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 candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview.
However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.)
What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw.
The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen.
I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.
Just want to comment on this, because I think think favoring unknown candidates is a mistake we make too often, and in fact the "normal" process is a disaster on both sides for this reason. Nepotism or Cronyism is granting resources, patronage, jobs to someone you know instead of a qualified candidate. In many industries this is how they function because qualifications and skill provide little to no differentiation (Think knowing Microsoft word and having a comms degree with no work experience).
In high skill industries where experience is hard fought... people know the who the "people" are because they stick out like sore thumbs. If your hiring process at work is throw up a job on indeed and see what resumes come through, your company likely isn't worth working at anyway because the best candidates aren't randos.
Think of it this way if you were putting together the Manhattan project again would you recruit the people with a stellar reputation in physics, engineering, manufacturing, etc OR would you throw up a job on a job board or your corporate site and see what comes back? The difference is active vs passive, good reputation vs no reputation (or a bad reputation).
Not trying to make a big semantic argument... I just want to say that things like reputation and network matter... and thats not really "nepotism"
My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager. You might say “well that’s nepotism then since he’s under qualified”, but I’m sure he would make the argument that he got the job because of his “stellar reputation and extensive network”.
It’s an abhorrent situation to be in. Everyone knows he can’t code but because he got hired at such a senior level he’s making high level decisions that make no sense. Give me a qualified rando any time of the day.
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 clarify, though, I'm not denigrating anyone who has been out of work a long time. I've seen many categories of jobs in the tech industry where there are simply a lot fewer jobs to go around - it's musical chairs and a lot of chairs got taken away all at once).
I would put in an important caveat, though, and that's for people who are early in their careers. The hiring process really is truly shitty for people just entering the workforce and for people with only one or two jobs under their belt.
Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.
There are now AI CVs mimicking real people, so the CVs point to real Linkedin profiles, Github profiles.
Not sure what their end game is unless it's to continually test CV creation or find woefully inept companies that will hire them with limited vetting.
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
I wonder about (and didn't immediately find) case-studies that lay out the strategy of Resume Of Total Lies Dude, their expected payout before they get fired, etc.
I think your idea is very elegant as everyone has access to the mail system, an actual stamp is pretty cheap, but it is just enough hassle to mail an application that it will filter out some of the spam.
The other suggestion I have had is that candidates need to hand in the resume in person, but I guess you could accept resumes from both mail and in person drop offs.
1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that
2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
Probably not much yield in going through more than a few hundred.
Shuffle them around, start skimming through and throw out the rest once you realize you’re just seeing more of the same.
Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”
If that worked, someone would automate a way to bulk spam that too.
Several people have been recommending candidates to lie for IT-related jobs for a long time now, and honestly, I think the vast majority of positions have such a crazy set of requirements that they only get the lairs.
But when the job description contains a lot of very general terms (e.g. "scientific computing") and every part of your job history is just parroting a specific term used in the job description with no details it doesn't pass the smell test.
I absolutely respect keyword-heavy job/project descriptions. You kind of have to do it to make it through filtering by most recruiters. But real descriptions are coherent and don't just parrot back terms in ways that makes it clear you don't understand what the are. You find a way to make a coherent keyword soup that still actually describes what you did. That's great! But it's really obvious folks are misrepresenting things when a resume uses all the terms in the job description in ways that don't make sense.
I kinda think we've reach this weird warfare stage of folks submitting uniquely LLM-generated resumes for each position to combat the aggressive LLM-based filtering that recruiting is starting to use. I assume people think they can do well in an interview if they can just get past the automated filtering. I'm sure some are trying to do 3 and 4 remote jobs at once with little real responsibilities, too, but I find it hard to believe that's the majority. I may be very wrong there, though...
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.
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.
Then why would have unrealistic expectations in the ad?
In government work programs in British Columbia, we were taught to address every point or requirement in a job listing that we could. Is this tactic clearly distinguishable from clearly faked?
ain't nobody gonna get past the interview sheriff
Job seekers should also consider seeking representation from top tier brokers.
Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview.
So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.
One possibility for a free and impartial services would be via government funding. Unemployment insurance is paying out a few hundred per week per person, cutting that time down even a little could pay for a decent background check. That doesn’t get you a job specific resume but it should be good enough for an initial screening for most jobs.
