If life evolves on a planet with only oceans, no surface, imagine how much longer it would take to discover rockets that can leave the planet.
Like if there was no surface on earth, and only fish, there must be some very significant reason for advanced fish to even want to leave the water, let alone the atmosphere
That seems like a very landbased mindset. From a high level, what is an ocean but a thick atmosphere? I could even imagine an underwater culture would be quicker to explore because they would surely discover the surface of the ocean quicker than we discovered the concept of the atmosphere and that innately leads to the questions of whether the atmosphere has a "surface" and what is above it.
This still seems to be based on assumptions coming from our own history and situation. I don't know why some hypothetical species needs fire for chemistry or even metallurgy for that matter or why an underwater civilization couldn't eventually discover fire themselves. There is also the potential that our reliance on combustion based rocketry is actually a crutch preventing us further space exploration considering how impractical it seems for interstellar travel.
Chemistry and reactions would absolutely still be a thing. Reactions happen underwater all the time such as the complex decay of organic matter.
The fire meta get's postponed until trapping air inside bags happens (could be seaweed/skin based bags).
Then you need to make a habit of collecting a bunch of air and trapping it and then can begin exploring chemical reactions in the air.
ex: take dead but not decomposed organic matter, dry it out in hot air bag (maybe cover the bag in black squid ink and float the bag of air in the ocean out in the sun's rays for day to warm it up.
Then eventually you need to have the insight to do friction based experiments in the bag with dried materials and then one discovers fire in a massive breakthrough not dissimilar to when humans created Bose Einstein Condensates for the first time in highly specialized environments.
Nothing here says "impossible" to me. I bet if whales had fingers to easily manipulate matter they might've already done all this by now.
While I agree that there is no logical reason that underwater organisms could not become highly intelligent or advance to the level of doing experiments with fire, it is clear that being underwater is an additional barrier.
As such, the number of intelligent underwater civilizations, that could get near our present level of advancement, would likely be significantly lower. Not impossible (because of how large the universe is), but some order of magnitude, less possible.
> While I agree that there is no logical reason that underwater organisms could not become highly intelligent or advance to the level of doing experiments with fire, it is clear that being underwater is an additional barrier.
Meanwhile, a few thousand lightyears away, some sort of talking crab is rubbishing the idea that industrial civilisation could arise on land; after all, they wouldn't even have access to hydrothermal vents! What would they do for energy, burn plants?
(I really think we're inclined to build a _lot_ of unwarranted assumptions into what industrial civilisation has to look like and how you have to get there, because it's what we did.)
> As such, the number of intelligent underwater civilizations, that could get near our present level of advancement, would likely be significantly lower.
Unless of course, having opposable thumbs and >50 year lifespan and intelligence in the water causes you to go through a completely different developmental path than land based creatures. We just don't know.
Why so complicated? There could be many 'mini-labs' in underwater caves, accidental discovery of inverse diving bell so to speak. With trapped gases of any sort, by whichever process(volcanism?) pushing the water out downwards, while unable to escape upwards. Ready to explore, and mess around with. Maybe even in something like free floating coral reefs. Or below the ice.
Why is fire the only chemical pathway to metallurgy?
Can they not discover fire in underwater caves?
Can they not build underwater containers that hold the necessary materials to do chemistry, similar to what we do with bioreactors, flasks, beakers, and pressure vessels?
To support this: Oceans are more conducive to exploration due to their natural currents and lack of mountainous regions or rivers which inhibit movement.
Like the comment below was getting at: if you are water bound, you are very unlikely to discover or become proficient with fire, which to us, as if now seems like a requirement to travel through space.
There’s also the massive weight disadvantage water has compared to “air”.
So no fire and have to travel with a water filled rocket instead.
But again maybe these are just land centered views.
Maybe you can just inject oxygen into the water that merely surrounds your head.
And maybe there’s a hydrogen power rocket that is more efficient than our fire ones.
For traditional rockets, it's not so much fire, as it is the rapid expansion of matter and the force that it generates. Fire just happens to be the most convenient method for us.
There could be metals under an ocean that could be mined. An underwater civilization could potentially harness nuclear power.
I don't think this is a great argument. Crabs and lobsters have claws which are almost hand like. And Octopus have tentacles, which can be highly manipulative. So those limbs must give those creatures an advantage even in water. It wouldn't be too much of a leap from those appendages to something as good as hands.
