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When the job search becomes impossible

jeffwofford.com

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Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#211

Post by strken »

ilaksh wrote: post #111

The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week. For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.

Blog posts are aimed at an audience, HN is an audience, and in both cases the audience in question is a technical one with an above-average number of well-paid professionals. The whole framing that the blog post "reeks of privilege" to "most people" is a bit strange. If I were to read a Yachting Monthly article about The Five Most Attention-Grabbing Mega Yachts For The Conspicuous Consumer Billionaire it would probably reek of privilege to me, too, but that's an entirely self inflicted problem: nobody is making me read a specific article from a yacht magazine.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#212

Post by marcosdumay »

prawn wrote: post #208
jofer wrote: post #148

As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. 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…

I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?

When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie.

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.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#213

Post by ezekiel68 »

I've lived through the recessions of 1990-91 (in my 20s, not tech), the Dotcom bust and the Great Financial Crisis. I can tell you that it's always been this way when its' a "buyer's market" and the employers can afford to be picky. I can also tell you that this is not some game-changing phenomenon[0]. The jobs will return when it is once again a "seller's market" -- which it surely will be. This applies to non-tech job markets as well.

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.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#214

Post by marcosdumay »

atoav wrote: post #163
b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have found it reasonable for interested candidates to have reached out directly instead of just submitting a resume to the ATS? With the AI spam etc. it feels like the usefulness of these automated systems is quickly diminishing. Hiring feels broken right now.

What does "reaching out directly" mean?

At this point, probably forming a line on the door of the hiring manager.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#215

Post by jofer »

prawn wrote: post #208
jofer wrote: post #148

As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. 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…

I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?

I have no idea, but yes, I suspect remote positions are heavily targeted and folks are looking for lazy hiring processes.

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...

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#216

Post by harimau777 »

jonkho wrote: post #196
jofer wrote: post #148

As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. 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…

Use hiring brokers. The good ones will vet the candidates and verify them. Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.

Any suggestion on good brokers?

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#217

Post by foxfired »

This past year, I noticed people reaching out to me whenever my employer is hiring. These seem to be new graduates, and there is a pattern in the way ask for a reference or a job:

  - "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?"
These are people I've never met, yet they are so direct to the point of being rude. But to the best of my knowledge, they are real people. And what it looks like is that I'm contact #258 in a spreadsheet, because they have to cast an extremely wide net to hope for a single response. When I respond, they are lost because they don't even remember which of the job I was a contact for.

I don't envy anyone looking for a job right now.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#218

Post by saulpw »

hansvm wrote: post #203
jofer wrote: post #148

As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. 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…

I must be missing something. 1200 real applications are hard to sort through. 1200 mostly fake applications are much easier. Hiring is a high-leverage activity, and it's absolutely worth spending a couple hours going through those by hand.

For 1200 applications, a couple hours translates to less than 10 seconds per application. In the age of LLMs, why do you think you'd be able to discern whether an application was fake in 10 seconds? Remember, it's not "obviously fake", it's "designed to con you" fake.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#219

Post by em-bee »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #27
pizzathyme wrote: post #13

> "You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at." 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 pe…

As other posters have said, this only really works if you have a network. Zeroth-order referrals (i.e. they call you) work best, first-order referrals (i.e. you know someone at the company) work decently well, and second-order referrals (you know someone who knows someone to refer you) are a guided shot in the dark. People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any n…

or you are working for small companies with people who have no (useful) connections. i worked with one for 10 years. not a single referral. a few connections from the university. nothing. they all work in small companies that are not hiring or simply have no pull to provide a meaningful reference.

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.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#220

Post by bell-cot »

marcosdumay wrote: post #212
prawn wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't applied for a job since the 1990s so I'd be out of the loop, but what are the faked resumes trying to achieve? Just get in a role and get paid before being found out? Are they trying to find brief or lazy interviewing processes? Do they only target remote positions?

When the requirements of every single job are impossible, people will lie. 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.

Amusing Idea: Advertise three vaguely-similar positions, only one of them real. Specify impossible-for-honest-humans requirements for the fake two. Then discard all applicants for the real position who also claimed to be qualified for a fake one.
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