Can you elaborate on why you consider a close match to the job description to be unrealistic?
Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z
Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z
Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.
Why do they even bother?
Because the job requirements on the position are likely to be real as the applicants accomplishments on their resume.
At every company I’ve done hiring at my job descriptions for positions on my team were edited by my boss or hr and read like what was 1-2 levels above the nominal title of the position or had shit like the well worn joke of asking for X years of experience in technology that hadn’t existed for that long.
The entire hiring market for tech at least has devolved into almost 100% noise over the last few years
During the DotCom bust I ended up getting a taxi license in NYC and driving yellow taxicabs on 12-hour (standard) shifts for over 18 months. During the GFC, I got trained in HazMat handling and joined contracting companies as an employee cleaning the beaches after the BP oil spill for a year. In both cases, I re-entered the software engineering market as a high-demand candidate and made even more in base and total comp than I had previously.
I am over 50 now. I never transitioned to a management position. Still, I do plan to re-enter the software engineering market when the current winter ends and spring next arrives.
[0] I work with agentic AI on my own projects. Due to limited context windows, even the best models like Claude Opus or Alibaba's Qwen-coder require much more expert handholding than people let on. Even with good context engineering and memory tools.
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 could cause something like this in the near future.
According to wikipedia[0] there doesn't seem to be any significant uptick in H1Bs. Is that what you were referring to by "immigrants coming over in hopes of getting a white-collar job"?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_visa_tables_and...
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.
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 makes sense in a low-interest rate environment where finding a qualified candidate becomes a challenge.
The exceptional and even qualified immigrants that would take these jobs are coming at a significantly lower rate since Trump 1.0. And that includes international students that would eventually become exceptional/qualified candidates.
The 50 year old commenter has pointed out the root cause and showed examples of the cycle to explain when the jobs will come back.
You do what you have to to pay the bills. If that means going outside your field for a while, so be it.
When the Great Recession hit, 90% of the food truck operators in my neighborhood were very recently bankers and finance people.
Pretty bold. Things like manufacturing haven't recovered and we're seeing similar outsourcing in tech.
For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
I have a couple friends who haven't had steady work in years, and they still eke out a pretty reasonable existence living with friends and family because they are kind and considerate and people don't mind having them around. A lot of street homeless have mental or substance issues that make it hard for them to coexist with other people.
I've had the luxury, working in tech, to have lost a job and had the opportunity to take a few months off before searching. Even this was incredibly stressful in practice, but I never had to worry about losing my place of living.
A lot of my friends' parents rely on their support. If they lost their jobs their parents would be in trouble, too.
What about their wife and children? Do they get to stay with them too?
This is one of the most out-of-touch HN comments I've seen in a while. Most people are not nearly as privileged as the community on these forums. Not even all the people posting here are fully removed from the risk of being out on their ass. Some have moved from other parts of their home country (think people in the Bay Area who moved for a job and have no family in the same job market). Some have moved from other parts of the world to where they are and have no one upon whom they can impose. Plenty have huge student loans and are so fresh out of school that they're at the edge of the many rounds of layoffs affecting the tech industry in the last few years and lack enough experience on their resumés to land a new position before their finances run out.
I can't believe how tone deaf it is to suggest that most people have multiple rungs upon which to fall back. And I've only been talking about people on these forums, the "fortunate" types.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/table...
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2024/08/lowest-homeownership-rate-...
I recently stumbled upon a YouTuber grousing about losing her six-figure tech job. She was in full freakout mode about budgeting etc. but something didn't seem quite right. Then she disclosed she's married, financially stable, husband still has a great job, etc.
It made me stop and think how there's people out there delivering groceries, putting on an apron, all so they don't have to switch to eating cat food by the end of the week.
OTOH ex-Googlers are worried they might be forced to switch to store-brand mineral water within weeks.
There are several drops in lifestyle you have been accustomed to, before that happens.
If it doesn't happen it's because someone bails you out, this is a privilege not everyone has.
Thanks. You hit the nail on the head.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
I like learning new things, and I hope to continue that into my 60s (and beyond), but I have to imagine picking up new skills will get harder as I age.
