Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When the job search becomes impossible

jeffwofford.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–469 of 469 posts

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#461

Post by tennisflyi »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #440
ryandrake wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, whenever someone says "Just network, bro!" they never actually fully connect the dots between networking and walking into the office on your first day of work: Step 1: Just have coffee with a hiring manager Step 2: Hiring manager says go check out job #41102, and submit your resume. Good luck, bro! Step 3: [???] Step 4: You've got an interview to ace! Nobody ever explains the [???]. They just assume that by magi…

The ATS systems everyone outsourced to a few years ago are a big part of this problem.

My take too

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#462

Post by jjav »

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…

Going through this right now. I hired someone about 8 months ago and the process was still pretty normal. But for the role I opened last week, we are getting a ton of AI-written resumes that are just a rewrite of the job description.

When I look many of these people up in linkedin, they often have jobs listed but completely empty descriptions of each job. I guess this is so they can have AI generate a rewrite of their resume based solely on the job description for every role they apply. This used to be too labor intensive to do, but now with AI it's easy to churn out a hundred of those a day.

(The more careless ones leave their actual job description on linkedin and submit a resume with a wildly different version, which just happens to be a rewrite of our job description. At least those are easy to filter out.)

While I don't like this, I'm finding that I need to find the person on linkedin, it must not be a recently created account and it must have a reasonably detailed description of what they did in each company and it must reasonably closely match the resume.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#463

Post by BobbyJo »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #361
BobbyJo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.

That’s why AI is dominated by a bunch of 40 year old gen Xers. Oh wait, it’s not! Zuckerberg just gave a 25 year old promising AI researcher a 300 million offer that the researcher said “No” to. He didn’t give that to yann lecun, or yoshua bengio, or Hinton. He did it to a kid. When I go to NeurIPS, it’s mostly grad students in their 20s who are the first authors. The professors are almost always the last authors. 20…

I don't mind competing with a single 25 year old in a market with tens of thousands of opportunities.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#464

Post by alimahmoudhu »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #417
alimahmoudhu wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ended up passing a number of fake profiles through because their CVs looked real. None of them showed up to the initial screening call. That's just crazy. Probably those were for collecting data to analyze what makes a CV pass. Mass apply everywhere, combine the results, and analyze the results manually or using LLMs. Selling these data can be profitable

It's also possible that they got a job elsewhere, and didn't follow up.

Yeah, That would be more reasonable :)

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#465

Post by ozozozd »

9rx wrote: post #388
ozozozd wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statements contradict each other. If companies are much more careful when hiring, they would not consider immigrants unless the candidate is exceptional, which doesn’t significantly change the number of opportunities for an average worker. Contrary to the conspiracy theories, H1B requires the employer to pay market wage or higher, so hiring an immigrant for a white collar job is extra cost and risk, and only mak…

> Contrary to the conspiracy theories, H1B requires the employer to pay market wage or higher [...] where finding a qualified candidate becomes a challenge. Something doesn't add up here. If you are paying the market wage, you fundamentally cannot have challenges finding qualified candidates. The market wage isn't established until you already have someone agreeing to your terms... H1B is built around the concept of…

You are right.

I was refuting the claims about H1B workers working for less.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#466

Post by trod1234 »

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…

The problem today is AI makes everything worse. Its jamming communications channels, and what you get once those channels are saturated is the equivalent effect that you see in cellular networks culminating in RNA interference.

No binding sites, no matches.

Additionally, if competent people can't find work within 2 short years, they will leave that sector forever and retrain. They may have been rockstars, but that doesn't matter. No work, no food, bad investment. When you have coordinated layoffs across sectors you have a short period of time to scoop up the competent people.

Its not immediately clear, but it seems like you either skipped over the part of filtering properly (and didn't do it?), or just jumped to this other strategy when what worked before no longer works.

Instead of trying to wrangle the data, why didn't you put a physical barrier at the very beginning. A simple validation, this is your CV, you are this person, and you have a valid DL with that name, and then you whittle down from there.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#467

Post by nathan_douglas »

em-bee wrote: post #459
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism" I strongly agree with this, and I'm glad you put it so clearly. If you've been in your industry say 10 years or more, you should have built a reputation by that point that makes people say "I want to work with that person again, or I'd recommend that person to a friend who has a job opening". (Important thing to cla…

building that reputation is harder than it sounds. you don't always work in positions where you have contact to other people that could build up your reputation. i was a contractor for a small company for 10 years. i had little contact with the employees in that company, only working with the boss. the boss was nice but he had no useful contacts into the industry. the employees that i did have contact with were to lo…

Yeah, I worked at a tiny company (<10 employees total) for five years, then was in a small company with a tiny dev team (3 engineers and 1 PM at peak) for almost five years. Now I've been at a government contractor for five years, so I have a ton of contacts now... but they tend to remain in the civic tech space, and I'd like to move into research. Where I know absolutely nobody. I feel ya.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#468

Post by nathan_douglas »

incompatible wrote: post #255
sfink wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strict honesty here has always been a losing proposition. The "requirements" section of a job posting has almost never been accurate. It's more of an image they're painting. An honest applicant is one who reads the whole description to understand as best they can what the company is looking for, and sort of holistically matches their own expertise against that picture. If the job posting lists requirements A-F and yo…

Well, there are people who hate the idea of lying, and can't bring themselves to do it, even it's applying for a job where they don't meet one of the requirements. Most likely this isn't an attribute that most employers actually want, though.

My mother always put a really high emphasis on honesty. I wasn't the best kid, and certainly not the most honest (sorry, Mom), but I've always been absolutely forthright in résumés and cover letters. If I don't fully tick C, I mention it and share some quality or experience that I think might compensate. In my experience, it hasn't helped. I still do it, though, just because TBH I'm not 100% qualified for any of the jobs I apply for because I don't want to do the same shit I've already done for the rest of my career. I'm trying to grow, lol.

Re: When the job search becomes impossible

#469

Post by jahlove »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #230
myahio wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"? We have an increasing amount of immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job, in combination with the tech sector shrinking, as well as companies as a whole being much more careful when hiring. There would need to be some explosion in the amount of tech jobs, in order for everyone to be able to get one. However, I just cannot see what…

> What could potentially put an end to the current hiring "winter"? April 18, 2017; EO 13788: Buy American and Hire American (H-1B reform) Still waiting on that one. Just need a favorable administration back in office.

You didn't have to wait long, eh?

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/20/nx-s1-5548568/h1b-visa-fee-tr...

Post reply on HN