceptionally lucky to land where I did, and yet still would not care to do that process again.
Foo Corp
Recruiter: [Jane Smith]
* 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown]
* 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe]
# Leads
* [Adam Albert] at [Bar Corp]
# Initial Contact
* [Brenda Baker] at [Qux, Inc.]
# Recruiter call
...
# Phone Screen
# Tech screen
# Onsite
# Rejected
* [Shifty Corp] (they gave me the heebie-jeebies)
# 2025-09-15
* On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] from [Foo Corp]
* Recruiter screen with [Chris Carter] at [Deluxe Pinkies]
# 2025-09-14
* Reference check with [Arctic Drilling and Waste]
Hyperorganization is one of my superpowers, and I leaned into it. Every morning I'd review the pipeline and timeline docs and ping every recruiter or company who I should've heard from but hadn't yet: "hey, it's me! Thanks for the chat the other day. Hope your Maltese, Mr. Pickles, feels better! Here's a picture of my cat waving to Mr. Pickles!" A lot of times that'd nudge them to respond and move things along.
I'm looking at my timeline right now and seeing the day where I had 2 recruiter screens, a tech screen, and an onsite. It was busy. But I was ready and willing to work, and at the end I turned down 3 pending offers to accept the one I most wanted.
Again, I count myself as exceptionally lucky. That said, half of "luck" is putting yourself in the right place, in the right condition, to jump on a good opportunity.
There are a lot of things to track all this. I personally didn't want to spend more than the minimum time setting up and using the system, because last think I wanted was to get nerdsniped into inventing a job application tracking systems instead of, like, applying for jobs. That would've been a real risk to me.
I followed up with the three of course, but was ghosted after one reply or so.
BTW, I did not, never, not once, apply to any jobs listed through LinkedIn this time around. I did that before and it was utterly demoralizing. Their ads were like "subscribe to LinkedIn Ultra and move to the top of the list of 9,000 people applying for this role!" I've never gotten a single hit from applying for a tech job through LinkedIn. I don't think that's actually a thing.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
I would be perfectly happy without a job. It's the income I'm concerned about.
A realistic UBI would be $10-15k/year, which means a crappy apartment and/or roommates and no luxuries. There's probably a margin where some people who want to do FIRE would be able to retire slightly earlier, but I can't see many people abandoning median or better paying jobs.
We only don't have it because we refuse to collect it. There is enough wealth in the world to end hunger, poverty and allow people to age to death in dignity, but we lack the political will to achieve any of these things.
US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars on wealth transfers from workers to non workers via Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other program. And even that doesn’t guarantee you will be able to see a doctor in a timely manner.
Real estate in particular (but there are others) is a bottomless pit that society dumps money into, and speculators scoop money out of.
I'm in western europe. I think the situation in the US is way different, though. Also, for juniors (or people with less than 8-10 years of experience) is much harder, that's true.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-uap-whistleblower-hear...
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
Some say this has already happened...
I'm trying not to upset the people around me.
OP, I would be interested in knowing if that's the case, why are you posting here on HN, getting up in the morning, doing the things you do etc?
Are you depressed (if so) in a physiological or psychological kind of way (because of something external?)
I will say I am not doing too well, but still, if I look at things objectively right now, I'd still rather wait and see what happens in this world rather than choosing nothingness. My rock bottom is someone's heaven
Because there are some incredibly serious consequences to it.
Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love.
That's when I learned to stop working for free.
Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.
If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.
The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.
Another small points: reduce your expenses. Basically plan for the worst in terms of budgeting. Widen your search space. There are other younger markets in global south you can also approach.
Theres this expression i couldn't exactly translate to English. It goes along the lines of loosen up your body (literal translation), but it's more about yielding to the flow and less about physically doing so.
This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.
Also, the number of junk resumes, where I take a resume block and post it into a search engine and it comes back with an exact match of the text. I write up a caustic response as to why not to hire the person… and they still slipped in!
He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again.
But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice.
I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale.
Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give.
What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets.
It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)
So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.
But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.
