Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if they had something in them that made it seem like a real person, e.g. a personal hobby section. I think a lot of people discourage writing that but I argue it makes you stand out in an ocean of fake and copy pasted junk.

At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity, because the percentage of straight out fakes is too high. Even the questions to ask me at the end were GPT provided.

The fake job applicants are only siphoning resources from the economy at the high expense of all other parties involved. The ones who are getting screwed the most are the applicants, some of whom are concerned about making ends meet and getting auto-rejected constantly despite decades of experience. No one should stand for it.

Bonus: jobs would have to be classified according to a single government standard, so it should be possible to search for a good job match by at least limiting the field and (allowed) location(s).

You as a hiring company can pay to have a 2nd website, but posting it to the gov't portal is a requirement. The information, such as conditions, salary (range), experience, location etc, are all in standardized format. If you're found to be lying, it's a federal crime (because of fraud and interstate commerce for example).

Applicants also must have gov't issued ID (such as social security), so you cannot be fake.

It’s been a mess for awhile due to economies of scale benefiting the hiring side to manipulate and abuse the market. The fact it’s become more affordable for job seekers to do a bit of the same is just ironic.

With LLMs, this same exact scenario is playing out in other realms. Look at writing and publishing. Sure you’re on top of the world before everyone else catches up, but when they do, there’s now just a boilerplate of exponentially expanding bullshit and counter-bullshit that everyone has to circumvent to do anything.

The second tier of search results tends to be dominated by imitators that don't really add anything of value (SEO spam, blog posts that tell you how to write a for loop in Ruby despite knowing full well that the reader already had no problem finding that information, etc.)

Then finally at the bottom are the little guys who try their best, but haven't learned yet that it's a waste of time to try to self-publish any content because there's too much actual spam masquerading as content, and Google can't tell the difference.

The search results effectively became a list of content approved by a single publisher (even if automated) rather than a melting pot of freely-expressed ideas.

I sincerely hope that we can prevent the similar nullification of the software developer's career accomplishments as carrying any weight, but I am starting to have doubts. If it even goes as far as the erosion of incentives to accomplish things, then we may actually end up needing that AI to do the work for us, as there will be few people left who give a shit.

As an aside, I shudder thinking about what a heavily ‘SEO’d’ LLM experience would be like.

They seem much better at producing bullshit that’s difficult to filter through, than performing actually useful work.

Coca-Cola and Toys R Us have found them useful for making terrible commercials cheaper than making terrible commercials by hand and way cheaper than making good commercials that actually improve their brand image. Seems weird they’d do that for immensely expensive holiday television spots rather than throwaway 5 second YouTube spots or something but hey — I’m clearly not a corporate genius.

It’s actually a constant them on HN to imagine that passing laws will magically make problems disappear. The realities of enforcing the law or even identifying perpetrators are imagined to be the easy part.

“You keep getting the stomach bug. Here take this, it’ll calm your stomach. No no, you can keep eating that expired cheese, it’s all good”

Why are you anti French ?

I’m a huge fan of French onion soup.

But if that isn't the case, there's no reasonably good safety mechanism to mitigate the massive amount of harm that a determined bad faith actor could cause to the economy.

But making false claims about your work history (as could be the case with the one using ChatGPT to answer questions) is a problem, isn't it? And it's wonderful to see these rebuttals made against a hypothetical something that already happened. https://www.lawdepot.com/resources/business-articles/legal-c...

Why wouldn't this be a desired outcome? Unemployment doesn't give a carte blanche to send spam.

Good luck.

The applicants doing fake job applications do not care about your laws at all. Many might be in foreign countries. They might plan on applying with stolen identities.

Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?

I missed the part where I included that or any strategy on how it would be used as a deterrent. Clearly that's not how it is done as you pointed out, but you make it seem as if laws have no value at all, which is a rather naive take. Fraud is already illegal FYI.

I don't have a solution, other than to make a call to the people who are elected to find those solutions, if they are able to. If they can't or won't, then it is a good thing that phone call was free anyway.

What I don’t get is what’s the economic incentive for this behaviour

- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.

