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I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me

grell.dev

271–280 of 419 posts

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

#271

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

This lands. I discovered an emergent feature in GTP40 and when I tried to post about it on the developer forum, the spam filter removed my post. I asked GPT40 to rewrite it for me. I posted the update, and got banned. There's too much 'noise'. People like Einstein and Tesla would've gone unnoticed today, as I doubt they would've become "social media influencers" just to promote their ideas.

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

#272

Good findings, the rest not surprising tho.. online recruitment doesn't work at all these days. most likely your app wasn't read by anybody meaningful and did not trigger right flags in the HR system to even be spotted by clueless ladies working there. This post can give you some visibility unless somebody sees it as frustration/negativity then they won't bother either. aside of the core topic, best way to get a job…

I assume your choice to describe average HR reps as “clueless ladies” isn’t meant to suggest that you respect e.g. women software engineers on your team any less. But if the gender of the clueless HR employees isn’t relevant, why mention it? Maybe worth reflecting on whether calling them clueless ladies rhetorically emphasizes their cluelessness

Nopes, nothing to the ladies in general nor any other gender in general. Just a shortcut to my own negative experience with HR by example. English is my foreign language and in my country we are not that allergic to terminology. But clueless processors stay as valid… regardless of particular denomination.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make the remaining 24% more clueful. Identifying a department by the gender of its workers seems pretty suspect.

I read the original comment as implying that the average HR person reviewing your resume will be a clueless woman. Not as implying that only women work there or that people of other genders working there are more clueful. The comment is open to interpretation, and you are free to interpret it in a less charitable way. The ambiguity is absolutely something we can and should criticize the comment for

I never implied any of that nonsense that I’ve perhaps triggered nor I want to be responsible for other people’s interpretations outside core meaning

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it short term? Seems like the MS and the others got exactly what they wanted. Exploiting the passion for free work is a trade that will keep happening as long as there are passionate inexperienced people.

Sorry but have to call b.s. here. Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion. Same exact story as with surveillance tech. Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments of this field in 21st century. Own it.

> Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion.

I'm not entirely sure that was intentional. On Reddit, it would be called 'brigading', and basically getting your corpo-techbros to -4 and flagkill posts.

If done fast enough, you only need 5 500+ karma accounts to sink a post.

Sometimes, I'll say something unpopular, but defensible. Its interesting to see the dramatic swings those contentious posts take.

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

#275

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

You should change the license to AGPL and 'custom, contact for payment details', and provide a link to this as why you did so.

Simply put, anything not a viral license like GPL allows parasitization by companies effectively living off FLOSS devs, with absolutely nothing to gain. Human rights under GPL were meant to apply to humans, not '3 lawyers in a trench coat' (corporations).

They can make their decisions (snubbing a dev of code they deem good enough for enterprise). And you can make comparable decisions, punishing them for the sheer hubris.

It also reaffirms that my decision of AGPL for everything is the right one. They can contact for custom terms.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but have to call b.s. here. Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion. Same exact story as with surveillance tech. Hackernews is hugely responsible for many of the ailments of this field in 21st century. Own it.

> Many of us did in fact, in this very forum, kept pointing out that dumping on GPL (and the man and his ideas behind it) was a mistake and that non-gpl oss was for chumps. And we were greyed to oblivion. I'm not entirely sure that was intentional. On Reddit, it would be called 'brigading', and basically getting your corpo-techbros to -4 and flagkill posts. If done fast enough, you only need 5 500+ karma accounts to…

The fact that the management of this forum, who are VCs, permitted such a mechanism is part of the "own it, HN" assertion. HN has baked in something like 'peter principle' into the forum. Karma Grifters who post articles that get them over the 500 points are then ala Peter Principle granted the right to 'grey out' actual thoughtful comments.

Are you telling the management of this outfit never looked into this phenomena?

How about ageism? Mr. Paul Graham and personality cult asserting that anyone over 20 something is no longer viable for leading edge tech work?

We used to call these VCs "vulture capitalists" in the 90s. We geeks were so right about so many things in the 90s: We were right about GPL. We were right about VCs. We were right about surveillance tech. We were right about outsourcing ...

But alas, "corpo-techbros" empowered by thoughtless forum software courtesy of Paul Graham and company got into this mess.

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

#277

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!

Tbf, I'd rather get a "we didn't review your CV" response than a template "we are continuing with other candidates :)" response. It softens the blow considerably and helps me as an applicant better keep track on which variation of the CV is working best because I can just remove this datapoint.

[deleted]

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

#278
post #64

The author should have just asked the friend of a friend for a warm intro instead of trying to go through the main gate. Sucks, but that's the reality of hiring (and getting hired) in tech in general.

My experience with Anthropic and OpenAI is they’re not super interested in experience and don’t take internal references very seriously. Most of who I know that was hired were fairly junior folks and they have an early weed out that’s a fairly rudimentary but very specific Python programming quiz typically administered by very junior (like 1-2 years out of school) - even when interviewing extremely senior and experienced people of some substantial success and renown. This isn’t uncommon - meta and others do this too. But the programming quiz at Anthropic is sudden death and the first round, and the people administering it are looking for a very specific implementation that if you don’t see it immediately they just Gen Z stare and don’t discuss etc. It’s one of the more amateur selection processes designed with an extreme bias against more senior folks (frankly it felt unintentional just naive). (Meta etc scale the programming weight to seniority and the administrators scale as well - asking for depth of understanding of concepts as seniority grows with the expectation experience brings more to the table than syntactic knowledge).

So getting an internal reference and being highly qualified for something they need done isn’t enough. You need to also make it past the 20 years old gate keepers and their amateur hour hiring process.

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

#279
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of the selection committee for a position once, where we selected the more junior engineer. The probably most simple explaination would be that for some roles you like to have someone that can be easier "shaped" into a certain role. Someone who is already successful may bring their own system of doing things. This is great if it is a good fit, but can produce frictions if it isn't. The next thing is that i…

>Maybe you're looking for the mediocre job just because you think it will be a walk in the park >The worst one was talking about how it would be a relaxing position for them What's wrong with that? Can't you compensate being lazy with being efficient?

Yes, sure, in theory. But the position we were filling was one with very little supervision and oversight, for room reasons. So basically one person in a room in a different building who has to maintain a bunch of stuff in addition to build up a organizational structure from scratch.

Filling it with someone who you might have to check after not for seemed like a risky bet. Call it a gut feeling. I worked together with a guy like that, which lead to me having to save the day every other week because he forgot to organize for an event he knew about months in advance.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> what exactly are their tools for?

Obviously, for writing and sending said job applications.

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