From the UK. Named Ahmed. I think this plays a factor.
Why, Ahmed is one of the most common names in the UK
Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
421–430 of 502 posts
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#422Two initial thoughts: 1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer. 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search…
> 2
I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's talking about.
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think use the time to network with real people It kinda doesn't work these days. One of the points of DEI was to eliminate the nepotism hiring (and it's kinda good if the hiring wasn't so broken), so these days referrals don't mean shit unless you're referred by someone high-ranked enough. I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
My experience is completely the opposite, every quick hire is a referral, jobs constantly ask for and bonus for referrals. The higher up the position the more it matters that you have a warm introduction.
Agree. The big public traded companies might be different but if a business owner thinks you can solve their problem and that will gain them more money than you ask for it is very easy to get hired
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#424[deleted]
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say that you can't really agree [about the resume being poorly formatted from having too much text?], but then you agree that there's too much text (if all you need to see is the 1 item of "Google", then you're saying there's firmly too much text, like 95% of the resume is useless). Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption…
I'm not sure if this is a good approach or not.. but I've started just exploding my resume out, then feeding it to an LLM to create a job-specific version a few times... I'll edit the job-specific version a bit, which does cut things down. I don't know it's helped or hurt, as I've only gotten a response from about 1:50 that I sent out before or since I made the shift and I know the job market sucks. I still need to f…
Last time I was job hunting I did something similar: Write out everything I've done, even "silly" things like Haskell knowledge from uni, then comment out everything not relevant to a job until my resume fits on 2 pages. My Latex Template made this much quicker than it sounds, maybe ~10 minutes per application (and 10+ hours to create the CV itself...).
Two issues I see that haven't been mentioned yet:
1. A lot of companies, especially startups, are fake job advertising. They want to look like they are growing, and they might hire a golden goose, but many job ads I saw just stay up for months or even years.
2. A lot of companies, especially large ones, are using AI to pre-screen CVs. So you now have to get through AI, then HR, then a technical manager, each with their own sets of requirements. I've played around with some of the HR AIs, they tend to be quite... superficial. To give one example from the CV above:
> Ran small A/B tests and collected human-in-the-loop safety ratings to calibrate thresholds and escalation rules.
Is a perfectly good sentence, but according to AI should be:
> Optimized escalation rules and safety thresholds by conducting A/B test collecting human-in-the-loop safety ratings, reducing false-positive escalations by 15%.
Put your achievement first? Good. Strike out verbs like 'small'? Fair, it is a sales situation. Make up numbers entirely to provide a 'quantifiable result'? Complete crap. But it seems to be what every HR bot really wants to see, so now you have to sprinkle it in and hope it gets you past the bot, and doesn't make the technical manager think you're a complete charlatan.
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#426Two initial thoughts: 1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer. 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search…
> 2 I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's t…
It's not the formatting, it's the content. A resume that tells me what I need to know without a bunch of extra fluff vs an essay tells me about the author's priorities and it'll be a deciding factor when you have hundreds of applications to go through.
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Im not American so can't comment on the US situation. However, where I live, CS grads are facing the same problem. However, switching to trades is not an option - the salaries of trade workers are not enough to pay for housing. I've been working for 5 solid years now at my current company, Im still the youngest hire. While my company continues to compensate me really well, I think that the new grad situation is terri…
The wages for skilled trades are enough to pay for housing outside of HCOL areas like New York City and the SF Bay Area. People may need to move to restart their careers. There is high demand for electricians in Plano, TX. I understand that making that kind of move is difficult and highly disruptive but at some point workers have to face reality. Regardless of whether the root cause is AI or offshoring or higher inte…
> but at some point workers have to face reality.
If workers have to face the current reality, we are in for an unfortunate time.
The better outcome would be fixing the current reality before workers see what is being done.
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if this is a good approach or not.. but I've started just exploding my resume out, then feeding it to an LLM to create a job-specific version a few times... I'll edit the job-specific version a bit, which does cut things down. I don't know it's helped or hurt, as I've only gotten a response from about 1:50 that I sent out before or since I made the shift and I know the job market sucks. I still need to f…
Last time I was job hunting I did something similar: Write out everything I've done, even "silly" things like Haskell knowledge from uni, then comment out everything not relevant to a job until my resume fits on 2 pages. My Latex Template made this much quicker than it sounds, maybe ~10 minutes per application (and 10+ hours to create the CV itself...). Two issues I see that haven't been mentioned yet: 1. A lot of co…
It's that second one that I'm trying to actually work around by using AI to generate the trimmed down version. I just haven't taken the time to pull open some of the really old versions of my resume to flush out the history and to expand on older projects yet.
The whole process just seems to suck all around. As much as I never liked filtering through a stack of hundreds of resumes as a senior member in a time hiring, being on this side of the wall is even less fun.
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they are worthy, they will have parents who have influential friends and family. Or if they have parents who have influential friends and family, they are worthy.
That works for people coming from upper-quintile backgrounds. What about the other 80% of the population, and any hope of social mobility for them?
Why would anyone in power care? There are no incentives for them to do so.
Re: Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs -…
looks at Patreon Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream. “Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.
I don't know the most polite way to tell you that you're demonstrating an almost textbook example of survivorship bias. There are 300 million people in the United States and 8 billion in the world, it's trivial to find individual examples of people making a solid living in almost any career you could conceivably imagine, and in many you couldn't.
You're going on the "Writers getting paid" website and sorting by most paid. That's like looking at the top 10 NBA salaries and saying "Basketball players seem to be making money, and if they're good at the game they seem to be wildly successful"
And, notably, a wildly successful writer makes $120,000 a year. So, you know, the same as any employed coder with more than like a year or two of experience. And that's the very highest echelons of a famously incredibly competitive, rapidly shrinking field, with fewer real jobs than probably anything else not also considered an "art" of some sort.