It’s too elaborate of a Rube Goldberg strategy to take very seriously. Companies struggle to achieve simple, clear, short-term goals in tight-knit, well-aligned teams. Ain’t nobody got the skill to pull off that level of conspiracy.

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 to play by the same rules, relocate there and apply for the same job. Or ask for a lower salary where you already are to be competitive. This is fair competition.

In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority.

if you think america is “free market” I have some Enron stock to sell to you :)

> There are 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”

Total: 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”

No changes—still 4 Rs! Let me know if I can clarify further.

> There are two "R"s in the word "cranberry."

Good example to illustrate how LLMs work, if it is not correct for cranberry, but correct for raspberry or strawberry.

Either way, if my cheap standard unpaid ChatGPT version gives the correct result, I don't think it counts as a valid catch anymore.

Wouldn't you notice a lag between your question and the candidate's answer if the candidate had to type your question into chatGPT?Or does the candidate use some software/tool with transmits your question to chatGPT directly?

I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with the person and would want to work with them. If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway and everybody joining your company can expect colleagues selected by this sub-par process.

This is pretty unfair and seems like victim-blaming when we have companies spending billions of dollars to create these programs with the specific intent of trying to pass the Turing test.

I do think people cheat video interviews with LLM help, but in-person should always be required anyway, even if it’s via proxy (“meet with a colleague from our Madrid office”).

Even if that's the case, isn't it just a matter of conversing in a way that the LLM can't easily follow?

I was happy for that info to go to potential employers, but not to random company and its canine friend.

Then MS bought LI and I was so glad I'd left years ago already.

I've seen one of two places have mandatory URL fields for LinkedIn profiles.

One of the impressions I've been getting is that if you do not fit exactly into an recruitment agencies process, you're DoA, and I have begun to suspect the only work they do is look at LinkedIn.

Having an established LinkedIn profile with their simple identity verification tool is such a trivial amount of effort for de-risking your job search that it’s hard to justify boycotting LinkedIn at this point.

If an application looks suspicious for some reason, I’ll look for their LinkedIn profile as the second step. If I can’t find one or if the profile is also questionable, I move on. LinkedIn is far from perfect, but it’s at least some signal in a world where the noise level is rising fast.

I’m glad it’s a trivial amount of effort for you, I guess.

wait shouldn't that already have been the case? lol

There’s also a rise of “overemployed” people who farm out second and third jobs. Again, they don’t care about anything other than collecting paychecks for a while until they go through the long onboarding, ramp-up, and PIP process, by which time they may have collected $100K for doing barely any work. They use fake backgrounds and resumes as a way to avoid their primary employer getting notified and as a sort of filter for companies who aren’t looking closely at the details. If you can trick them with a fake application, you’ll probably be able to trick them in the interview and then trick them into paying you for a long time too.

Wild.

(Thanks for sharing this info btw.)

On top of that, you have a number of people who are just trying to get hired and perhaps are skilled, but the market is so shitty (in part because of the AI resume slop) that they're resorting to various services to lessen the workload of shotgun resume posting. If you pay a person to send out resumes, you get email notifications that the resumes were submitted, and that person was just asking an LLM to spit out a resume, you'll be hard-pressed to figure out that the resumes are fake (and so on for a variety of other similar reasons, where spray-and-pray resumes are sent out in moderate good-faith but the resumes are BS).

I suppose I am supposed to actually fill out my LinkedIn too?

I'd go the other way, towards more schlepping and less automation[0].

Are you reaching out to anyone in your network and asking if they know anyone who needs your skills?

Are you joining communities (online or offline) that match up to your skills and interests?

Doing either of these, so that you can be warm intro-ed to hiring managers by someone who knows you (or maybe knows someone who knows you) will typically get you to the front of the line.

That's the approach I would take if I were looking today. Too much noise otherwise.

0: Works for startups: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Ask them if it is possible to re-apply in a few months.

Show your resume to friends and colleagues you trust and ask for honest feedback.

I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.

Then you should also apply some mirroring. I wouldnt overdo it with body language, but mirroring with spoken language can be quite powerful (and is more stealthy). Normally there are many different ways in our language to express an idea. Try to do it in a way that is natural to your counterpart.

