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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I’m applying to jobs, and the amount of AI assessments, rounds, AI interviewers, questionnaires, is nuts.
One of these emails for example,
It’s rough.
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Corrected headline: AI gave companies a new excuse to make jobs worse
That’s a thing too, but this article is about interviewing and hiring.
AI teleprompters for remote interviews, AI generated resumes, AI candidates screening, etc.
Everything really shifted aggressively over the last 12 months.
I’ve been hiring for a year now and I can’t get anywhere. Open the job listing for 5 minutes and have 10 million applications. Many are fake made up people. Many are repeated entries, like 100 for the same person but with slight differences, like they are trying to hedge their bets. Have to close the listing after those 5 minutes since there’s already far too many to sift through, which means only automated, generated applications got in.
Sift through all of those, interview a few folks, find no worthy talent, start over. It impossible, there is just too much noise.
Almost better off posting the address where you are hiring and see who comes in person to apply. That would be a bigger hurdle for serious applicants.
Or they can send a letter 😅
They’d have to solve the riddle of envelopes and stamps.
Would it make any sense to switch to some kind of physical application process? Not necessarily in person, but require the applications/résumés be mailed in? The advantage that these automated models have is that they are basically for the user to submit as many applications as possible. Requiring that the application be physically mailed would create at least some small barrier and cost that would mean the applicants wouldn’t be able to apply a near infinite number of times.
Strategically, why don’t you just disqualify anyone applying too soon?
I’m glad I’m near death, every day I hope the black hole at the center of the galaxy will swallow the whole solar system.
And here I was thinking that I was cynical
You okay, buddy?
Tired. The endless grind of mindless constant changes to everything for no gains. I can’t keep up and I don’t feel like it anymore.
Absolutely. Never been better, thanks for asking!
I’m sorry it sucks.
It seems like there’s a dividing line between newer techs and senior techs that determines the difficulty in getting new gigs. I don’t know where it is but I crossed it at some point in the last 10 years.
Each time I’m done with a job I’m sure there will be some kind of horrible gauntlet to get the next engagement, but it stopped happening. Maybe I just made a lucky connection but it keeps happening. I think they just want candidates who have seen some shit.
I guess the point is that eventually you’ll have done something that gives you the right gray in the ponytail. Keep at it.
I have been in software for 20 years and I never had trouble finding work until this past year. All of a sudden it’s a lot harder. I’m just one data point but this time feels different for me. The job market feels a lot more disjointed and full of spoofs and fake listings.
I am a second data point.
Yeah I have over 25 years and I also have had the assesment stuff although not to often and not every time. Basically I went into tech because it was a field where they wanted people and if you were sharp you could get a job. They don’t seem to have the demand they used to but I don’t see another place to pivot and honestly I don’t think I can change careers the way I did over 25 years ago.
Do you have experience with AI dev environments? That’s generally the differentiator right now. Claude Code replaces managing a junior dev team of 5. Anyone who can demonstrate the ability to leverage it is not short of work.
Those 5 junior devs are, though.
Yep. Actually ran the rollout for Cursor at my last job, right before I got laid off lmao. I trained a bunch of devs on what do and what not to do. A bunch of my recent interviews have incorporated variations of the question “Do you think you could manage an LLM orchestration that would replace our junior devs?” and, I could but I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm for it that people are looking for. Maybe that’s why I haven’t made it through the interview gauntlet. So much senior hiring right now seems to be looking for people to be the scapegoat for LLM bullshit and I ain’t looking for that kinda work.
Claude Code replaces managing a junior dev team of 5.
But who was hiring 5 junior devs?!
Did nothing they produced matter to anyone who knew better?
I can’t think of a better way to drive my organization into obsolescence, than to have 5 junior devs rampaging across the place leaving stupid mistakes in their wake.
I love having one or two junior devs around the office. On a large team (15 devs), there’s just enough deeply unimportant unimpactful harmless bullshit to keep two junior devs from doing too much damage.
Once, on a huge team (30+ senior devs split into squads), I had four junior devs at the same time.
That is the maximum I have ever allowed, and that was during a period of exceptional demand.
Anyway, I guess I just wish the folks replacing 5 junior devs with an AI equivalent to 5 junior devs the day they deserve. Lol.
