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I automated my job application process

blog.daviddodda.com

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Re: I automated my job application process

#391
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what other solutions look like: Gatekeeping of various forms including institutions and certifications, letters of introduction like essentially the US service academies, standardized tests, informal networks, etc.

There's two distinct reasons why more qualified candidates might get skipped over: 1) There is too much noise occluding their signal. 2) There is a form of gatekeeping going on. Gatekeeping only really works in exploitative systems (e.g. "me and my children are the masters, and you and your children are the slaves") or when the noise is so high that companies wouldn't gain much from not gatekeeping (e.g. Harvard admi…

For a lot of things, hustling is probably at least as important to me as a hiring manager as rather amorphous "skills needed to do well in that position" at least as an entry-level employee. Of course, I don't want someone who has none of the skills needed for the job in most cases but they probably don't know most of what they need to learn anyway.

Re: I automated my job application process

#392

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing? I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I h…

The idea that the problem is primarily (or even substantially) the fault of employees is laughable. HMs put up all the hoops, and keep immeasurably more power in the process from start to finish.

Re: I automated my job application process

#393
I dont fully get something here. Being a good Engineer is a trait I would seek in a candidate, not really the actual hard skill knowledge.

That is changing every day, and if you are a life long learner, you will master it. I get that domain specific experience matters.

For example I passed the CCIE 10 years ago but today using Aider and LLMs to boost up Network DevOps related developments. I think using LLMs for code generation is a powerfull use case , is not really cheating, but a new way of working. Why would an employer not value this, and hiring managers, why are you not testing candidates in open book format on real world issues, giving candidates access to the latest State of the art LLMs, instead of using good old puzzles?

Today in development and Infra engineering space it might make more sense to ask candidates to build something real instead asking for a motivation letter and if they used Sonnet 3.5 v2 that is just a proof for trying to be effective.

Re: I automated my job application process

#394

Nice. But as a hiring manager, this is the last thing we want. Flooded with auto submitted Resumes. I posted a job recently and got 100+ resumes in 2 days and 99% were not even remotely close to being a good fit. I struggled to sort through so many Resumes to find someone worth interviewing. The problem is that with so much noise, good candidates may get ignored or rejected by mistake. And the cycle continues. I get…

Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the problem. The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated y…

In my whole career I've seen 0 correlation between effort and rewards.

Re: I automated my job application process

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a Platform Engineer and it feels like your experience mirrors mine. Like you, our challenge is filtering out large volume but also filtering out LLM abusers. We're not opposed to people using LLMs, when appropriate. I find that candidates inappropriately use it to circumvent the process and that is a big deal for me (and our team). We try to do the right thing(TM) by the candidates by creating minimal interview…

Fellow Platform Engineer here, and I can relate 100% with your comment. We decided to stop announcing our engineering jobs and go back to mouth to mouth for sourcing candidates for now. It's a move I didn't want to make as, like you said, it means a lot of less networked engineers will not know about it and all. but for now this was the only way we got rid of the constant stream of letters from AI.

What is a "Platform Engineer"? I never heard that term before today.

Re: I automated my job application process

#398
Not very smart of him to post that while looking for a job. I know it is nerd smart but it is not real world smart. Any prospective employers looking for any excuse to reduce the number of candidates will find the blog post and reject you.

And yes, I understand that this automation is but a reaction to the way companies handle applications

Re: I automated my job application process

#399

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing? I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I h…

Because adding shit to the pool doesn’t help. The jobs aren’t there, and crapping in an empty pool doesn’t help any more than pissing in a full pool.

Re: I automated my job application process

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine you actually work in the US in software and expect candidates to pay to fly out for an interview. I would withdraw from the process immediately if I encountered a company so cheap

Not only withdraw, but post publicly about said company. That's so beyond the pale it's gotta be a joke

I’ve flown myself out for interviews at companies that were dream jobs. Think: sports industries, not insurance companies. They tended to be small and didn’t have the resources to put together reservations (and would have taken months to figure out budgeting situations)

Yes, I wanted to work for them so badly it was well worth the risk. Sometimes you see opportunities and want to pay for them.

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