Look at what you can infer from the appearance of the interviewer. Maybe you can also find out more about him before the interview. What generation does he belong to? Is he conservative/progressive/whatever? What programming languages is he familiar with? ...

Does he look rather old and conservative? - Maybe dont talk about your love for the newest tech hype. Put an emphasis on your good cs fundamentals.

Is he a Java programmer? - use the word interface

Is he a Haskell programmer? - use the word typeclass

Is he a nice guy? - try to be nice

Is he not a nice guy? - dont be too nice

etc...

Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

The person you're replying to is a senior, not junior candidate.

For junior devs who are still learning, LLMs are a great force multiplier that help them understand code faster and integrate new things.

For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might save a couple hours per week, on a good week. I would consider extremely heavy LLM use a much larger red flag for a senior level position, than not using them at all.

As an experienced engineer, I know how to describe what I want which is 90% of getting the right implementation.

Secondly, because I know what I want and how it should work, I tend to know it when I see it. Often it only takes a nudge to get to a solution similar to what I already would have done. Usually it is just a quick comment like: "Do it in a functional style." or "This needs to have double check locking around {something}."

When I am working in the edge of my knowledge I can also lean on the model, but I know when I need to validate approaches that I am not sure satisfy my constraints.

A junior engineer doesn't know what they need most of the time and they usually don't understand which are the important constraints to communicate to the model.

I use an LLM to generate probably 50-60% of my code? Certainly it isn't ALWAYS strictly faster, but sometimes it is way way faster. On of the other things that is an advantage is it requires less detailed thinking at the inception phase which allows my do fire off something to build a class, make a change when I am in a context where I can't devote 100% of my attention to it and then review all the code later, still saving a bunch of time.

See here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566

Worse/less experienced developers see a much greater increase in output, and better and more experienced developers see much less improvement. AI are great at generating junior level work en masse, but their output generally is not up to quality and functionality standards at a more senior level. This is both what I've personally observed and what my peers have said as well.

Out of curiosity, which LLM code tool do you use?

Somewhat related, i have a good idea what i can and cannot ask chatgpt for, ie when it will and wont help. That is partially usage related and partially dev experience related. I usually ask it to not generate full examples, only minimal snippets which helps quite a bit.

For the second use case, I can easily see how effectively prompting a model can boost productivity. A few months ago, I had to work on implementing a Docker registry client and I had no idea where to begin, but prompting a model and then reviewing its code, and asking for corrections (such as missing pagination or parameters) allowed me to get said task done in an hour.

For example I needed to create a starting point for 4 langchain tools that would use different prompts. They are initially similar but, I'll be deverging them. I would do something like copy the file of one. select all then use the inline chat to ask o1 to rename the file, rip out some stuff and make sure the naming was internally consistent. Then I might attach additional output schema file and the maybe something else I want it to integrate with and tell it to go to town. About 90% of the work is done right.. then I just have to touch up. (This specific use case is not typical, but it is an example where it saved me time, I have them scafolded out and functional while listening to a keynote and in-between meetings.. then in the laster day I validated it. There were a handful of misses that I needed to clean up.)

This is mostly because if i don't know that i'm asking for the wrong thing, the llm won't correct me and provide code that answers the wrong question and make things up to do that if needed.

Sure i learn by debugging the llm's nonsensical code too, and it solves my "don't want to watch a 2h tutorial because if i just watch the 10minutes that explain what i want to learn, i don't understand any of the context". But it's not much faster with the llm since I need to google things anyway to check if it is gaslighting me.

It does help understanding errors i'm unfamiliar with and the most value i found is pasting in my own code and asking it to explain what the code should do, so i find errors in my logic when it compiles but doesn't have the desired effect. And it will mention concepts i'm lacking to look them up (it won't explain em clearly but at least it's flagging them to me) in a way youtubers earely do.

Still haven't made up my mind if it is a net positive as it often ends up getting on my nerves to wait 10min for a fluff intro before it gets to the answer. Better than a 20min fluff video intro on youtube maybe?