I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.
You can’t really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don’t learn (at best they’ll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).
Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there’s more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.
I most places I worked in (all in Europe), Junior Devs are generally hired as an investment, since their productivity sucks until they become more experienced so the idea is to teach them until they become more senior.
Yes. Same here. I never would have managed to build teams as large as I have if I didn’t create some of my senior devs out of junior devs.
You can’t really replace such Junior Devs with LLMs because the LLMs don’t learn (at best they’ll somewhat follow past guidelines still in their context until those guidelines are push out as the context fills over time).
Yes. Exactly! It boggles my mind when folks talk about all the money they’re saving on junior devs. A forever-junior sounds terrible, to me - no matter how cheap.
Maybe in the US (were job security is a joke) there’s more a tendency to hire Junior Devs as cheap manpower.
Yes. When I was doing consulting gigs for clients too incompetent to maintain their own developer teams, I would hire junior devs and charge clients for their work. Organizations too incompetent to hire and retain their own developers are also pretty reliably too incompetent to tell the difference.
Even so - while I never felt I owed those (generally sociopathic, often malicious and usually willfully stupid) clients too much loyalty - professional ethics still meant that I didn’t saddle them with any fully un-supervised junior developers. So they were still better off with my consulting team than with an AI.
The job market was already ruined, AI is just an yet another excuse that corporations trot out. The heart of the problem is that corporations do not care about society, simply existing to line the pockets of a few people within their ranks. Nothing else matters to them. Country and humanity are equally worthless in the eyes of the elite.
Works both ways too. The number of AI generated resumes I’ve gone through, the incomprehensible business speak…
I sat in on a couple interviews. Blew my mind how many candidates were clearly reading from an AI. They all gave almost the exact same, very AI-sounding answers to the skill based questions then just slammed into a wall when we asked them questions that are more opinion based.
Not all of them of course, and we wound up hiring the person who sounded the most like an actual human being having a conversation with us out of the lot. (Of course, he matched the skills we needed to so that wasn’t the only factor.)
“We’ve decided to hire chatgpt since that is who wrote all of the applications.”
“It will create more jobs.” is the equivalent of trickle down economics.
job markets ruined work
It’s always the fucking suits. And nepotism.
giving an applicant an engineering test (kind of like a crossword puzzle with code instead of words)
lol.
Man this bullshit seems to have gotten so much worse since I last looked for a job in 2023
Prior to my current job, I worked at one for 7 years. I’m an industrial electrician, so maybe the demand is higher. But in 2023, I applied for 12 jobs, got 3 interviews which resulted in 2 offers. All cold applications on indeed. I was picky about which jobs I even applied for. For one of the offers I did not want the job and it paid too little so I strung them along as much as I could before I finally turned it down as I had a feeling I was getting my current job, but it took forever for some management to come back from field service for my second interview.
Same story. 2022 I got 12 interviews in one week, 8 in the next from about 30 applications (not counting interviews for second round)
Done i didn’t pass, others didn’t pass me
2026, I’m looking again
200+ applications.
1 reply so far that at least got me a third interview round but I just found out there are 2 more rounds. It’s a higher level job, fine, but seriously… 200, and the one that replied was application #2
From the rest?
Nothing. A very few (less than ten) at least replied with the “we love you but…” mails, the rest didn’t even bother with that much.
Companies have been very spoiled somehow because most think it’s okay to ask for an application that you include a cover letter why you want the job, a separate letter saying why you love the xpmpa souch, a one minute video about how I love the company, and so on
BITCH did you forget that an employment is a mutually beneficial relationship, where you get the fruits of my work and you pay me a good salary? You are not the king, your company sucks and I want to work because I need an income to pay rent
He should be having AI write tests for each candidate.
Have been applying from a while and have deduced that any org that take OA without cam on or without monitoring or takes any AI interview is just isn’t interested in hiring
Just use “connections,” you know, the fancy word for “rich friends.” (At least that’s all they mean when first getting into industry)
Just use AI to fill out the assessments. We are interviewing and only half joked that if the applicant didn’t use AI in some way they aren’t qualified. Just don’t try to hide it.