I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.
Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.
It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.
It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.
I agree.
But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.
Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.
>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.
When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.
This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people.
Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.
If I call you an idiot I will get banned.
It's not up to you to prove you're not actually an idiot no matter if its true or not.
This isn't twitter. You don't need to demand a ban against the first bruise to your ego.
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market
Edit: Maybe it could be used to start some sort of unemployed software engineer fight club?
That said, grinding through middling startup jobs also sucks.
The ability to get vc attention seems incredibly cliquey - not a game I really want to play again. On top of just wanting a normal / decent salary as a founder.
Dating is just a numbers game. Roughly speaking it's about maximising interactions with potential partners and taking a shot in as many of these interactions which go positively as possible.
You can game dating in your favour with a bit of strategy. Unfortunately job searches are much harder to game since you can exhaust the number of active positions for your preferred role quite rapidly. The only advice I can give on job searches is to keep your skillset as broad as possible. Specialising is good if when you find work you want to be paid well. Being well-rounded is good if you want to find work as easily as possible.
I’m not sure that the process the author describes is all that common in practice even if it is eminently sensible.
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Job_Seeker_Informati...
https://www.worksourceoregon.org/jobseekers
The tech industry has turned into some kind of beauty contest of who appears to be doing the most work. I suspect the reason why it's more about 'appearance' is because deep down, they are demoralized - They are only pretending to be motivated, they are not actually motivated to improve anything. They're motivated only to keep their job. They are laser focused on that goal. The rewards are small, the punishments are big.
It makes the work more competitive and stressful, especially for those who aren't used to keeping up appearances and actually want to get stuff done. You kind of have to play the game.
It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output but I feel like it's mostly backfiring. People are burned out. I was shocked to realize that even immigrants from developing countries who come to my country are feeling demoralized in the tech sector. 10 year ago, they felt they were on a career fast-track, now even they don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've met some of them with master degrees who feel like they walked into a trap by leaving their home countries. They're feeling the high cost of living. The cost of living (and salaries) also went up in their home countries, the remittances aren't what they used to be. Meanwhile, cost of living here is sky-high. Doesn't feel like success anymore, for anyone.
I'm very good at software development and I enjoy coding but even I've had thoughts of changing career to something more essential like plumbing or construction, to stop the feeling of powerlessness and systemic manipulation which seems to be the core of this industry. I need more control over my destiny. I'd like a career where skill determines outcomes with high reliability and doesn't require permission from gatekeepers. Unfortunately, the country I live in is not very good for bootstrapped software developers and raising money is impossible unless you have a certain pedigree.
The problem isn't that millennials are unwilling to support previous generations in their retirement, we are... but we are not allowed to because the game we play is a race to the bottom for our own survival, not one about value creation. The system is not letting us be efficient, it's forcing us into bureaucracy and politics; that's where the money is coming from.
An acquaintance of mine—he was the owner's/CEO's deputy at a place I worked—now runs a team-coaching-turned-recruitment business. I saw a question from him on social media the other day, something along the lines of: "Some businesses in the industry are receiving over 5,000 applications for advertised roles. How do you effectively screen that many applications?" I didn’t respond, of course—I have neither credentials nor experience, nor any real relationship with this guy—but I formed an opinion nonetheless.
My intuition was simply: you don’t. If your candidate pool’s fitness function is normally distributed, you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000. The distribution will be practically the same, and the maximum will be indistinguishable from the true maximum in any practical sense. As I recently explored—prompted by some statistical curiosity—this, of course, is modulated by the mean and standard deviation of the distribution. A higher standard deviation calls for a larger subset, while a higher mean dramatically shrinks the number needed to screen.
But I also think nobody really knows their "true" fitness function, much less its distribution across the applicant pool—simply because businesses have no means or resources to actually measure or research this aspect. That doesn’t stop them from pretending they do.
