Public job board listings have always been flooded with low-effort spam applicants, but AI tools have supercharged the problem.
The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.
The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.
The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.
The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.
I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.
> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max
Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?
Yes we can. Resume spamming is not a new phenomenon. Ten years ago we were already struggling to sift through the nonsense at the big co i worked for, llms just expanded the “tam”.
I don't understand why more companies don't leverage in person events. It's something my state does for government jobs and as an applicant, it's so much easier to chat up an agency rep about what they're looking for and schedule a formal interview.
It’s used by every single big co and a lot of smaller ones too. It just doesn’t scale well when you need to hire hundreds of engineers every year. I never actually seen public job postings bring in many leads that actually convert to offers. It’s one of the worst channels which is why candidates are getting such crap experience going that route
>It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.
I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait until next year to see if I can get that now while still carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new positions.
I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as possible.
There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that increase.
You can't have many of these experiences before you become jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't get rewarded for it.
I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If that means spamming LLM applications for the next position, then so be it I guess.
Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that many people get far more money for far less effort than a Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all levels below where I'm at).
All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the world really works, so can you really blame people for getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken advantage of and be a sucker - do you?
How long has your career been? I’ve been doing software professionally for 20 years and the correlation I’ve seen is huge. Not necessarily inside a single company - but after awhile you get jobs from networking & people you worked with in the past. If none of your ex colleagues want to work with you again, it’ll become a lot harder for you to get hired & promoted.
When I see stuff like that I can't help but wonder if the people who are satisfied by it are the ones who fall upwards and of course say the system is working perfectly.
Maybe I fell upwards. Maybe I earned it. Doesn't matter for the following:
I'm now on the side of the table where I frequently make personnel decisions: hire, promote, offer a new role, offer a new assignment, merit adjustment, expand a successful team, disband or merge an unsuccessful team into another, transfer in, transfer out, put on a PIP, etc. Most of the good things on that list go to people who demonstrate ability and results, and rarely do those results come without effort. Most of the bad things on that list go to people who demonstrate an inability to deliver results, which is sometimes related to a lack of effort.
Public job board listings have been spammed by fake jobs called ghost jobs. Candidates must overcome that to find real jobs, and the boards in general do not remove said postings. Candidates are forced to identify characterize and remove listings on their side (extra work and cost), through strict OSINT background searches. Businesses have forced candidates to bear increasing arbitrary costs just to find a job and this is a longstanding trend (half a century). Comparisons could easily be made of a slave master in uncivilized times, where mental coercion and torture has replaced physical torture.
What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.
Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of cooperation among companies in various little things they have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over decades.
The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing power, not even increasing).
The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves in many respects. Companies care far more for short term profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise as you call it).
Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no we can't have this.
(The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landis)
Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.
Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out, and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind people are today.
Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good amount of time.
Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.
When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in the first place by the actions taken.
You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed, larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when in a downturn there may be nothing wrong.
Its completely irrational when these people then say they can't find talent. The brain drain is real.
Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent candidates which your HR department, or 3rd-party pre-screener (AI), ignored, and that isn't even touching on all the protected class violations silently occurring in unenforceable ways, thanks to AI's black box characteristics (where age, gender, and other things are being used to decide).
The inquisition being as bad as you think it was was mostly protestant porn/propaganda. Protestant countries burned far more people and for centuries after the catholics had stopped.
You are very mistaken, and it shows you haven't studied enough to rationally discuss the subject matter.
Of course later, in time, countries impacted more people. Population grows with time, and any rational comparison along these lines would need to be normalized against population, but the truth in the ambiguity of the latter phrase doesn't make the former phrase true.
The inquisition lasted quite a long time (1478-~1820), it has been attributed to the collapse of Portugal/Spain as a national superpower of the time (which was dependent on sea power), the brain drain from fleeing refugees (mostly Jews) was also quite impactful (for France), and it was self-financing. The events became less about heresy, and more about seizing wealth domestically, while creating an environment of persecution for cover. The impacts of it are still felt today in those localities where it was worst.