This is solely done to reduce/delay pension payments by pushing the old unemployed into lower social security / forcing them to live off of their savings.
No one in any industry is looking for geratric 70 year olds.
If by FIRE you mean retire in your 50s, I don't think that's an aspiration. That should be an expectation. You might be able to work a full career in this industry, but I wouldn't plan on it.
And you have to do it for decades. You need to be able to tough it out through the worst of times (like the dot-com bubble, financial crisis, covid, and random political chaos like tariffs.)
You have to tune out the noise and always remember that on a long enough timeline, the market only goes up. And if you think it's "different" this time, it won't be for long.
I feel like the underlying issue is less with age and more with ossification. If you're a world expert in Visual Basic but don't want to learn that "fad" TypeScript, well, get used to being unemployed.
Life never gets easier with age. I guess that's just something we all have to come to terms with eventually.
HAHAHA. I have so much more "fu" money now, it really takes a lot of pressure off. Something goes wrong? I can solve it with money. Stranded somewhere? Just pay. Friend in trouble? Help out.
Also unions are mostly there to allow the lazy low performers to coast. We already have a serious problem of this but making it hard to fire them will make everyone’s life worse.
If there was a union there would be no boom to capitalize on.
That’s a long enough tech career to retire. I don’t know you, but I know that even 65 year olds with 6 million in the bank are nervous to retire.
Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
HN has been huge for my career personally, so I made this site to help make it easier to find stuff that's good for you: https://hnresumetojobs.com/
Sincerely wishing you the best of luck.
Otherwise oof, that sounds like volatility only worth dealing with if one really needs an income, esp. considering the signal for prospective employers.
This hurts. As someone who's been unemployed, struggling with mental health issues, for far longer than I'd care to admit in such a forum, I struggle with the question of when it's just been too long to realistically get back into it.
I wish you luck
I wish you all the best and hope you find a job too.
Hope you find something soon !!
I've had some extended periods of unemployment. Only advice I can offer is to strengthen existing social connections and put yourself in situations where you can meet new people. I've gotten work before from people I met in random social contexts. I guess you could call this "networking", but I hate that word. It's good to reduce your isolation, whether or not it directly lands you a job.
Email in bio if you want to chat. Maybe I can help.
- "Hey, I applied, could you hire me?"
- "I have a compsci, I'm qualified, I sent a resume"
- "can I use you as a reference?"
I don't envy anyone looking for a job right now.
When I was hiring somewhat recently, I talked to a worryingly high number of people that didn't know what role they're applying to, had perfect resumes and were taking the fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude to its limit. I mean I get there's a sales aspect to an interview, in a way, but this was pushing it way too far. It was a very frustrating experience.
A lot of the recent advice has pretty much destroyed the hiring process, in my humble opinion. It swings from solving hard computer science problems to testing trivia to being a political round-table. I keep on wondering how much worse can it get before a reset is needed.
- basically all jobs you see posted on LinkedIn or on big sites are either fake or might as well be because they are being run through HR
- everything is optimized for engagement, not outcomes, so there are lots or meaningless things to do (basically anything on linkedin). You might as well do some of them to stay sane but they'll never get you a job
- what's valuable is networking and getting the opportunity to speak to a real person who might want to work with you. There are always lots of jobs, even when there are no jobs, but there are trust problems, process and bureaucratic issues, and incompetence (all of HR/talent) that need to be navigated
- sort of redundant, anything that's easy (like Easy Applying to a job) is useless. Hard, uncomfortable prospecting, involving real people, increases your chance of success
When I was looking (a while back), my experience was that the big sites are a dozen or so of consultancies and head hunters reposting all the jobs as "an opportunity for a client."
FooCorp (a real company) would post a position. Then headhunters and contract to perm style consultancies would repost it. This way, you'd get 1 + 12 job postings for the same position (assuming that the company even posted it there in the first place).
Next, applying to a position (other than the real one) on that set would get you ghosted (they're collecting resumes to send on and will pick 100 that they feel have the best chance of getting hired before contacting back). Sometimes, they'd call you back with a different position that "you'd be perfect for". Often, the resume that they send on to the actual position is significantly doctored from the original (to the point where its "this person isn't the one on the resume"). In today's world, the "this is an AI fake" is sometimes the transformation that the head hunter does to your resume.