I also felt the urge to respond with some snark: maybe they don’t really understand their own business, at least the placement/recruitment aspect of it. If they’re recruiting mid-echelon personnel—software devs, BAs, testers, other office roles—it makes sense to publish an ad and gather applications. But it doesn’t make sense to expect that pool to include extraordinary candidates from a fitness perspective. Sure, we’re all extraordinary in some sense, but in roles like these, businesses are simply not in a position to materially benefit from that extraordinarity. Nor are they able to detect it during hiring—and I don’t even mean that as snark; it’s just the nature of things.
In a natural distribution, the second-best candidate is not materially better than the top-best, and the third is almost like the second, and so on. Businesses that set their hiring threshold—whether explicitly calculated or intuition-based—too high will simply go out of business, because in this echelon you need to rely on mass hiring. Relatively speaking, of course, but you still need to be able to fill multiple positions with readily available candidates.
So, the question posed by my ex-coworker doesn’t make sense. But as I see it, it doesn’t make sense even for hiring in the top echelon—C-suites and so-called "rock stars." The strategy for top-echelon hiring is well established. It’s widely used in business, show business, and sports alike, where "fitness" follows a power-law distribution. It’s called "scouting" or "headhunting". You don’t throw a job ad over the fence and wait for a torrent of applications. You meticulously maintain a rolodex of potential candidates, watch their careers, court and dine them, and try to snatch them when they’re poised to make a move—or even just before it becomes obvious.
You don’t wait for them to apply to you—you apply to them. You don’t ask "Why do you want to work for our company?"—you shower them with perks and sign-on bonuses if they show even a hint of hesitation. The "agents" in this echelon work for candidates, often on retainer—not the other way around. It’s a completely different world, where you’re never in a position to screen a pool of 5,000 in hopes of finding an extraordinaire. In that world, hiring the second-best can have a humongous negative impact on company performance compared to hiring the top-best. For better or worse, that’s reality.
So I found my guy’s question quite unsettling—an indicator that yet another "recruiter" doesn’t really understand what they’re recruiting for.
I was able to fish out a useful metaphor from the LLM-generated word soup: "talent brokers vs gatekeepers." Over the last decade, recruitment agencies and internal departments have been universally rebranded as "talent acquisition." That rebranding feels disturbingly phony and hollow. Now I know why. Despite pretending to be "talent brokers"—scouting for talent—the reality hasn’t changed. They’re still the same old "gatekeepers", applying selectivity to boatloads of "talent" that come to them.
As industries and their associated keyword-spaces have grown dramatically—and AI tools have proliferated—such selectivity has become increasingly diluted. In my opinion, it’s now indistinguishable from random picks, yet still cloaked in the illusion of validity. For someone like me, swimming deep in the muck of the mid-echelon and with no ambition whatsoever to strive for oxygen-deprived heights of top echelon, it’s deeply disturbing.
Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
No Debt
Lots of savings
Single-income able to support family
WIN!
One of the "problems" companies have is that it's hard to find skilled workers in the US with good experience who are not demanding SF wages. And recent graduates aren't that useful so while they might technically be "tech workers" in the sense they would like to fill open roles, companies don't really want them.
So for most companies if you want to hire the most experienced and qualified for the role, and do that at a reasonable cost, you'll need to consider the H1B route.
I mean, if you are senior, you probably have a family and possibly kids. Even with a part-time RTO position that means more than a three-roommate setup, you need a house or 2b/3b in SF/SEA/NY. That works for industries where you dont need to be in the most expensive cities, but how does it work for tech workers with families?
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me.
So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life.
But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search.
If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.
I'll be honest though, I had a lot of difficulty parsing that and some chunks of it are beyond my reading comprehension abilities.
Anyways, his writing style reminds me more of people I knew with addiction issues than something like schizophrenia (which can make folks come off paranoid).
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.
looking back, the best options i got was from active networking in tech and business communities. actually, all of my jobs and clients come through that. except the most current one, which is from reconnecting to an old client, but there too the initial connection and the reconnection happened through a tech community.
When I am in a hiring role, I am not flipping through memories of good times with former coworkers that I had deep and meaningful time with -- I'm thinking back to who was the verb who got ish done and will make my project a success.