For unit tests, it's a godsend. Particularly if you write one unit test, and then it can write another in the style you wrote.

I don't know where you work where code is written once and is never changed again, but enjoy it while it lasts...

E.g. suddenly some fresh out of college know-it-all sent crap into your function that you weren't expecting. Then he went to management to blame you for writing such shitty code.

Thing is you wrote unit tests around that code and the shitty know-it-all deleted them rather than changing them when he modified the code

This is why management needs to understand code.

Is your workplace filled with high school students? I’ve never seen anything so petty and immature in my professional career. I hope management told them to grow up.

I think the description I remember on glass door was that it was "high school all over again".

I'm firmly on team "require a coworker to say okay before merging", and this is exactly why.

This is a hot take. I'm 100% not onboard with.

Of course, there are overzealous managers and their brown-nosing underlings who will say that the LLM can do everything from writing the code itself and the unit tests, end-to-end, but that is usually because they see more value in toeing the line and follow the narratives being pushed from the C-level.

I'm an industrial engineer who writes software and admittedly not a "senior dev", I guess, but LLMs help me save much more than just a few hours of week when crapping out a bunch of Qt/Python code that would cause my eyes to glaze over if I had to plod through it.

Meanwhile, a sr with an LLM is a straight up superpower!

Someone with experience can first think through the problem. Maybe use chatgpt for some resarch and fresh up your memory first.

Then you can break up the problem and let chatgpt implement the stuff instead typing everything. Since you are smart and experience you know what chunks of code it can write (basically nothing new. only stuff you could copy pasta before if you had somehow access to all code in the internet yourself).

TLDR: It is way faster to use it. Especially for experienced programmers. Everything else is just ignorant.

My job isn't writing resumes and cover letters.

> Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

lmao this is exactly the issue. There are hiring managers in here saying they're trying to filter out people using LLMs in applications and you're telling me to use LLMs.

I downvoted your post because this is a complete nonsequitur.

Like completely fabricate what they need for a plausible answer from thin air.

As of now they do more harm than good.

Reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He just made stuff up all the time. Turns out, the answers never actually mattered, people were just bored at their desk and wanted to give the appearance of doing work. I think he's in management at Apple now.

Clearly management material.

We all know that.

I don't want to retype my recent experiences, but I have a thread from about 6 weeks ago that goes into my specific details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137229

I was in a good position so I could take my time, but I honestly don't know what I would have done if I had needed a position quickly.

All of the rest including Faang companies I went in without any interviews by knowing people and pulling strings. You shouldn't have to "apply" for anything.

What I have seen on occasion, especially for more senior people, is a carefully constructed charade. We're not interviewing you, that would be so uncouth, we're just having a chat!

At a small company, a chat over lunch that you didn't even go into thinking of it as interview may be enough.

Ask me how I know in both cases :-)

The best defense against AI would be a license number that identifies a person uniquely, provides their relevant job history from a database, proves some minimal common competency baseline, and confirms conformance to some ethical norm against known liabilities.

Come to think of it, this might be a good way for software unions to get a hold in the US. The Union will have a process to validate the competency if its members, and validate their careers, meanwhile hiring managers who are looking for guaranteed engineering quality will be able to find them, and unemployed engineers will be able to find work quickly, only bye the may benefit from the power of collective bargaining.

Kinda like a recruiting agency, but without for-profit motives and the shareholders will be the union members.

I don't see any downsides, except dkr the usual "corrupt men on top" problem which plagues any hunan organization, though mandating that leaders have extencive industry experience could slightly mitigate that.

But it comes with requirements like 4-year degrees, having worked under a PE, etc.

1) They didn't waste my or their time. Interviews rounds clearly progressed towards a hiring decision.

2) Their version of an AWS-style "loop" was a half day with people I'd be working with directly in various capacities. Questions were directly relevant to work culture and function.

3) After the first couple of rounds (recruiter screen, then first tier) all interviews were in person at their office. Interviews were conversational, open, and honest on both sides.

4) The final interview round with the hiring manager was structured as a round of questions to find possible match among the choices of equivalent openings I was likely qualified for.