So its not so much run through the company's HR, but run through the head hunter's filter trying to find the "best" ones to send on and for that filter, even though you applied it might not get to the hiring company to consider.
(Anecdote: when I was unemployed looking for a job a number of years ago, I tried some headhunters. One interview that I got they were asking me really odd questions about technologies that I knew nothing about. When it was pointed out that "I should know about these things, its on your resume" they showed me the one that they got that had my name on it... and it didn't match the copy that I brought with the exception of when I got my degree and what university it was from. They thanked me for my honesty and we both agreed that I was not a good technical fit for the position.)
Imagine trying to find customers only by cold emailing.
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement.
At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structure, not having a social context, and lacking a sense of belonging. Lacking these factors will absolutely ruin your mental well-being.
These aren't things that are impossible to find when unemployed (or otherwise not working), but if you've spent most of your life being told what to do, first in school and then at work, you've got some figuring out to do.
Most people don't have the financial resources to be out of work for a month or two, much less indefinitely. For most people it has nothing to do with the factors you listed.
I've been laid off twice in the past and each time I was fortunate to have enough savings to take several months off of work to relax and unwind. I'd quite happily do it forever if I could afford it. I loved being able to set my own routine, tell myself what to do, and find my own social context and sense of belonging while doing activities that I enjoyed, usually having nothing to do with work, like biking, skiing, creating open source projects, etc.
But watching your bank accounts slowly tick downwards is incredibly stressful, even when you have a long runway, and each time I ended up job hunting sooner than I had planned.
I would be perfectly happy without a job. It's the income I'm concerned about.
Partly true. But today there is no way to live off the land either, as people used to in the past by raising cattle and pigs. Either it's illegal or you owe the govt taxes.
I'm in western europe. I think the situation in the US is way different, though. Also, for juniors (or people with less than 8-10 years of experience) is much harder, that's true.
And it's got to last years or there will be no recovery for shareholders from what they've already suffered with a stagnant economy.
In the 1970's it ended up 10x this bad or worse, in most technical fields at the time as well as non-tech.
There was nothing else that could be done except recognize it was a crap shoot.
There will be plenty of millions who do not lose their jobs, some will not even lose much momentum. There will be nowhere else for the "new normal" to coalesce around, after nothing else resembles the old normal for so long.
As before, only the relatively unscathed will write the economic history of these years, and many less-fortunate millions are slated to be forgotten.
The only other alternative is for everybody to take a steep pay cut, and all upwardly-mobile climbers to halt all momentum. What are the odds that could happen this time?
And that still wouldn't allow hiring as many early-career professionals as there will be available for quite some time to come.
Don't worry, employment is not where all the negative outcomes will affect future generations . . .
> Are you scared for your safety?
> … I am not scared for my physical safety in the sense of an agency or company coming to kill me, but I have no job. My career has been tarnished. I'm unemployed. Living off of unemployment for the next three, four weeks until that's gone. So it's a complicated question.
https://www.rev.com/transcripts/house-uap-whistleblower-hear...
The opportunities happen from talking on the phone, meeting someone for coffee. I feel like this entire resume submission industry should just be deleted.
To the brainstem, employment is the process of hunting for food. No employment means there's no hunting going on.
I know it's going to be deeply unpopular -- it always is -- but I never understood how reasonable people don't find bringing children into this world to be an act of abject cruelty.
Some say this has already happened...
The reason why it's not cruel (IMO) is that there's hope for a better future, if you don't have kids, you will never be able to know. That's choosing to just not play the game, total darkness. There isn't an alternative universe to choose from.
I consider myself exceptionally lucky to land where I did, and yet still would not care to do that process again.
Foo Corp
Recruiter: [Jane Smith]
* 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown]
* 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe]
# Leads
* [Adam Albert] at [Bar Corp]
# Initial Contact
* [Brenda Baker] at [Qux, Inc.]
# Recruiter call
...
