Wow, sounds so familiar! I've once had to argue precisely against this very conclusion - "you saved us once in emergency, now you're bound to do it again".
Wrote to my management: "It is, by all means, great when a navigator is able to take over an incapacitated pilot and make an emergency landing, thus averting the fatality. But the conclusion shouldn't be that navigators expected to perform more landings or continue to be backup pilots. Neither it should be that we completely retrain navigators as pilots and vice versa. But if navigators are assigned some extra responsibility, it should be formally acknowledged by giving them appropriate training, tools and recognition. Otherwise many written-off airplanes and hospitalized personnel would ensue."
For all I know the only thing this writing might have contributed to was increased resentment by management.
Like a proverbial broken clock which shows correct time twice per 24 hours, AI may "show correct time" for 99% of prompts, but doesn't deserve any more trust.
> Pat yourself on the back and mutter “you need to be skilled and lucky to work here”
It would be absolutely amazing if employers and recruiters finally were doing exactly this. We are in this dead end precisely because everyone is under false illusion that their pool of candidates has a hidden gem outshining everybody else in existence, and they absolutely need to sift through the whole pool to find this gem. As a result, all pools are never exhausted and only ever spreading, with more and more desperate people sucked into multiples of them.
Your take is very sensible and I agree with it 100%, but the reality is that (by my assessment) it is absolutely not present in the wall of ATS filters one's job application is up against. I've sent hundred of CV/cover letters over last ten months, none of them are touched by LLM. Most cover letters I manually tailored to re-frame in line with job ad - where I cared a lot, some I just made with my generic template - still manually - where I couldn't be bothered to care. Invariably I either received no response at all, or for remaining 10% I received a generic rejection email, identically worded and styled in almost all cases.
Here it is, if you are curious:
"Thank you for your interest in the <position> position at <company> in <country>. Unfortunately, we will not be moving forward with your application, but we appreciate your time and interest in <company>."
The Resume I am sending out is just an evolution of one that worked very well for me for 25+ years. The roles, as far as I am able to see, are 80%-95% keyword match, with the non-matched keywords being exceedingly superficial. Yes, I haven't listed "blob storage", but guess what else I have used but haven't listed: "semicolon", "variable declaration" and "for-loops". Yet in this day and age one seems to be punished for not doing so.
I am very principled in not letting any AI anywhere close to my CV, because I think the usefulness of signal it conveys rests solely on it being addressed to and read by human, hence it has to be fully authored and tailored by human too. But these days this idea has completely flipped. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Standing by principles could lead to literal dying. Personally, I made peace with dying, but I cannot allow my family to go homeless. As such, I don't see it below me to go down the path of mass-blasting heavily over-tailored Resumes. If it bumps my chances from 0.05% to 0.2%, that's a four-fold increase that may be the difference between, literally, life and death. The organic job search with my natural skills and authentic ways of presentation I relied on for twenty years is dead.
Disclaimer: I've been navigating the job market for almost a year now, and have practically given up.
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.
I would also add meticulous attention to documenting requirements and decisions taken along the development process, especially where compromises were made. All the "why's", so to speak.
But yes, commercial development, capital-A "Agile" absolutely kills the drive.
And yep I didn't want to make my comment too big. I make double sure to document any step-by-step processes on "how to make X or Y work", especially when I stumble upon a confusing bug in a feature branch. I go out of my way to devise a 100% reproducible process and document it.
Those, plus yours, and even others, are what makes a truly good programmer IMO.
Doesn't sound absurd at all to me. Divorce is bad enough so the child can perceive it as having the same "finality" as death, with additional burden of abandonment, disowning and guilt without any chance of reconciliation.
Katy Faust in "Them Before Us" published in 2021 cites the study making this exact claim: "One study found the death of a parent inflicts less psychological damage on a child than divorce. It appears children fare better when they know their parents didn’t choose to abandon their family." The source link in the book appears to be dead, but searching for the title "Parental Divorce—Worse than Parental Death" surfaces plenty of similar studies, enough to satisfy an inquisitive mind.
Wrote to my management: "It is, by all means, great when a navigator is able to take over an incapacitated pilot and make an emergency landing, thus averting the fatality. But the conclusion shouldn't be that navigators expected to perform more landings or continue to be backup pilots. Neither it should be that we completely retrain navigators as pilots and vice versa. But if navigators are assigned some extra responsibility, it should be formally acknowledged by giving them appropriate training, tools and recognition. Otherwise many written-off airplanes and hospitalized personnel would ensue."
For all I know the only thing this writing might have contributed to was increased resentment by management.
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