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I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

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Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#231

Post by motorest »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #108
UK-AL wrote: post #72

Being able to get hired at a company is often unrelated to being able to generate viable products. If you want to get hired don't focus on skills to build useful things. Focus on psychology and charisma.

Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit

> Yeah, no. You have to pass tech interviews and generally know your shit

You don't understand. You need to meet the hard skills bar, but there are far more bars than the hard skills one.

I think a hefty share of people here fail to understand the fact that there is way more to hiring a candidate than leetcode.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#232

Post by cnst »

> Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they chose other applicants.

I've mostly stopped applying to the big companies long time ago (10+ years) precisely because I'd never hear back regardless of the match or the credentials.

The only exception has been JaneStreet — they've contacted me almost immediately after a cold application with a small cover letter about my interests.

Yet going the referral route, it's relatively easy to get an interview almost anywhere, even Google or Apple.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#233

Post by mlinhares »

captain_coffee wrote: post #53

Unfortunately, this seems on par with recruitment practices in the summer of 2025. I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it. "the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications" Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!

Nah, if there was ever a time where making meaningful contributions to open source was important to land you a good paying job in a hot tech company, that died a long time ago. The people making these decisions don't care, unless you have someone inside to put your resume first it doesn't matter that you wrote all the code that makes their product even possible, the hiring manager won't care.

I might just be old but i really haven't felt like contributing to open source at all lately because i've bills to pay and kids to care for and taking time out of this just for the sake of enriching some billion dollar corp that will eat me and spit me out doesn't feel like a good investment for my time.

Sometimes i feel sad that it came to this but this is the place we're living in right now.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#234

Post by e4325f »

tomrod wrote: post #205
wongarsu wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save everyone the click: HR managers: 76% female, HR workers: 75% female, HR assistants: 84% female.

The distribution in other categories is fascinating, and HN doesn't format tables well. Though "saving a click" typically refers to spammy clickbait news articles that bury the lede, which a statistical table directly relevant to the conversation does not qualify as.

I found it useful at least.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#235

Post by sigmoid10 »

cnst wrote: post #232

> Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they…

>The only exception has been JaneStreet

Huh. I guess if you decide to make OCaml your company's primary programming language, you have to take what you can when it comes to devs.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#236

Post by Matumio »

user94wjwuid wrote: post #158

In the very least contract the developer for a little bit? Aren’t these Ai companies swimming in capital? Something almost dystopian about this

Uh, a company not paying money for something they can legally use for free? There are so many MIT-licensed software libraries that everyone is using in a critical place, for profit, with zero money flowing back into the ecosystem that created them. It should surprise nobody, it has been like this for over a decade now.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#237

Post by cnst »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #235
cnst wrote: post #232

> Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position in the team implementing the secret, unreleased feature of Claude Desktop using enigo. I wrote a cover letter and sent out my application. An automatic reply informed me that they might take some time to respond and that they only notify applicants if they made it to the next round. After a few weeks without an answer, I had assumed they…

>The only exception has been JaneStreet Huh. I guess if you decide to make OCaml your company's primary programming language, you have to take what you can when it comes to devs.

Yes and no, I imagine the biggest qualification for Jane Street would still be humility and not OCaml interest or expertise, and the pay probably has something to do with people's desire to apply, too.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#238

Post by brudgers »

Through a friend of a friend, I found out that Anthropic had an open position

"Coffee" with the friend of a friend would he better strategy than a cover letter in that case...more work, but better strategy.

Because logically, getting hired requires demonstrating you are "the kind of person we want to work with." Being qualified on paper is not necessarily required.

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#239

Post by gwbas1c »

pentamassiv wrote: post #27

Hey, I'm the author of the blog post. Thank you for submitting this. If you have any questions feel free to ask and please let me know how the writing was. It's one of my first posts so I'd like to improve

I wonder if it's useful for you to put a few subtle "hire me"s on your repo, mailing list, ect?

Re: I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

#240

Post by vdupras »

TrackerFF wrote: post #217
captain_coffee wrote: post #53

Unfortunately, this seems on par with recruitment practices in the summer of 2025. I can almost guarantee that they didn't even read that application / cover letter and auto-magically rejected it. "the team doesn't have the capacity to review additional applications" Zero effort. They probably didn't even realize the relevance of that specific application for that role. Unbelievable, I swear!

To be fair with Anthropic, they probably get unfathomably many applications for everything, on top of the cold calls/emails. They're one of the hottest companies in the world, so I'd expect tens of thousands of applicants. Media writing about $100m+ hiring deals in AI does not help, either.

Aren't they an AI company? Couldn't they sort it out? If Anthropic, of all companies, can't sort out incoming job applications, what exactly are their tools for?
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