# Phone Screen
# Tech screen
# Onsite
# Rejected
* [Shifty Corp] (they gave me the heebie-jeebies)
# 2025-09-15
* On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] from [Foo Corp]
* Recruiter screen with [Chris Carter] at [Deluxe Pinkies]
# 2025-09-14
* Reference check with [Arctic Drilling and Waste]
Hyperorganization is one of my superpowers, and I leaned into it. Every morning I'd review the pipeline and timeline docs and ping every recruiter or company who I should've heard from but hadn't yet: "hey, it's me! Thanks for the chat the other day. Hope your Maltese, Mr. Pickles, feels better! Here's a picture of my cat waving to Mr. Pickles!" A lot of times that'd nudge them to respond and move things along.
I'm looking at my timeline right now and seeing the day where I had 2 recruiter screens, a tech screen, and an onsite. It was busy. But I was ready and willing to work, and at the end I turned down 3 pending offers to accept the one I most wanted.
Again, I count myself as exceptionally lucky. That said, half of "luck" is putting yourself in the right place, in the right condition, to jump on a good opportunity.
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
Seeing bog standard senior engineer positions still advertising for the places that ghosted me 5 months ago means the job posting is fake for one of the n-teen reasons companies paste fake postings or the company has gotten unreasonably picky with how much labor is on the market
Edit: Maybe it could be used to start some sort of unemployed software engineer fight club?
She graduated with a computer science degree in January, and then her dad passed away. The estate was a mess so she ended up spending time figuring that out. Then, we found and fixed a medical issue that had been draining her energy. She's doing a lot better now, but as a result she has an 8 month gap on her resume. She also never took an internship so that she could finish a semester earlier with summer classes. So now she's absolutely screwed for phase 1.
She switched to phase 2 recently. She got a hit for software support. She got rejected, but the person was like "Why aren't you applying for programming jobs, since you like programming?" They set her up for an interview for an actual programming job, and said her lack of experience wasn't an issue because they had a lot of pull, and that they would offer her a test where she could prove herself. She spent the next several days preparing non-stop for the interview, only for the same guy to be angry at her for not having multiple significant projects on Github and refused to even give her the test.
After that we thought about continuing phase 2, but we both felt like it was just a waste of time, especially after the last experience. She's had previous experience tutoring and I've written some instructional books, so we've now just decided to ignore the job market and form an LLC related to teaching. She'd be a great programmer, and it's really stupid that no one wants to give her a chance, but at some point you just figure the job market is so irrational that we should be able to beat it by doing it ourselves.
The argument of "have hope, almost everyone picks themselves up eventually!" doesn't work when you're the one who is actually homeless.
> Tell them you’re unemployed, what do you get? “Oh yeah I was unemployed one month ten years ago boy that sucked.” Yes, friend, yes it does suck right now six months in, and unlike your little story there I don’t know when or if it will ever stop.
This is on point, but then the author completely misses the mark a following paragraph.
> How often have you known somebody whose life was really, finally wrecked by unemployment?
I don't know anybody in my situation. The people I know send one job application, get an interview, and get an offer. I don't know how they do it. They don't know how they do it.
People look at me like I must not be trying very hard because it's trivial for them to get a job and infer that it must be for me as well.
The author says
> It won’t turn out as bad as you fear.
And continues by asking how many people does the reader know go homeless from being unemployed?
> I’m talking about who do you personally know who’s had it go that badly?
Homelessness is just a weird way to frame that. A family friend is the only other person I can think of in a similar situation to me - mid 30s, university educated, very unemployed - and they're living with their parents.
That doesn't mean they're not having a really bad time. Or that its not bad for society in general when we waste human capitol like this. She had motivation enough to travel out of country to get her degree. She is educated, but had no place in society, no career or family of her own now. That isn't fine just because she isn't homeless.
My savings are gone and even when I lose my home this year I will have social support structures, like living with family. I won't go homeless but that doesn't mean my career isn't over or that things aren't that bad.
I'm not even worried about being homeless.
I'd sleep in a tent if every day I woke up to doing what I loved.
I am worried that every day for the rest of my life will be worse than the day before it because nobody will work with me and nobody wants me on this earth.
Still searching for some reason!
This is surprising to me. Unless you last tried this long enough ago that the manager said, "I like the cut of your jib, young man, you've got grit" in a transatlantic accent.
They can verify if people are real. They have the information on what experience people have. If I was them then I'd be saying that your LinkedIn profile was your CV, and persuading companies to make LinkedIn be their route to applying for jobs.
