151–160 of 174 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really want an employee who is dumb enough to do a repetitive, menial, low-value task manually for dozens or hundreds of iterations? Do you want to disqualify great programmers who are bad at writing prose?
None of my colleagues are dumb, and I don't think the implication is appropriate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When benhoyt says "In short, don’t be generic" then at least he could take his own advice into account when writing questions. I actually agree with this: I think several of our questions could be improved and made more specific. On the other hand, we do want them to be somewhat open-ended so the writer has to think and can put their best foot forward (or not). I don't write these questions, but I'll try to provide…
Wait am I tripping or aren’t you benhoyt? Kinda new to (at least commenting) on here.
The author contradicts their own advice to avoid flowery prose, “show don’t tell”, and to use “nothing but words” — they frequently use italics and punctuation for added emphasis. The criticisms seem pedantic, given that many job postings might fail the writing bar suggested by the post. How would applicants know that the writing style in a posting is unacceptable in their submission? Re:business jargon — the example…
Can you give some examples of where I use flowery prose in the article (apart from when quoting samples that do)? It's something I try hard to avoid.
When do employers get to "how to properly write a job advertisement"? All these articles are only about what workers should do, not how companies fail again and again at writing a good description of the job. E.g. "Describe your experience with software operations and running services in production" is a really bad question as it is too open ended and leads to name dropping. Asking for "engaging answers" judges the p…
"Don't be generic" applies to the employer with regards to renumeration. "Competitive" means nothing, give me a numerical range. This avoids a waste of time on both parties' behalf.
Am I the only one who is not maintaining some kind of private Github repo? I am doing this job for the money and not the "coding fun". If I had the urge to code more, I would just do more hours in my regular job and get paid for that.
I lead a small R&D team in Materialise's Kyiv office. Due to very demanding requirements (we need someone who can do math, write code, and communicate with other people reasonably well, often at the same time), I usually have to read somewhere between 50 to 100 resumes per hire. And one thing is absolutely certain - there is an inverse correlation between the quality of the resume and the quality of the candidate. Pe…
I have never seen this. Most of the time, not only do they not look at your linkedin profile (because like it's usually a reflection of the CV), they want you to fill in a custom built 'Resume builder' on their 2000 era site. As you can imagine, this is as crap as can be and doesn't work correctly.
I just give up at this point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and by “cover letter” I just mean an email that’s says here’s who I am and here’s what I like/do This makes it sound like it would be something that would be "copied and pasted to countless other employers", just like a resume often is. But your last point made it sound like the applicant should invest more of their time than that. Conventionally, a good cover letter will be, at least to a degree, bespoke for that…
> Also, in the last several years, the impact of a good cover letter on getting an employment offer has diminished tremendously to the point that expect it of applicants isn't not respectful of their time. Do you have anything to substantiate this claim? I'm an employer and I read and respond to dozens of applications when I have an open position. Usually when I receive an excellent application, the cover letter is r…
No, it's my personal experience.
It's an observation supported by people I know who have gotten a similar sense at their jobs. One director level friend, with insight into how they do hiring, explained that it has a lot to do with how HR filter things. (As someone else said in this thread.)
Some HR departments will sanitize information to reduce bias, like a photo of the candidate, but this can include a cover letter.
It's going to be different with different employers. So you could be an exception. But the likelihood that anybody reads my cover letters these days is so low that writing them is almost never worth the time. I've also found it to be more difficult these days because the quality of job postings themselves have diminished. A lot of the complaints that OPs article makes can be said about the job postings. There's just nothing to latch on to.
But yeah many/most places don't read cover letters. Some don't even read resumes. It's very clear from the start of the call you can see them start to skim through it or just ask you to just about read it for them. I even had a call where one of the interviewers had someone eles' resume up and referred to it by mistake and apologized and then did it again five minutes later.
So, no, I have nothing to substantiate the claim.
Edit: Okay here's something you might consider "substantial".
Apparently it's a thing now to not even send applicants rejection notices -- and just to ghost them instead -- on the basis that they might be a wacko and react poorly to rejection. So, as a policy, companies will inflict on all candidates, including nice people, the ill of ghosting them, to spare themselves the risk of receiving a shitty email from a shitty person. They are so thin-skinned/careless that they can't tolerate bad behavior in the form of an email that they don't even let you know they're not interested in hiring you. Even if you started the "hiring pipeline". Even if you apply with a cover letter.
People on this website who apparently work for companies that do this admit that's what their company does. So if companies do do this and admit it then maybe that's substance for you.
In my opinion, the kind of psycho who can't send a rejection email is totally consistent with everything I've experienced above the edit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A diligent employee who gets the job done in an efficient way because they want to get home to enjoy the money they just earned?
Ok. If you can explain in a little more detail how you get the job done and what qualifies your assessment of the relative efficiency, then you probably have the basis of a decent cover letter.
- data is in the database
- get data from the database using ORM solution
- pull stuff from Backend (from Frontend), using REST/Graphql
- display it in a nice way using whatever the du-jour styling solution they picked.
This isn't rocket science. Do I really have to make some BS about why I'm "excited" about this company or industry in the cover letter.
Look at the number of applicants at a linked job posting. It's usually high 3 digit numbers, sometimes 4 digits.
Are they really going to read all this flowery cover letters about how you feel about their company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that they would write me a short answer about what piqued their interest Honest question: do people actually apply to jobs because it piques their interest? I pretty much just... need a job. I'll assess whether I want to join based almost purely on the team - if the team doesn't feel right, I'll skip. I don't apply for any jobs that require a cover letter. There's already enough information asymmetry and the effort…
I also don’t apply for jobs where I have to write a cover-letter. Last time I was laid off (when I was forced to find a new job), I applied in 2 pools - jobs that piqued my interests and jobs that paid me money so I can live. In the first group, when asked I could easily drone on about the interesting work they publish or whatever. The second group… I could scrap together a smile and a thin lie about how they’re a re…
I assumed cover letters were for non-programmers and that places that demand them are trying to hire programmers with an antiquated/non-programmer interview process, which I interpreted as a red flag.
Software engineers using tools like ChatGPT isn't really about trying to game the system. It's more about how out-of-touch the old-school job application process feels. We really just want to make things easier on ourselves. We're in a time where we're all about automating the boring stuff. Why? Because we can. The whole idea of writing a cover letter feels ancient. Honestly, when I'm shooting out a ton of job applic…
We toss out anything that looks written by AI.