> Hands wouldn't give a fish any advantage, because there is nothing to climb.
The ocean floor has plenty of stuff to dig into, pick up, and manipulate, along with un-anchored things like mats of seaweed.
> Land animals are more likely to develop hands.
I can easily imagine sea-creatures making the same kinds of assumptions in reverse: "Sir Blub-blub, while this hypothesis of 'land' animals is indeed intriguing, they would undoubtedly be primitive, far less likely to develop intelligent grabbers. After all, there will be nothing worth grabbing but hard 'dry' rocks! They wouldn't even be useful for propulsion, given the intangibility of this 'air'."
This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.
Is there any particular reason why an intelligent organism couldn't evolve to be able to grow and change its body into any arbitrary size and shape that it wanted to merely by thinking about it?
Perhaps aliens from another planet would consider our limitation as four limbed bipedal organisms to be absurd.
Why can't organisms chose to grow eight hands each with 16 opposable digits?
> This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.
It's pretty normal for organisms to have drastically different body configurations through their lives. e.g moths
Though I'm not aware of any that have choices to make in the process.
Edit: actually lots of organisms can "choose" to change their sex
It would probably be useful for high speed travel. Speedboats can go a lot faster than submarines. Airplanes can go even faster, but they might be a bit impractical since they'd have to be full of water.
Also radio communications since radio travels much better through air than through water. Of course, they could just build antennas underwater and then float them above the surface to use them.
Navigating by the stars would be really useful, and for that you need to be able to see above the surface. I guess you don't need to go above the surface. A periscope would do the trick.
It might also be useful for energy generation. Wind power if the wind is stronger than ocean currents. Or solar because the light is stronger.
Their airplane doesn't necessarily have to be full of water, just like our high altitude (military) planes and spaceships do not have to be full of air. For convenience, yes, but just for survival you'd wear a protective suit with life support systems, just like we do. Edit: But I agree that they'd be impractical for convenient business and leisure travel for the average octopus out there...
Orcas could very well be smarter than us, but it is extremely unlikely they'll ever evolve hands to build tools - it would be a radical and crippling change in their skeleton with absolutely no evolutionary pressure to do so. Primates (and koalas) didn't evolve hands with opposable thumbs to build tools, we did so because our ancestors got pushed into the trees. And orcas really need their flippers to be good in the water.
"If life evolves on a planet with land, instead of only oceans, imagine how much longer it would take to discover boats and submarines that can travel on and under the water!" - Xenobiologists on K2-18b after detecting possible signs of life on the Sol system's third planet.
Earth had precious little land, if any, over the first billion or so years too. The crust takes time to differentiate and pile up into cratons.
Though in this particular case it looks like the planet is a gas giant, plausibly with a water ocean but without any higher density rocky/metal core to make "land" out of.
I wonder how oceanic life would be able to record information. If we assume that extraterrestrial oceans would have lifeforms similar to corals and barnacles, how would an aquatic civilization prevent written information from getting encrusted with biofouling or keep it from corroding away?
there are so many ways to record things... for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
maybe the need to keep it clean just makes it more important to a society...
Or selectively breeding barnacles to make longlasting letters/symbols, or 'milking' their glue and put it on something to avoid being overgrown. Imagine an aquatic market for underwater fonts!1!!
Taking it a step further, being an ocean dwelling creature could even be an advantage in space since they would more easily be shielded from radiation if they were enveloped in a large mass of water and g-forces might be easier on their bodies since they'd be less compressible.
The software my school uses to communicate with parents is fucking awful. Based on digging around their website & linkedin, I suspect they have a team of offshore developers - which is fine - but my money is that they don't actually have a team, they're paying a company that gives them supposedly-fungible engineer-hours instead of an actual cohesive team that works on the product and is proud of what they've made. They just eat requirements and shit something approximating software.
But what am I going to do? Say I build a competitor, solo, for cheap. (It can be done. The software doesn't do much. The hardest thing would be ensuring the emails actually get delivered.)
Now I get to play salesman. I have to sell it to my school. Now I have to maintain it. Our school isn't rich; a local school paid $130k for an unrelated hardware+software solution, so I'm at most going to get that, and now I'm on call 24/7, now I'm training the teachers & administrators to use it, now I'm fielding support emails, etc., etc.
This is a perfect example. The school is suffering, but has nearly no budget. The users suffer, but have no say. Nothing changes, everyone cripples along.