(Not a shareholder, don't really use LinkedIn myself, just feels like such an obvious step for them to take.)
If I have to guess, the current business model is likely profitable & any deviations too far from that could hurt their bottom line. Incrementing slowly overtime to LinkedIn replacing the CV seems to be the play, mainly to keep the current cashflow going.
Worst case scenario, this provides something interesting to talk about in subsequent job interviews. You can often delete large portions of a resume when you have a fully published product live on a platform like Steam, even if it's very mediocre and selling like trash.
In any reality, this is way better than working in the domain of boring bullshit banking and suffering the miserable personalities that inhabit the space. I feel like I might cross the "never going back" threshold with that entire industry within the next few months. If I reframe this, it is really stressful but it's also quite liberating. If I hadn't walked away from that job last year, I would have had zero time to think about these alternative paths.
Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love.
That's when I learned to stop working for free.
Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.
If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.
The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.
Also, the number of junk resumes, where I take a resume block and post it into a search engine and it comes back with an exact match of the text. I write up a caustic response as to why not to hire the person… and they still slipped in!
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)
So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.
But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.
I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.
Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.
It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.
It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.
I agree.
But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.
Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.
>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.
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 something kids are running circles around boomers today.
When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.
This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people.
Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.
This isn't twitter. You don't need to demand a ban against the first bruise to your ego.
He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again.
But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice.
I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale.
Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give.
What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets.
It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.
I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out.
The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.
The tech industry has turned into some kind of beauty contest of who appears to be doing the most work. I suspect the reason why it's more about 'appearance' is because deep down, they are demoralized - They are only pretending to be motivated, they are not actually motivated to improve anything. They're motivated only to keep their job. They are laser focused on that goal. The rewards are small, the punishments are big.
It makes the work more competitive and stressful, especially for those who aren't used to keeping up appearances and actually want to get stuff done. You kind of have to play the game.
It feels like the current job crisis is artificial and specifically intended to lower people's salary expectations and increase their work output but I feel like it's mostly backfiring. People are burned out. I was shocked to realize that even immigrants from developing countries who come to my country are feeling demoralized in the tech sector. 10 year ago, they felt they were on a career fast-track, now even they don't really see the light at the end of the tunnel. I've met some of them with master degrees who feel like they walked into a trap by leaving their home countries. They're feeling the high cost of living. The cost of living (and salaries) also went up in their home countries, the remittances aren't what they used to be. Meanwhile, cost of living here is sky-high. Doesn't feel like success anymore, for anyone.
I'm very good at software development and I enjoy coding but even I've had thoughts of changing career to something more essential like plumbing or construction, to stop the feeling of powerlessness and systemic manipulation which seems to be the core of this industry. I need more control over my destiny. I'd like a career where skill determines outcomes with high reliability and doesn't require permission from gatekeepers. Unfortunately, the country I live in is not very good for bootstrapped software developers and raising money is impossible unless you have a certain pedigree.
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
Dating is just a numbers game. Roughly speaking it's about maximising interactions with potential partners and taking a shot in as many of these interactions which go positively as possible.
You can game dating in your favour with a bit of strategy. Unfortunately job searches are much harder to game since you can exhaust the number of active positions for your preferred role quite rapidly. The only advice I can give on job searches is to keep your skillset as broad as possible. Specialising is good if when you find work you want to be paid well. Being well-rounded is good if you want to find work as easily as possible.
Another small points: reduce your expenses. Basically plan for the worst in terms of budgeting. Widen your search space. There are other younger markets in global south you can also approach.
Theres this expression i couldn't exactly translate to English. It goes along the lines of loosen up your body (literal translation), but it's more about yielding to the flow and less about physically doing so.
I’m not sure that the process the author describes is all that common in practice even if it is eminently sensible.
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
(I say this half-joking, but also I know a DBA who retrained as an electrician and was happier than ever. It's the fact he retired - early - which has put me in my current predicament.)
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
People who have networks all know this. The issue is that a shocking number of people don't have any network at all. These tend to be the sorts of people who are either actively antisocial at work (the "coworkers aren't your friends" type) or job hop so frequently that they don't spend enough time at any single job to develop any meaningful professional, let alone personal connections.