5) At offer time, I told them what I'd work for and they told me what they couldn't exceed. We discussed total package and wiggle-room. The final offer they made had both no surprises and was also better than other incoming offers.

The position is not specifically rare in my industry, but I am specifically well qualified for it. None of us had worked together before, but we did have some shared clients so they were able to check my bona fides.

In comparison:

- AWS's process, while highly structured and tries for impartiality, is a massive time suck for all involved and as a result is kind of a mindless assembly line. However, it's kind of a good first interview among many companies since it preps you well for everybody else.

- There's more to this story, but briefly, I had two prior near interviews through a strong internal referral and another recruiter who put me into the wrong funnel then disappeared along with the position.

- There's also more here involving friends and former colleagues but to put it short, Google's process is stupid, disconnected, and broken while being far too self-congratulatory. It's a surprisingly good match for what they appear to be as a company externally, and from what I hear, how they are these days internally.

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 applications and embracing LLMs. Their response rate is dismal, but they make up for it with shotgun volume.

The catch is that when they finally get a job, it’s usually at a company that sucks. Some place with incompetent hiring managers who can’t tell the difference between LLM slop and a genuine application. Interview processes that leave so much room for LLM cheating that all of your coworkers are going to be LLM jockeys too.

So you can try it. You might get something out of it, which is better than nothing. However, if you’re expecting a good job at a good company then it’s not going to deliver what you expect.

An arms race is afoot

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 it’s easier to think that a broken AI filter rejected you instead of the company making a valid decision to go with someone else.

> throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks

If your experience wasn’t good enough the first 10 times, doing another couple hundred rounds of LLM word manipulation isn’t going to make it better.

I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link.

Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if they had something in them that made it seem like a real person, e.g. a personal hobby section. I think a lot of people discourage writing that but I argue it makes you stand out in an ocean of fake and copy pasted junk."

is it "fear mongering" or is it reality?

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.

Aye, this. Got all of my jobs historically though word of mouth. Sat next to someone at a wedding reception, or talks at a Linux User Group, or colleagues from one job going to the next and pulling everyone with them, etc.

cold applying was brutal. worked out, eventually, but it feels/felt like such a waste of time.

This is a great way to entrench the recruiter middleman further though, because paying them a 20% cut to bypass the bullshit is already what they sell (and sometimes deliver).

Is the job market just as bad for juniors, people looking to enter the field right now?

I had many of my peers pay people for signing off that they had an "internship" at some companies.

IMO job boards are almost entirely useless. Going to meetups and making friends in open source communities is the way to go.

Are you doing anything that shows and differentiates your interest isn’t the same as all the automated “interest”?

Ex: understand deeply some parts of the industry the company is in and how it can be improved w/tech? Or is it just “rust is cool”?

I'm still amazed that the applicant tracking systems don't provide employers with stats like "time spent on application" or "time spent on website researching". At least this would be a signal towards higher interest.

Heck, I'd love a "fave 5" system for employers. Something to flag extreme interest in working for their company. Companies would probably love to have a list of high-intent people to recruit, regardless of their current employment status.

As for the fave 5 idea - I don't see an easy way to game this if it's tied to a single user account. You would only be seen as prioritizing the company to the employer if you're actively prioritizing them. Most people are applying to way more than 5 companies simultaneously and don't know where their application stands for the company. It would be too risky to try and rotate it continuously.

You ask your friends/past colleagues if the company they currently work for has any openings. If you've worked hard, solved problems and are good to work with, it's a good way to get further employment.

Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say what you are doing wrong.

Yep. But this question has answers. You just don’t know what they are. Ask some friends to help you practice by getting them to give you mock- interviews and get feedback about what you need to do better. If you’re unemployed, you have time. Be resourceful and you should be able to figure out where the problems are.

(That said, solving your problems may be much harder - especially if you’re going for senior roles. I have met plenty of people who have 10 years experience who are nowhere near qualified to work as a senior engineer.)

Since university I have never not been offered the first job I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche into the wider world. I've put hundreds of tailored applications in and basically had nothing (literally a few interviews with Canonical, which is a complete car crash of a process and an HR screening call for a role on half my previous income where she said they were struggling with the number of applications, that I didn't hear back from).

