As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.
Large companies exist, but pure software companies or with heavy side of it?
While the 9th largest is 7,777 people reported... all the others are at least 40,000 people and the largest two are over 100,000.
Itaú Unibanco https://www.itau.com.br/download-file/v2/d/42787847-4cf6-446... shows 80,657 employees in Brazil in Q2 of 2026.
And for tech jobs... https://carreiras.itau.com.br/busca-de-vagas/software/35299/...
Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.
Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).
In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.
You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.
Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.
> This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.
Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.
What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.
While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.
It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.
Signing up for another page is a bit annoying (especially for places that are all using the same platform, like Workday—I understand these are probably self-hosted or kept disconnected on purpose, but still it could be nice if there was a separate global space for applicants, then we could just be imported in).
To some extent it would be nice if it was harder to apply. Like I used to be happy to see a cover letter required, as that’d filter out some of the competition. Now people can just AI generate their cover letters I guess, so I mostly avoid postings that require them unless I’m really excited. (I think LLMs mostly review the applicants these days as well, and I’m pretty sure LLMs prefer LLM-speak, so it’s a losing proposition).
Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.
If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.
I have applied for, and got, 3 jobs in the last 8 years. So yeah I think I am allowed an opinion on it without people telling me Im wrong.
1. (Actual feedback I got in an interview two weeks ago, for a position no sane person would want to stay in for longer than two years.)
You get rejections? When I was jobhunting, half of the companies I applied to never replied to me.
Tell that to the last 3 years of new grads.
I can't send or recieve documents as email attachments anymore to external stakeholders, everything must be via sharepoint link.
That, plus a decade of compulsory anti phishing training means no half competent HR person should be blind opening an attachment that says 'CV'.
literally the first thing I talk about with recruiters during an initial phone screen.
yeah okay there may be a ~5-10k, maybe even a little more, bit of wiggle-room but if I can't make a reasonable guess where I'll land why would I even consider interview #2 when I already have an existing role?
But in a good market, sure. You can throw your hat into a random general application and you still might get a call back. Old postings are worth a shot. Any connection with an internal recruiter at least guarantees you start the process.
Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.
A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.
They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.
While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).
That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.
In the 90s I was making $50k/year ($50k '95 -> $109k '26 https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ).
The companies where people used to work a decade or two or three are still there and in many cases, largely unchanged.
What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.
Here are the stats for tenure: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.
Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.
I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.
Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?
The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.
But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs. It can create career opportunities you would otherwise not have, and even unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints.
no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.
jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.
This shows some ignorance on the history of work relations. The bad old days of industrial guilds and company towns are not renowned for quality of life and independence. Your life was tied to the company, and all you could aspire to do in your life would be to toil in the same low paying job while mixing up your corporate structure with your life's social structure. If god forbid you lost your job, you and your family would lose your whole life.
Tell me how this is doing things right.
For those in the US to understand, see how your access to healthcare is tied to your employer, and the impact this have on your life of you are forced out of your job. Now extrapolate this to every single aspect of your life.
Perhaps true in the most literal sense, but you cannot assume that it's true in the practical sense.
Lots of companies have laid off significant numbers of people, particularly in certain roles. There will always be some turnover that requires hiring at a large company but this does not mean that you should assume there are always open positions for your role.
Submitting to a large company for roles that are in secular decline within that company is mostly a waste of time.
It's also not uncommon for natural turnover to be used as an organic way to downsize, with a role for a person who just left remaining unfilled.
If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.
Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.
> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people
This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.
The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.