The majority of employment in tech is with large, corporate firms, and unless you are in the executive tier they all have implemented a massive amount of process to prevent bias in hiring which means that even networking has low impact on getting a job, beyond letting you know the positions even exist
Use the paths available to you to get a job. Exhaust them all. If you know someone that works there and THEY track you down, yes this is good advice, great way to get a job.
I don't really have a good network, since I have worked in different countries.
Just be careful contacting recruiters directly. I know of at least one F100 that will blacklist you for pestering their recruiters. If you think ai-generated resumes are overwhelming recruiters, you should see their LinkedIn inboxes.
This is becoming less and less true.
> You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
Unless you're lucky, this is no longer going to happen. Getting a job is now becoming much more about luck, circumstances, and who you already know, much like getting your first starring role in a movie -- not about your abilities.
https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Job_Seeker_Informati...
https://www.worksourceoregon.org/jobseekers
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
Presumably the computer science departments will continue to churn out more supply for a while yet.
Started my career as a "physicist" at the NIST in research on the "Lamb dip" in the wavelengths of He-Ne lasers, got into the numerical analysis of ill-conditioned matrices, and, thus, got a career in scientific computing.
For a job, just look in the 'Help Wanted' section of the Washington Post, send a few resume copies, get a few interviews, and get 1-3 offers, all in less than 2 weeks. No problem.
The DC area was awash in organizations trying to get into computing and were desperate for anyone who could type in code and have it run.
A guess is that there was a larger plan: Some Big Shots in US National Security were really big on getting the DC area really moving on computing so pumped in big bucks with the theme, "If they look like they have aptitude and interest, then make them an offer they won't refuse and have them learn on the job." I.e., the Big Shots tweaked the supply and demand curves -- considering the money they were spending on military hardware, getting young guys into computing was small potatoes with a big gain.
Soooo, from the posts here, now we are at the other extreme: Way too many people and way too few jobs.
Part of the problem is the concept "geographical barrier to entry". E.g., there around DC, the Big Shots wanted to hire people already in and around the local area of DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland and, thus, the employees had for competition a "geographical barrier to entry" -- no one outside that local area would compete.
So, I got a good career going, Camaro with 396" engine, the best restaurants, fancy food cooking hobby, violin practice on a decently good, new violin, a sack full of Nikon camera equipment, self-study in math, furniture, clothes, wife in grad school, in computing with also, crucially, some math, Fourier theory, numerical analysis, Navier-Stokes equations, etc. With that success, to improve that career, got an applied math Ph.D. -- ruined my career, never recovered. My brother warned me, "Each year in your Ph.D. program will leave you 1 year behind in your career" -- CORRECT.
Now, with the Internet, often no barriers to entry.
Curiously, people mowing grass, removing trees, installing roofs, repairing driveways, installing HVAC, electricians, plumbers, painters, real estate agents, insurance agents, ..., do have a small geographical barrier to entry. E.g., in my neighborhood, a guy mowing grass has two, nice, new 4-door pickup trucks with some nice trailers for the equipment. They have useful tools, e.g., pickup trucks, riding mowers, leaf blowers, wrenches, saws, volt/amp meters, etc. and are good at using them.
Now there are computers, useful tools, with people who know how to use them. Sooo, find some uses with some barriers to entry.
Uh, can't not notice, that looks like it's time to move to the other side of the table, be an employer instead of an employee.
An acquaintance of mine—he was the owner's/CEO's deputy at a place I worked—now runs a team-coaching-turned-recruitment business. I saw a question from him on social media the other day, something along the lines of: "Some businesses in the industry are receiving over 5,000 applications for advertised roles. How do you effectively screen that many applications?" I didn’t respond, of course—I have neither credentials nor experience, nor any real relationship with this guy—but I formed an opinion nonetheless.
My intuition was simply: you don’t. If your candidate pool’s fitness function is normally distributed, you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000. The distribution will be practically the same, and the maximum will be indistinguishable from the true maximum in any practical sense. As I recently explored—prompted by some statistical curiosity—this, of course, is modulated by the mean and standard deviation of the distribution. A higher standard deviation calls for a larger subset, while a higher mean dramatically shrinks the number needed to screen.