It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I regret I don't have any answers, but good luck with your search.

Applied to more than a hundred positions - one phone screen and one interview.

Then I just went to my large network and within a week I have multiple opportunities - companies creating positions so they can hire me.

Spoke to a number of colleagues in recruiting and who are hiring for their teams - the number of ghost jobs, and frozen but posted positions is staggering. Something is fundamentally broken in the hiring world today.

I’m not gonna do that so I’ll just keep my job until layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and belatedly start connecting.

Meet people and form connections.

I didn't get the job, or even an interview despite that and the hiring manager never bothered to tell me why. (one of their direct reports told me its because i was vastly overqualified)

I feel stuck in a limbo where my title doesn't reflect the seniority i operate at so i'm not getting interview for senior roles based on automated filters i guess, but jobs i do get interviews for, I was told no because because i was overqualified for the role more than once.

This includes being overqualified for the FTE equivalent of my current job as a contractor in the same company and org. But there's no roles opening at the seniority level they'd hire me at and I can't just rage quit on a 6 figure salary just because I should be making double even as a junior as an FTE by now.

The last company where I worked, employee referrals were the preferred mode of hiring. The referring employee would also benefit, on successful completion of the new hire’s first year.

You might want to revisit this aspect.

HN hates recruiters, especially the cold calling kind on LinkedIn, but it has worked great for me. Every other job of mine has been through a recruitment agency and they have been responsible for the highest pay increases and they have been better to talk to about available budget for the role than the employer

During my last job hunt I applied to nearly 300 jobs. Then I recruiter I met at a tiny JavaScript meetup messaged me about a position, and boom. New job.

It’s just one anecdote, but it changed my perspective, that’s for sure. When I’m getting serious about my next hunt I’m just gonna attend tons of meetups and get real active in open source

What about situations where you were laid off and can’t really wait months to get a new one?

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 friends that recruiters simply don’t respond in most cases and I’ve heard from a few recruiters I know that they won’t consider it anymore because it became swamped with spam

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 probably face a lot of headwinds--especially relative to the last decade or so.

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

The referral is not sufficient, but unless you have an MIT PhD in Machine Learning, or similarly rare and in-demand credential, it is necessary.

And I wish I had something encouraging to tell you, but I don’t. I’m extremely broke and getting ghosted on application after application, or turned down months later via robot email. Never any human contact any step of the process.

I’m looking at getting into another industry, tbf.

some people think SWE is about "logic". it is, in part, but the "engineering" in software is much more of an art than it is in other branches, like construction

the current sota AI is great at logic and terrible in creativity and actual engineering. if the technical assessment is not designed for you to show your creative engineering side, do it yourself, do more than you were asked, think about what would be relevant to that company in terms of engineering creativity and offer that

that's the best way I know of showing you're a real engineer, not an LLM operator, it's worked well for me in the job search process

good luck!

The current hiring market mirrors online dating.

Swiping right as much as you can (as a man) will get you more matches for sure, but is unlikely to result in a long term relationship.

There isn't much you can do. It comes down to two things: luck and timing.

I do think there are actions you can take to improve your odds, but you gotta figure out what will work best for you. If those actions were somewhat obvious, I'd imagine thousands of others are doing the same thing.

> know someone in the company who can vouch for me

It didn't take long to establish myself as a relatively skilled engineer in a discord community specific to a mobile development framework. I was able to help many junior engineers solve issues. If I was looking for a job, that community may have provided me an opportunity to at least get my resume in front of a few hiring managers.

Me personally, with all these seemingly out of work programmers who are likely as skilled. or more, I'd look to network with a few of them and do something interesting. Start a programming community that lets engineers self organize and launch a projects. Keep the bar to join very selective much like those dating apps that target VIPs and elite people.

You've gotten 10 phone screens, so you can probably double your activity and get to 20. If you're actually going for jobs you're qualified for, 20 screens should net you ~3 offers, if not more.

My suggestion: record yourself on your interviews and have friends review the recording and offer critique. You have blind spots you need to address to achieve the outcomes you want.