Dare I ask: what did people do before the internet existed?
I automated my job application process
801–810 of 884 posts
Re: I automated my job application process
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so is firing people (at least in United States it is.) There's probably some country somewhere where it is easier to fire people than the US, but not sure where would that be. There are zero requirements to fire people in the US. No reason needed, no notice, no compensation, nothing. Most (if not all) other countries have varying levels of requirements, notice and compensation required to fire someone. In the US, n…
There's a difference between layoffs and firing. To fire an individual, the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination. Ironically, it's easier to lay-off 100 people because all you need to do is demonstrate their division's project is cancelled. And that documentation takes time as a manager, which costs money. But I admit not knowing completely because I haven't had to fire anyone yet…
Re: I automated my job application process
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it is time for a set of unions or guilds to do that certification for you.
This. Just as doctors or lawyers or civil engineers can't do their jobs before being vetted by their own professional bodies it's time we do the same for software engineering.
The same is true of those other fields too really - I certainly wouldn't want a newly qualified doctor operating on me, or lawyer defending me, or civil engineer designing a bridge I'm driving over. It's nice to know that someone has been professionally educated and passed some entry level exam, but to be useful in a field it's experience that counts.
Re: I automated my job application process
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s grim, to say the least. I also think it’s more proof that tech hiring is broken. When good candidates can’t reasonably get in front of hiring managers without an “in” that means they’re missing out on a lot of really good candidates. Think that’s the part that bothers me about tech hiring right now. You can’t even really get away messaging a recruiter at the company to start a conversation, I’ve heard from fri…
I'm not sure why you think this is something about tech specifically or even something recent. Most hiring has always been about knowing people and/or some other signal rather than walking off the street other than in a really would-be employee's hunting environment. ADDED: To be fair, it's probably the fact that, in tech, junior people coming in without any real credentials or otherwise out of the blue at this point…
I know a few mechanical engineers and they haven’t seemed to have the same hurdles. One works in the car industry, a few others in industrial areas, they all switch jobs by simply applying online to their desired companies.
I know some accountants and people who work in logistics who cleared lower bars to get interviews, though I suspect the accounting shortage had some to do with the former.
Finance is very networking heavy but clearing their interview process in some respects sounds easier than the leetcode engineering grind but that may not be representative of the situation as a whole.
Networking never hurts, no matter the industry but tech has a self inflicted wound around hiring practices few other industries seem to have
Re: I automated my job application process
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then you run into problems on the corporate side: fake job listings to build up resume databases for comparison shopping of applicants. Regulations in this area should have to cut both ways.
This the end game that Silicon Valley created. An automation arms race between two competing groups that were initially trying to save a little time or cut down on staffing but escalated it to the point where the default approach would be considered unforgivably assholish 15 years ago, people that don’t buy into it at least somewhat are drowning in bullshit, and nobody’s happy— but on paper everybody’s got record pro…
They seem much better at producing bullshit that’s difficult to filter through, than performing actually useful work.
Re: I automated my job application process
#806I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing? I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I h…
> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements? I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT). The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated…
Re: I automated my job application process
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they're both nitpicking then they are in fact both mediocre at best.
You cannot say either way. There was a point I was trying to get at: Devs access each other just as several religions people do : one's own religion is the best, and that there cannot be any other right way to do things. This why the whole hiring/interview process is broken.
Software is not a religious text. There is good software and bad software and good and bad ways to make software. Usually the devil is in the details and context matters a lot in practice, so it's hard to just write down the answer to all things in all scenarios.
But in a technical interview things are pretty cut and dry. There are in fact right answers and wrong answers and if an interviewer is nitpicking during an interview then they are in fact not doing their job as an interviewer well. If they do the same thing on the job then they are at best a mediocre engineer.
Re: I automated my job application process
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just the first pass. There are second pass strategies that could improve and are even more insidious: - review your generated CV pre-submission, make changes, do this a lot. Eventually you'll have a training set to fine-tune the model - throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks. That's your training set for that job. Now you have tuned the hiring manager's preferences. Follow up with your actual CV. Side…
This is just fear mongering. If a job posting got spammed with 200 fake resumes from multiple fake applicants then the first thing we’re doing is cancelling our job postings with whatever service is so poor that it can’t reject basic spam attacks like this. Honestly, I think people vastly overestimate how much hiring managers use AI for filtering. Blaming AI for rejections has become a common coping mechanism because…
And resume refinement representing and reformatting essentially the same information has always been a commonplace trick to improve your odds. My simple first pass resumes around that time must have never seen the light of human eyes because optimizing things around such systems, adjusting formatting, pushing docx versions, and so on increased my return response rate per submission for the exact same information. People just tend to forget they’ve gone through such processes or are moving positions through networking. The cold market has been abysmal for quite some time, even if you’re qualified.
Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.
Re: I automated my job application process
#809Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely. Pro tip for anyone hiring engineers for remote positions: Tell the applicant that there “might be” an in person technical assessment, even if you know the process will be 100% remote. The amount of fake candidates at the moment is insane. The only thing that makes fake candidates self-select out is knowing there’s t…
I agree with this approach. In this field, unless you're hiring a junior engineer, you can have a reasonable expectation that a potential candidate will fly out for an interview even if it's a 100% remote job. If they refuse, well, there's a chance it's just because they can't afford to. The chance is far greater, though, that you dodged a bullet.
Re: I automated my job application process
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Is this a 'love it or leave it' comment? I genuinely don't understand what you're meaning to say here.
What I mean is unless your ideal is autarky or USSR under Joseph Stalin, it is hypocritical or ingenuous to expect having a market where you can sell goods and services worldwide but not allowing workers applying and getting jobs worldwide for same companies. That is called free market. So if you happen to think you are missing jobs because they are given to people living in another country, you also have the choice…