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When the job search becomes impossible

jeffwofford.com

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Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#441

Post by mixmastamyk »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #81
detaro wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course it's the people that have a different experience than you that are insufferable, not the ones that share yours, right?

That's not anywhere close to my point, it's not their stance I have any issue with. it's their mindset that their own stance is universal: > 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 everywh…

When was your experience? Because tech hiring has largely changed with the advent of the ATS SAAS in the last few years. So far filling out apps in those systems has been a complete waste of time.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#442

Post by Rakshith »

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…

[dead]

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#443

Post by atemerev »

ryandrake wrote: post #184
atemerev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.

> We don't have money even for retirement funding 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.

Hunger is easy. It is housing, medicine and education that are unsolvable.

And no, even if you skin all the rich and put all their money to UBI, it will only last a year or two (you can take Excel and calculate). The bulk of income and taxes comes from the middle class.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#444

Post by atemerev »

vkou wrote: post #183
atemerev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.

We have the money, it's just flowing into making the top 5% comfortable and the top 0.0005% really comfortable. Real estate in particular (but there are others) is a bottomless pit that society dumps money into, and speculators scoop money out of.

Just try and calculate. The rich are rich, but there are too few of them. Even $1000 UBI (which is not enough for anything) is like $3.2 trillion per year. All the rich taken together do not earn this much.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#445

Post by Bukhmanizer »

hnfong wrote: post #439
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re just arguing for nepotism in a roundabout way. 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…

I think you're projecting your negative past experiences and trying very hard not to understand the GP's point. It doesn't matter what the person hired thinks. The important part is whether those making hiring decisions are hiring people with "stellar reputation". In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation. If we apply this scenario to what the GP said, no company would have h…

I understand just fine. There is no objective descriptor of a person. The engineering manager probably thinks he’s a perfect candidate.

> In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation

Yes that’s what we figured out after he got hired. He obviously didn’t have a reputation within our org before he got hired. All we had to go off was the engineering managers opinion.

Are you guys really shocked that given the freedom to, people would rather hire their friends and people they know would do them favours rather than the “objectively best candidate for the job”?

By overweighting network and reputation all you are doing is turning every career into a political game.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#446

Post by Bukhmanizer »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #437
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re just arguing for nepotism in a roundabout way. 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…

This situation is very weird to me. In my experience, referrals got your foot in the door, but you still always had to pass the same hiring screen/interview process as everyone else. I recommended an engineer once who I thought was great - he was a total "get shit done" kind of guy. But he did poorly in the interviews (I won't say they were leetcode-type problems, but you did have to have some algorithmic skills - I…

Yes we have the same interview process. This is something that no one knows about as I don’t know who interviewed him but my cynical guess is that if someone has enough power in the org and happens to sit on the hiring committee, it doesn’t really matter how well they do.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#447

Post by Bukhmanizer »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #446
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This situation is very weird to me. In my experience, referrals got your foot in the door, but you still always had to pass the same hiring screen/interview process as everyone else. I recommended an engineer once who I thought was great - he was a total "get shit done" kind of guy. But he did poorly in the interviews (I won't say they were leetcode-type problems, but you did have to have some algorithmic skills - I…

Yes we have the same interview process. This is something that no one knows about as I don’t know who interviewed him but my cynical guess is that if someone has enough power in the org and happens to sit on the hiring committee, it doesn’t really matter how well they do.

In another much better incident, we once hired someone that did poorly in some interviews because I happened to present a project they made the week before. He turned out great, and he was doing some really cool stuff, just didn’t do coding interviews well.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#448

Post by lelanthran »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #392
abathur wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably crazy talk, but I have been wondering how requiring people to slap a stamp on an envelope and mail in a résumé would go.

I don’t think it is crazy and I have suggested beforehand there needs to be some sort of proof of work on the candidate side to prevent resume spam. I think your idea is very elegant as everyone has access to the mail system, an actual stamp is pretty cheap, but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam. The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in…

> but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam.

More than that, bots currently have no way of sending snail-mail :-)

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#449

Post by Terr_ »

smegma2 wrote: post #429
Terr_ wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't say liquid assets though, it mentions multiple options which vary in how easily you can/should use one to pay an unexpected bill or period of unemployment. For example, if one is using their life-insurance payouts to pay their rent... well, something has gone very wrong somewhere. Specifically, this part: > financial asset—which includes transaction accounts, certificates of deposit, savings bonds, other b…

Sure, I couldn’t find a better data source than that. If you find a better source that includes liquid assets specifically that would be helpful. I am skeptical that of the 39k in assets listed there, there isn’t a substantial amount that can be used to pay the bills (i.e. who has $39k in their 401k but $0 anywhere else?).

It seems some "Survey Data" files are publicly available [0], but without investing a bit more effort in parsing them (which is definitely not happening on my phone) I'm not sure if they have the kind of household-by-household data that could be used.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#450

Post by lelanthran »

Balgair wrote: post #436
carlosjobim wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I see it, hiring people is the most important part of running any business - by a large margin. And if you have a lot of employees, then hiring people who are good at hiring becomes your highest priority. > The manager is responsible for $X but only gets paid their salary. That's why somebody higher in rank makes sure the manager gets the time he needs to make the best hires. Somewhere up the line there is somebod…

I'm not trying to be glib here, but I'm not entirely certain that you have worked for a long time in a large corporation, right? If you have not, I would like to introduce you to one of the best pieces of writing on corporate workings that I have ever come across: The Gervais Principle. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... It is a very good lens, but a very cynical one, to look at the corpo…

> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

This should be required reading for everyone wanting to enter the corporate world. It rambles on a bit but even today, decades later, it's still spot on!

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