Yes but the industry is so rooted and vendor locked that it is extremely hard. People pay for Autodesk, Ansys, comsol etc. because it is proven and engineers are trained to use it. I would not be eager to use something new if I’m a constructor or car manufacturer.
Sure, a new startup will never get any market share in large, stable businesses like those. They would have to sell to other startups. New auto parts manufacturers pop up all the time.
A dirty secret I recently learned about: look for public contracts in your area, to find some of those, google "contract register filetype:pdf".
Tons of crazy shit in there waiting to be disrupted. The tricky part is to get the right financials to bid on the interesting stuff, a good pathway there is to combine multiple companies together and make a shared bid, reach out to me if you're interested.
I like how rendering positioning gives the illusion of there being more shape types than there really are, as the three triangles are the same and circle and hexagon are the same. I'm sure it's been done before but I've never seen it, so nice job
Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad.
The reason? My resume lists my name as follows, where I means the initial for my middle name:
Firstname I. (Nickname) Lastname
And yes, even professionally I do use my nickname and my last name, except for things which must match my government ID, such as offer letters and payroll/tax records, where of course I omit Nickname and use the legal Firstname as well as sometimes the middle initial or full middle name.
With this format, how does Personio parse my name? It thinks I’m called Firstname Nickname. No human would make this mistake, nor would a copy-paste into Notepad cause a human to do that.
And if it has any LLM intelligence at all, it should know that this is unlikely, because Nickname is actually a very common nickname for Firstname, so it should suspect a disperse and have a human double-check its conclusion. Alas.
I’ve also had other issues with these systems misparsing my employment history, since they don’t always properly parse jobs that span corporate acquisitions (changing title and employer at that point but being the same job) and are accurately reflected as such on the resume.
>Even that can fail. I’ve had multiple cases now where my name (!) was auto-parsed wrong in a way human would never do, not even after copy-pasting into Notepad. [...]
sounds like they did something like:
first_name, last_name = name.split(" ")
which is an issue, but unrelated to what everyone else is talking about, which seems to be how text data is being parsed/encoded inside pdfs. Pasting into notepad would check for that issue, but obviously wouldn't do anything for bad first name/last name extraction logic.
I felt that the general topic was "software failing to do the right thing parsing the text in PDF resumes in ways a human would get right", which includes all of these types of problems, not specific to encoding issues. But, sure.
I think mashing up of names happens a lot, since they are not common words. Personally I don't see what the problem is of your name being mangled in a parsed resume, other than when it would look offensive. The name mangling can get easily cleared up after first contact with a real person.
I’ve indeed cleared it up quickly every time it’s happened, but in my opinion, it makes the company look unprofessional in an easily avoidable way. (And yes, I’ve been in the hiring manager role myself - I’d feel the same way if this happened to one of my candidates.)
I call this easily avoidable because name is usually a separate field in the application or referral forms, so this is the bad auto-parsing overriding accurate manual input.
Parsing names is like writing a time library. Sounds easy until you learn the hard way that it definitely isnt.
Some examples that come to mind from my experience are applicants with Chinese names that also use a western name professionally ("Yu-Chen Liew, but I go by Janet"), Spanish names that include patronymics ("Penelope Cruz Sanchez") and cultures that place the family name first ("Park Lee"). Maybe (f,l) = split(name, " ") works in some very homogeneous country like Iceland, but it sure doesnt work in the US.
Yes, agreed - except that the Spanish name convention you describe isn't about patronymics exactly. Patronymics are something like a given language's version of "son [or daughter] of X" where X is a given name of the parent (usually the father).
By contrast, Spanish last names simply use two last names, with a child taking one last name from each parent. Traditionally this is the father's first last name followed by the mother's first last name, though efforts toward gender equality have made the law more flexible nowadays in both Spain and many other countries.
It doesn't violate Spanish naming conventions for given names to be reused in the next generation, and some families do that, but that isn't patronymic since it's not a "son/daughter of X" name, just a reused given name.
I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link.
Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if they had something in them that made it seem like a real person, e.g. a personal hobby section. I think a lot of people discourage writing that but I argue it makes you stand out in an ocean of fake and copy pasted junk.
And that's not even enough: A few weeks ago I had to interview someone who had what appeared to be a realistic profile. Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in.