In terms of the many domains important for measuring the health of a country, these events dramatically impacted the state of things towards the negative across multiple critical domains, as well as their neighbors.
Its improper to discount, minimize, and nullify (through fallacy) both events and their effects, that have been well established by experts without providing some proper basis.
Characterizing it solely as propaganda in isolation isn't a valid characterization. Many people died, or were imprisoned and abused, and the surviving records show this.
We know this accurately because it was a legal proceeding that left paper trails which can be studied.
Your claim that it led to the collapse of portugal and spain seems quite wild. And certainly doesn't explain why you think it had no ill effect in protestant countries that kept burning people for 200 years more.
Agnostic, and you are quite wrong about a lot of things.
Wikipedia isn't a valid historic source, this is consistently repeated in introductory college courses and throughout academia. Any derivations you make on unsound data remains unsound data and nothing more than your own personal opinion, you shouldn't make it out to be less or more than it is.
You neglects quite a lot in an attempt to nullify, discount, and minimize to suit your biased narrative, like the fact that established estimates show roughly 150,000 people were prosecuted, and the fact that confessions of the time were extracted using torture. Many died without ever being formally executed.
Yes there are legal proceedings that did leave paper trails which I have studied, as well as where those paper trails stop being accurate.
The claims were "collapse as a superpower", not what you improperly referenced as a quote.
When you omit important context intentionally to try and put words not said in other people's mouth (as you did here to strawman), its fairly blatant that you are operating from a place of delusion or severe bias, or potentially malign personal hidden agenda.
Portugal/Spain was known for their technology, seafaring, and maps right up until the inquisition.
This is not wild at all, when you have mass migrations of intelligent and educated people wherever they migrate to benefit from their intellect whereas the places they travel from stagnate.
In any case, the fact that you tried to change what was said kills any possible credibility you might have, and there is no impetus or need for me to respond to you any further.
There is no value in unnecessarily giving a platform in the guise of discussion to the delusional or the malevolent. Best of luck to you in correcting that vile behavior, deceitful behavior is not tolerated by rational or intelligent people.
Population levels are not the same, this comparison is without basis.
You also assume the formal documented executions are the only deaths where people were killed and died, they are not.
About 5 minutes of 'proper' research based in method, will establish that you are mistaken and don't know what you are talking about. This is the problem when you try to have an AI think for you, you get it wrong, and potentially become delusional.
The inquisition lasted almost three centuries. At its height, Spain had a population of about 7.5 million people. Many prosecutions occurred, but few executions as part of trials. The majority of people died from maltreatment, torture, and executions (absent trials) and these records are sparse in the historical record, but there are credible records to support more died than were executed.
The mortality rate was also significantly higher than it is today, and the families of the accused individuals often died from poverty as a result of fear from guilt-by-association (if you were to include that, most don't). Additionally, the Spanish inquisition inspired surrounding countries to similar acts of terror, and in the Latin America's as well. We are only talking about Spain here. The full global death count as a result of the inquisition is much much higher.
The saddest part to me is watching the AI and social media malaise infect young mentees. I’ve been doing volunteer mentoring for years. Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max. It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.
The recent tech recession was a huge wake up call for a lot of these people. The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance. It’s depressing for me and other mentors who have been trying to warn that workplace behavior has consequences for years, but the weird tech market of 2021 and 2022 led a lot of young people to think the worst thing that could happen to them was that they’d get fired and get a new job next week with a 20% raise.
The new version of this malaise is believing that AI will take their jobs anyway so the game is to use LLMs to bluff your way through applications, through interviews, and then use LLMs to coast as long as possible at their jobs until the next one.
The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews. The other side of this is that anyone who makes any effort to be genuine and learn (rather than rely on LLMs for communication and coding) is automatically in the top 25% or so.
I don’t know how this ends. My sense is that the job market is continuing to bifurcate into jobs that people take seriously on one end and jobs where everyone just does performative LLM ping-pong as long as they can get away with it.