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

Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 598 posts

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#491

Post by consteval »

jfengel wrote: post #487
consteval wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary is the most valuable thing, however. Because I would happily take a salary of 1 billion dollars with an awful manager and a no-fun team. And, conversely, I would never take a job with the best people on planet earth for a salary of one dollar.

If you were offered a job with an awful manager and a no-fun team for $250,000, and a job with the best people on the planet for $249,999, which one would you choose?

Right, naturally the extent matters, but it's still the most important statistic when doing cost analysis.

Also, other statistics are just wage in disguise. Work-life balance refers to working less, which means a higher wage. PTO is also just working less, which is a higher wage. WFH means less driving + lower cost of living, which is an effective higher wage.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#492

Post by JAlexoid »

zjdixhxjzkz wrote: post #75
indoordin0saur wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, this isn't clear to me. Are the interviewees citizens? So you're interviewing citizens to prove that there aren't any who can fill your jobs but even when they clearly could fill the job you don't hire them? Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce

It is. Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens. Worst case (and most common) H1Bs are more exploitable labor compared to citizens. H1Bs etc just suppress citizens wages and increase profits of capital holders. There’s a very very tiny % that actually aren’t replaceable domestically.

Fist - it is not companies' responsibility to train anyone. It is not their business.

Second - H1b are exploitable, because the system allows it.

H1b has demonstrably not suppressed software engineering wages at all.

Non-competes, have - on the other hand.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#493

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

georgeecollins wrote: post #430
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> work for a small one and make it big. I can say from experience that turns out really well. Survivor bias. I worked for a smallish company. I was employee number 77. I got laid off about a year and a half later after sales stalled. We're now almost two years after that layoff, and now the company has a skeleton crew just keeping the lights on until the money runs out.

Hopefully you are enjoying yourself at the big company you are at now. Sorry for what happened and I wish you well.

Not big, but certainly bigger. Based on the number of people in the #general channel on Slack, we're ~450 people.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#494

Post by bangaroo »

thecosas wrote: post #446
bangaroo wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm a hiring manager for engineers and have worked with tons of ATSes and have yet to work with a system that does this. i'm not saying it isn't real, but even as a director with fairly privileged access to the hiring pipeline and near-administrative access to the ATS at a public company with tons of applicants, i've never even seen an option for this sort of thing. the ATS will tag candidates who meet certain key re…

First, thanks so much for sharing your experience on the HR/hiring side! I recall in the multiple post-pandemic layoffs (especially in tech industry) that hiring teams were some of the first to be gutted. Made sense on a practical level since, at least in theory, layoffs > fewer job openings > fewer applicants to go through > less people needed to go through them. However, I'm sure that's also led to more people appl…

so to be clear, i'm engineering leadership - my exposure is probably greater than most individual contributor engineers but don't take my word as the experience of a dedicated recruiter - they have a much better view of the lay of the land than i do. i just wind up having a certain percentage of hiring/recruiting responsibility as part of my job.

for sure i think that might be a part of it, but i can say from experience that the market is flooded with recruiters, so if capacity was the issue, i'd imagine salaries are depressed right now and tons of talent is available... they could just hire their teams back up.

i genuinely can't explain to you why people aren't getting "no's." i wish i could. it makes me sincerely angry. the way ATSes are usually set up is you have a button to remove them from consideration or put them in some "not at the moment" disposition and every tool i've ever used has an option to automatically send a relevant form email as the result of that action. sending the email would take the same effort as not sending the email.

the only thing i can imagine (and have heard some hr folks say) is that rejecting someone is an action that elicits an emotional response in the person rejected - they might be hurt, they might be offended - and can lead to requests for an explanation why, or also hurt the chance that that person might be interested in working for you in the future. thus, just going dark and acting like "it got lost in the mail" is a way for them to keep the option of hiring you open in the future, or keep you receptive to a response if they reach out 6 months later.

i personally don't know if that's real, and i also don't think it reflects how actual humans respond to being ghosted, but the lack of a rejection email for a role i think is honestly a completely indefensible practice and i do not understand what is going on in the minds of the people who operate that way.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#495