This might not get you into your dream company. But it can get you a next job to grow from.
For one of my jobs I had no contacts in the industry so I emailed someone at the company who went to my school, mentioned we both went there, and could they meet for coffee. I then drove 2 hours to meet him. We discussed what was happening at his company, are there opportunities, and he referred me.
I moved here (the Valley) because I met my wife online. Reached out to anyone I was vaguely connected to at the time. Got a few "send me your resume", none of them were a good fit.
All the interviews I got (some good, some bad) were either from headhunters, or through LinkedIn applications. In the end, a random, "don't know this company, but they want software people" ad on LinkedIn resulted in the GREAT job I've had for 1.5 years now (about a year after getting laid off) - way better pay, better work-life balance, etc.
So applying online CAN work.
I don't really have a good network, since I have worked in different countries.
The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist
Step 1: Just have coffee with a hiring manager
Step 2: Hiring manager says go check out job #41102, and submit your resume. Good luck, bro!
Step 3: [???]
Step 4: You've got an interview to ace!
Nobody ever explains the [???]. They just assume that by magic, your online submission rises to the top of the stack of 1,699 other online submissions, avoids all of HR's filters, gets to the right person in the right department on the right team, that person has the authority to pick you out of the pile, and so on... There's a lot still out of your control in this process. It's not just Networking --> Job.
Hardly ideal, but it's a start.
[1] And if you're not contributing to an open-source project, please do it, it's a great way to learn stuff, improve your CV, network and of course give back.
I tried this way-back-when and ended up submitting fixes to projects that were open source but had no real path to accepting patches from people outside the cathedral.
Or you can reach out over social media. "Hi there, I follow you on X and am just getting started in the industry. Do you mind if I ask a few research questions?" A friend of mine just used this technique to land a role in an industry where he had no contacts.
If the situation is "good luck getting through to people on the phone", then that probably means this person is not a real friend of yours, they are a stranger, and you shouldn't try. You should be reaching out to people who actually know your name, or you have a mutual friend.
Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.
Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.
> People should not do this.
> It is causing so much suffering.
> I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site.
> A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
> I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere.
My experience is opposite to this but I'm not selling it as absolute truth or even giving it as advice at all.
This is becoming less and less true.
> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
So the goal is to figure out how to get in touch with that hiring manager as the first step. Even if the form or HR "rejects" you, this person can step in say, "that's silly, I want to work with them. Send them through"
I think this charade of sending in resumes to forms is causing people so much pain. It feels like rejection and is not moving them closer to a job.
Just wait... some time-pressed startup is going to find a killer LLM prompt that filters in exactly the people they want, and then post something on the benefits of "vibe hiring". Complete with large, well-spaced text, colored with one accent color, and several graphs of hiring spending vs. income or something.
You heard it here first!
Incompetent hiring will kill you, and hiring people that you and your team don't personally gel with is incompetent hiring.
So I see that as a self-solving problem.
That's not a new thing. It's how it's always been.
Getting a starring role in a movie has a lot to do with abilities, not just luck and who you know.
Many companies are looking for strong mission alignment, because when it's a buyer's job market, why not select someone who has intrinsic motivation for what you are doing? Are you passionate about the problem? That is a lot like auditioning for a starring role: do you understand the character you might be playing? Many jobs - especially desirable ones - use this sort of "mission alignment" as selection criterion.
The thing that's different in software is that because the equipment needed to demonstrate technical skills is so cheap (just a computer) and trust in representations of technical experience is so low, they can test for technical skills in a way that other industries can't.
I don't think that anyone asks a civil engineer to design a bridge or a surgeon to remove an appendix to get a job.
My first job in the industry was in a startup that went belly down. Most of us didn't get much opportunity to network.
Thankfully, I happened to contribute to two open-source projects. One of them was a (then) obscure language called Rust and another one was Firefox. Both contributions eventually turned into career-defining moments for which I'm still reaping benefits 15 years later.
Had I contributed to Vlang and Camino instead, my career would probably have been much less satisfying.