The OP thinks that candidates spending a lot of time on applications is OK, as long as the company shows respect by spending a lot of time themselves. I think this is mistaken - I care about how much time I have to spend, and am a lot less concerned about how much time the company takes.
There's a trade-off: if a company spends more time / requires more effort on an interview process, they can get a better signal on the candidate's abilities, but then they'll lose out on candidates who are unwilling / unable to commit this time. This might just be a hard trade-off in recruiting.
Excellent point. And for anyone who’s been a hiring manager / recruiter, you know how many candidates you will have to sort through. And you want to waste as little of your engineers’ time making them do interviews if possible.
Internet applications have made it so easy to apply to a position, companies have to find (usually arbitrary) ways of filtering the pipeline.
It’s a very difficult problem to solve - Coinbase had 500k applications for 500 positions.
Edit: I’m very concerned about AI tools flooding the pipelines even more by sending out tons of automated applications. This is going to cause an arms race where the companies have to use more arbitrary methods to sort through candidates, and it will only make it harder to find good ones.
But, yeah, it's not that, back in the day, I didn't post a ton of application resumes and form cover letters to HR departments out of school--and even got non-form responses from a number (and an offer from one sight unseen though I ended up going with someone else even after insisting on an in-person visit). But my sense is that, as you say, there's more of an arms race as you put it going on today where--if you don't have some way of cutting trough the noise, such as through your network, it's a tough slog. Which is one reason the anecdotal evidence at least suggests it's tougher for people who have't developed a network yet.
Historically, I'm not sure that isn't fairly normal.
But compared to maybe the decade plus prior to a couple years ago for (especially junior) software developers, it seems like a tough market based on a lot of conversations irrespective of overall unemployment rates.
Last time I was looking, a year or so ago, I sent out dozens of applications and got zero interviews. Last time I switched jobs, in 2022, I sent out the same amount of applications and >50% led to one or more interviews (and eventually two offers).
In 2023, I was Amazoned after 3.5 years and found myself looking for a job. Even worse, by then I had moved to an area that was tourist heavy, but not really tech heavy and was looking for remote only jobs. The remote role at AWS just kind of fell into my lap.
Plan A: Leveraging my network. This led to two offers both architect level positions - one over the architecture and migration to AWS at f500 company and the other over the architecture of PE owned company that was doing rollup acquisitions (been there done that).
Plan B: targeted outreach to companies looking for expertise in a niche of AWS
where at the time, I was one of the industry experts and was a major contributor to a popular official “AWS Solution” in its niche.
This led to two interviews and one offer.
I basically had three offers and a side contract within ten days of looking.
I’m not bragging, I’m old. I should have a network to lean on and a reputation. The point is that even with my experience, if that well above had run dry, I might have been screwed.
I also applied for hundreds of jobs during those two weeks while going through the interview process with my first hits. I heard crickets and for every job I applied to, it had hundreds of applications and my application wasn’t even viewed by most and my resume was only downloaded once (LinkedIn Easy Apply shows both).
I was not some old guy (well I am) with outdated skills. At the time I had over ten years of software development experience (on my resume) and 7 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS (ProServe) leading relatively complex projects.
>The OP thinks that candidates spending a lot of time on applications is OK, as long as the company shows respect by spending a lot of time themselves
if I spend 6 hours and the company has 1000 employees does that mean they spend 6000 hours? If so I might consider it a reasonable line of argument, but I guess they don't spend anywhere near that.
I think it's reasonable to make a donation on behalf or provide an honorarium if someone makes it far enough into the process. Something like a $250 gift card or equivalent.
Not enough to make it worth farming interviews for compensation, but enough to show that the company appreciates that you spent 2-4 hours working on their take home.
This is an interesting use of AI. If we just want to know what Charles III looks like, photography has solved that problem. So a portrait is interesting because it's saying something about him, rather than being a photo-faithful likeness. But what is the robot (or rather, the robot's programmer) trying to say here? Any ideas?
Trivially, the measure of how much it costs in dollars to drive into Manhattan along the affected routes has gone up. So there are likely some people who are worse off. It's rare to have a completely free lunch, but this one looks pretty cheap.