Post by [deleted] »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #468
lotsofpulp wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not want to "trash the whole system", but when I see laws crafted specifically and solely to depress labor prices, it is reasonable to get emotional and feel morally superior. Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B? See also lower minimum wages and separate labor standards for poorer Mexican immigrants in agriculture, not to mention th…

> Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B? H1B visas are not restricted to a single employer. The catch is that the new employer is required to demonstrate the new role is valid for H1B work. This is a control to make sure that H1-B visa holders are not underpaid or doing abusing the system. It is a genuinely tough problem. You could decoupl…

[deleted]

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#496

Post by ahi »

derektank wrote: post #361
hollerith wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what I would naturally expect to happen in the absence of consistent heroic efforts by the authorities to prevent it.

This is the lump of labor fallacy. People are both consumers and laborers; by bringing someone new into a labor market you marginally decrease demand for their skill set but you also marginally increase demand for all other labor. If H1-B visa holders all worked in the same industry, it could conceivably lower wages in that industry but they don't. They work in everything from healthcare, to IT, to education.

66% of H1-B approvals are in computer related positions. https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/OLA_...

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#497

Post by horns4lyfe »

It’s H1B abuse, everyone knows it. Indian nationals get hired on in a leadership position, and all of a sudden the entire tech branch is staffed by H1B workers, wonder how could that be? We all know it’s happening, but if you say it done head in the sand junior well call you racist.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#498

Post by hollerith »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #339
hollerith wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what I would naturally expect to happen in the absence of consistent heroic efforts by the authorities to prevent it.

If that is happening widely, surely there will be some data to support that right? Authorities do enforce H1B provisions proactively. https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau... https://cis.org/North/Apple-Hit-25-Million-Penalty-Favoring-... https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/11/06/h-1b-visa-fraud-leads... > absence of consistent heroic efforts Will that apply to every law in society or just to H1B…

You seem to be genuinely curious, which is commendable.

>Will that apply to every law in society or just to H1B laws?

The H1B laws are harder to enforce than most laws -- or so it would seem to me -- because the question of whether there are Americans that are able to do a particular job at a particular workplace depends on many fiddly details that only the managers of the particular workplace (the prospective defendant in any enforcement action) would know.

When lawyers working on Capitol Hill are serious about stamping out a behavior, they write laws that are easy to enforce (unambiguous, not relying much on human judgment). Something as vague as, "as long as there are no Americans qualified to do the job," suggests that whoever wrote that just wants to reassure critics of the H1B program without caring much whether H1B workers actually displace American workers.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#499

Post by 93po »

dentemple wrote: post #283
diego_moita wrote: post #232

This is the reason I no longer bother with HN's "Who's Hiring" posts. They're all Ghost Jobs and we can't even complain there about it.

I'd be curious to see if _anyone_ has actually been hired through HN Who's Hiring over the past two years here. I can only offer anecdotal experience, but... Despite 1) being a US-based dev, 2) Applying only to US-based jobs, 3) With 10+ years work experience, and 4) Having skills in commonly asked for technologies such as JS, React, and Python... I've only gotten to the interview stage with an HN Who's Hiring listin…

I had an interview last month from a post there. Dude sounded like he was half asleep and hated talking to me even from the very beginning. He carried it on for almost an hour for reasons I don't understand if he was so disinterested. No rejection email follow up, posted again in November. The rule just says "you have to respond" and he did by interviewing me, it doesn't explicitly say you have to provide direct yes or no answers to going forward.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#500

Post by JAlexoid »

ChumpGPT wrote: post #280
riazrizvi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2023 there were 755,020 H1-B admittances. Why was it much easier to get a job in 2021? Because there were only 148,603 [1]. Notice that even though Republicans talked about immigration, neither party is talking about reducing H1-B filled roles. The kicker is if you’ve had a gap doing your own thing or because you were laid off and you apply for a job at a discount salary, you’re still not competitive against an H1…

[flagged]

>Any offspring also doesn't qualify for citizenship.

Literally anti-constitutional.

Post reply on HN