But I also think nobody really knows their "true" fitness function, much less its distribution across the applicant pool—simply because businesses have no means or resources to actually measure or research this aspect. That doesn’t stop them from pretending they do.
I also felt the urge to respond with some snark: maybe they don’t really understand their own business, at least the placement/recruitment aspect of it. If they’re recruiting mid-echelon personnel—software devs, BAs, testers, other office roles—it makes sense to publish an ad and gather applications. But it doesn’t make sense to expect that pool to include extraordinary candidates from a fitness perspective. Sure, we’re all extraordinary in some sense, but in roles like these, businesses are simply not in a position to materially benefit from that extraordinarity. Nor are they able to detect it during hiring—and I don’t even mean that as snark; it’s just the nature of things.
In a natural distribution, the second-best candidate is not materially better than the top-best, and the third is almost like the second, and so on. Businesses that set their hiring threshold—whether explicitly calculated or intuition-based—too high will simply go out of business, because in this echelon you need to rely on mass hiring. Relatively speaking, of course, but you still need to be able to fill multiple positions with readily available candidates.
So, the question posed by my ex-coworker doesn’t make sense. But as I see it, it doesn’t make sense even for hiring in the top echelon—C-suites and so-called "rock stars." The strategy for top-echelon hiring is well established. It’s widely used in business, show business, and sports alike, where "fitness" follows a power-law distribution. It’s called "scouting" or "headhunting". You don’t throw a job ad over the fence and wait for a torrent of applications. You meticulously maintain a rolodex of potential candidates, watch their careers, court and dine them, and try to snatch them when they’re poised to make a move—or even just before it becomes obvious.
You don’t wait for them to apply to you—you apply to them. You don’t ask "Why do you want to work for our company?"—you shower them with perks and sign-on bonuses if they show even a hint of hesitation. The "agents" in this echelon work for candidates, often on retainer—not the other way around. It’s a completely different world, where you’re never in a position to screen a pool of 5,000 in hopes of finding an extraordinaire. In that world, hiring the second-best can have a humongous negative impact on company performance compared to hiring the top-best. For better or worse, that’s reality.
So I found my guy’s question quite unsettling—an indicator that yet another "recruiter" doesn’t really understand what they’re recruiting for.
I was able to fish out a useful metaphor from the LLM-generated word soup: "talent brokers vs gatekeepers." Over the last decade, recruitment agencies and internal departments have been universally rebranded as "talent acquisition." That rebranding feels disturbingly phony and hollow. Now I know why. Despite pretending to be "talent brokers"—scouting for talent—the reality hasn’t changed. They’re still the same old "gatekeepers", applying selectivity to boatloads of "talent" that come to them.
As industries and their associated keyword-spaces have grown dramatically—and AI tools have proliferated—such selectivity has become increasingly diluted. In my opinion, it’s now indistinguishable from random picks, yet still cloaked in the illusion of validity. For someone like me, swimming deep in the muck of the mid-echelon and with no ambition whatsoever to strive for oxygen-deprived heights of top echelon, it’s deeply disturbing.
That said, grinding through middling startup jobs also sucks.
The ability to get vc attention seems incredibly cliquey - not a game I really want to play again. On top of just wanting a normal / decent salary as a founder.
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
In the meantime, your task is to separate from the darkness and let it be on the outside, not the inside. It's bad enough when it's on the outside: that is, in the world around you or even in your own body. When it's on the inside—not just the body but the mind—then it destroys. Push the darkness out of the mind and into the outside world. That's pretty abstract advice but it's the best I know, and if it makes sense to you, I hope it helps.
I am not doubting you have been fucked with -- I once got into a 2v1 brawl on the Mission and 16th BART that only ended because I sent one flying into a pillar and told the other if he kept coming, he was going onto the fucking tracks.These guys kept going over to a homeless guy who was just... sitting there... trying to get a rise, hoping for an excuse to "defend" themselves. And when I told them to quit being bullies, they tried to jump me.
So trust me, I believe you, and I get that trauma can have an impact on your life.
But if you are using narcotics, it will impact your search.
If you want help getting clean, I could send some resources to the email on your profile -- on the technical side you sound like a better coder than me and if you had that part locked down I suspect you'd quickly find work.