With the way higher-ed works in the US, and the way certain schools opportunity hoard to an insane degree, that is effectively already the case for whole industries and has been so for decades at this point. It's practically an open secret that getting into some schools is the golden ticket rather than the grades you earn while there. Many top schools are just networking and finishing schools for whole "elite" industries.
A smaller size company, perhaps in a lower COL city, might have a more "human" side to them, simply because they can't afford all the nonsense.
If you attend a well-known college that bigco's hire from frequently, there's a lot of knowledge floating around about interview prep, hiring schedules, which companies pay the best, etc. Clubs host "interview prep workshops" where they'd teach the subject matter of interviews, host events(hackathons, case competitions, etc.) to help you bolster your resume for applying to these bigco's. So just by attending a better/fancier school, you'd have pretty decent odds of eventually getting a job at one of these prestigious places.
If you were to attend a less prestigious school, regardless of your aptitude or capability, the information asymmetry is so bad that you'll never learn of the prerequisites for even being considered for some of these roles. Not many upperclassmen will have interned at fancy employers, so they won't be there to help you drill dynamic programming/black-scholes/lbo models, and won't tell you that you need to have your applications prepped by a certain date, and won't tell you that you should be working on side projects/clubs, etc.
I suppose that the apprenticeship model biases towards people that already have connections, so perhaps inequality was already bad, whereas now we just have an information asymmetry that's more easily solvable.
You don't need a fancy school to get into a top firm anymore. You have to master the hell out of the interview.
I'm sure that's true in some areas, but our last hire I was shocked at the ridiculous lengths the applications would go to to avoid putting in even a minimum effort to apply for the job. Like the Van Halen brown M&M test, we put a line in the middle of the job advert saying "If you've read this, put your favorite color in at the top of your job application message. We had low double digits % of people who would do that.
Honestly, on our next hiring round, I think I'm going to make people fill out a google form to apply, and have any of our job posts say "Apply at <URL>" and completely ignoring any apps we get through Indeed or the like. We had a team of 3 people reviewing applications for an hour or two a day for a month and most of the responses were just human slop.
We're stuck in a stalemate where the sheer volume of applications for employers to handle and applicants to send makes them take shortcuts, leaving both sides wonder why people aren't trying.
If somebody has to send in 300-500 applications (which is not unheard of) and answer the same questions till they go blind, it's not surprising that certain things are missing or people don't care. Applicants don't have any reason to believe their info isn't thrown in the trash by an LLM as soon as it is sent.
Lazy people will always be a problem but until there is transparency or trust developed I doubt we will see meaningful change.
That's leading to an escalation where because applicants believe their apps are just getting fed to the LLMs, employers have to use an LLM. ;-/
Let's not blame the people with no power in this situation.
TBH I can't blame them. you're applying to hundreds of applications repetitively with qualifications that barely matter because you're encouraged to apply anyway. You can only spend so many hours reading HR-drivel (that at this point may or may not be ai-generated) before you focus on just finding "job title, salary , location), and then slamming apply. It's just not worth editing my resume to add some weird qualifier if I don't even think I'm going to get a reply. It's another hoop.
It's the complete inverse of hosting Van Helen at your show. It'd be more like trying to make a cashier recite their company motto. They are not that dedicated to any one role. They can't afford to be.
---
I don't know if it's feasible for your situation, but smaller teams tend to have candidates email their resume. It can still be LLM'd, but I will tend to pay more attention if I feel like I have a direct communication channel. Not yet another greenhouse application form. It leaves room to be more free form with my pitch as well.
Built most of the software of a company where I worked for 7y from humble beginnings to >80 people. Still gotta line up for a 4h on-site assessment! Built tons of free time projects, some more complex than anything one would usually build on the job. Still gotta have live coding interviews and no one can be arsed to even check my publicly available repos...
That'd be fine... meanwhile, the new loop we come into:
- okay, so what does your company need and do
Company: "that's under NDA/trade secrets, we can't tell you"
- okay. we can't see what you want to you'll have to train them
Company: "we don't want to train people, they just need to hit the ground running"
- okay. we'll just let colleges train the fundamentals and have others figure it out
Company: "no one's training anyone anymore. Where did the juniors go?"
Even doctors have apprenticeship programs. An industry where no one wants to train the next generation is a doomed one. If the US doesn't do it, some other country will gladly take it up.
They have terrible interviews there as well that go much deeper than here. They’ll analyze your family - not just you.
This is just a symptom of a really bad economy. That’s what the US is in right now. China’s youth are suffering from this as well.
When I was starting, you were checked for potential as a trainee. In my case, options trading. They checked over that you could do some mental arithmetic, and that you had a superficial idea of what trading was about. Along with a degree from a fancy university, that was all that was needed. I didn't know much about coding, and I didn't know much about stochastic differential equations.
A couple of weeks ago, a young guy contacted me about his interview with an options trading firm. This guy had spent half a year learning every stat/prob trick question ever. All those game theory questions about monks with stickers on their foreheads, all the questions about which card do you need to turn over, the lot. The guy could code, and had learned a bunch of ML to go with it. He prepared for their trading game with some really great questions to me about bet sizing.
I was convinced he was simply overly nervous about his prospects, because I'd never met someone so well prepared.
Didn't get the job.
Now I can assure you, he could have done the job. But apparently, firms want to hire people who are nearly fully developed on their own dime.
When they get their analyst class, I guess there is going to be nobody who can't write async python. Everyone will know how to train an ML on a massive dataset, everyone will already know how to cut latency in the system.
All things that I managed to learn while being paid.
You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job. Where everyone is like a doctor: already decided at age 16 that this was the path they wanted to follow, choosing classes towards that goal, and sticking with it until well into adulthood. And they have to essentially pay to get this job, because it comes at at cost of exploring other things (as well as actual money to live).