Number of people saying that you should just make sure you have backups. That's true, but there's still a role for government to play to prevent this sort of thing. We don't let companies sell poisonous food - why do we let them offer digital services that can be arbitrarily frozen?
It only appears rare for two reasons: the proposal consists of a literal fence, and we’ve no idea how many such failed or denied proposals have come before it.
Surely it must be well-known that it is exceedingly rare, but valuable, for an organization to document why they didn’t do certain things.
There are a number of industries where you may need experience to become more productive than AI, but nobody wants to hire you when AI is more productive in the first couple of years. Is there a good equilibrium for this, or does it end up with each company saying "We won't hire the juniors, just the experienced people" and then finding there aren't enough experienced people around?
There are many industries where you need lots of experience before you're a net contributor to productivity. This is true for everything from hairdressers to doctors. We have ways of dealing with this (eg. taking out loans to undergo years of training).
The problem comes if the number of years of experience you need to outperform the frontier AI models advances at more than 1 per year, which is not out of the question.
I think the solution is the same as it was in previous cases. Extend the education and make it more accessible so you can reach useful skill level before you dirty your hands with commercial work.
In the old times 12 year old could have economic utility. Now 26 year old often has none. It might be that with AI you might need to keep learning till 35 before you can usefully contribute to the economy.
Which leads to the obvious question of: who's footing the bill for this?
Is the taxpayer going to pay for another five or ten years of education for people? Are the young people expected to borrow hundreds of thousands more for training? Are their parents expected to house and feed them for another decade?
Not who, what. Most of the value in the economy is not produced by humans for a long time already. Most wealth comes from machines. So they need to be footing the bill instead of just lining pockets of people who bought the machines.
This used to be addressed by the fact that people were loyal to companies - so it was in the company's interest to spend years training them up investing in them, with the knowledge that they might get decades of productive work out of them afterwards. One of my grandparents joined a company as an apprentice as 16, got trained by them, and then worked there for 40 years until retirement.
But nowadys with the culture being much more to to repeatedly jump between companies looking for salary increases, there's a lot less incentive to train juniors - because odds are they're just going to get poached or jump ship before that investment has really paid off.
The big companies or startups with VC funding and deep pockets will always be able to hire experienced people - but it's going to become increasingly hard for other people (and particularly public sector and nonprofits) to do so, as the pipeline of juniors -> seniors is being eroded.
I'm sure you can find plenty of example of both. But TBH, I don't think it really matters which side you try and point the finger at after decades of decline - the point is that the employee/employer relationship has fundamentally changed, and it's hard to see it ever changing back.
Agreed. It's not about blame, just that employers are almost always working with a better perspective and more information.
Business circumstances made it advantageous, and then necessary, to break the social contract.
It might be possible to go back, but I can't imagine any series of events that leads in that direction which doesn't break the global economy in the process.
That's such a valid concern, and I think it applies across many industries — including home decor and interior design. While AI tools can suggest layouts or color palettes instantly, what really matters is human intuition, creativity, and an understanding of client emotions something that only comes with real-world experience.
At smithinteriors, we often balance AI-driven tools with hands-on creative insights. But we also believe in giving junior designers a chance to learn and grow, because without mentorship and opportunity, there’ll never be enough experienced professionals in the future. It’s all about creating an environment where AI supports human creativity, not replaces it.
Perhaps by juniors banding together and making new startups which outcompete the dinosaurs - a tale as old as time (or tech startup capitalism, anyway, so since the 1990s).
Peter already replied to this elsewhere in the thread. To a question
"Maybe a dumb question, but... I'm a Canadian who would qualify for a TN visa if I worked in the States, but don't currently have a visa or green card. On the online submission form for job openings, it always asks 'Are you legally entitled to work in the US?'. Am I meant to answer yes or no to that?"
Peter replies:
"Unfortunately, the correct answer is No because until you have the TN, you are not legally entitled to work in the U.S. Of course, this means that you will be excluded automatically for consideration of certain jobs."
From 0511 local, originally posted on X: "Due to a computer networking problem BART service is suspended system wide until further notice. Seek alternate means of transportation. Find more info at http://bart.gov/alternatives"