At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity, because the percentage of straight out fakes is too high. Even the questions to ask me at the end were GPT provided.
Anyone affected by this and in the US might consider calling or writing to their congressman. The time to do that is now when the demand is high to bolster jobs but low for excessive laws. Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to.
The fake job applicants are only siphoning resources from the economy at the high expense of all other parties involved. The ones who are getting screwed the most are the applicants, some of whom are concerned about making ends meet and getting auto-rejected constantly despite decades of experience. No one should stand for it.
If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire. As far as I can tell the advocacy is for either companies to be empowered to sue people who apply to work with them (seems like madness) or to set up a situation where the government enforcement arm pro-actively goes out and harasses unemployed job seekers. Either way that sounds like a recipe for disaster for unemployed persons.
> If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire.
It’s actually a constant them on HN to imagine that passing laws will magically make problems disappear. The realities of enforcing the law or even identifying perpetrators are imagined to be the easy part.
I think the GP is suggesting that making, distributing, and profiting from such software should be made illegal. If an engineer can make this software, they are probably a good fit for many jobs in the market.
I'm suggesting that you should call your congressman and say that getting a job is a problem right now and automated applicants could be contributing to it (we don't know the full story, but making noise about it might at least inspire some investigation by those who have the ability to get the facts). I don't think it should be a crime to automate a job application, and I have no problem with it from an ethical point of view long as the application is made truthfully and in good faith by a reasonably qualified applicant and there is real intent to follow up on it.
But if that isn't the case, there's no reasonably good safety mechanism to mitigate the massive amount of harm that a determined bad faith actor could cause to the economy.
But making false claims about your work history (as could be the case with the one using ChatGPT to answer questions) is a problem, isn't it? And it's wonderful to see these rebuttals made against a hypothetical something that already happened.
https://www.lawdepot.com/resources/business-articles/legal-c...
Ah, the ol’ “manufacture an argument that wasn’t made, then shoot it down it in front of an audience” trick. I suppose I’ll be advocating for the outlawing of those kinds of comments, and anything else deemed as misinformation next.
A more realistic scenario would involve no enforcement by the government (except perhaps in extreme cases, like with the 'spam king' back in the day). ChatGPT's terms of service would already cover it under the "shall not be used for illegal activity" language, and it would be just enough of a deterrence to benefit a larger number of people without creating new problems. But I wasn't advocating for a specific solution, just a call to a congressman. Despite their faults and flaws, they're probably still going to do a better job than I am at making the call, or maybe it won't even be a priority for them and they'll do nothing.
AI has made hiring especially in technical industry an absolute shit show. I agree with parent comment that ideally government could do something about it but agree with you on how would you even do that. Maybe if they required all the job board companies like indeed and glassdoor and LinkedIn to properly vet candidates else those companies would be fined, but it's hard to imagine a solution that doesn't also hurt unemployed legit human beings
And then you run into problems on the corporate side: fake job listings to build up resume databases for comparison shopping of applicants. Regulations in this area should have to cut both ways.
Yea, I couldn't tell if the original comment was satire but the number of phishing ads that existed in the past for bogus positions, to pool candidates for later hiring, to farm market rate data, and who knows what else… makes me have very little empathy for the employer side.
It’s been a mess for awhile due to economies of scale benefiting the hiring side to manipulate and abuse the market. The fact it’s become more affordable for job seekers to do a bit of the same is just ironic.
I would REALLY love if job postings had to go through a government clearing house. Only real jobs get posted. Only real applicants can apply.
Bonus: jobs would have to be classified according to a single government standard, so it should be possible to search for a good job match by at least limiting the field and (allowed) location(s).
making the jobs application (and hiring) market a single market will make it more efficient, and cut out a lot of middlemen inefficiencies. I like it.
You as a hiring company can pay to have a 2nd website, but posting it to the gov't portal is a requirement. The information, such as conditions, salary (range), experience, location etc, are all in standardized format. If you're found to be lying, it's a federal crime (because of fraud and interstate commerce for example).
Applicants also must have gov't issued ID (such as social security), so you cannot be fake.
This the end game that Silicon Valley created. An automation arms race between two competing groups that were initially trying to save a little time or cut down on staffing but escalated it to the point where the default approach would be considered unforgivably assholish 15 years ago, people that don’t buy into it at least somewhat are drowning in bullshit, and nobody’s happy— but on paper everybody’s got record productivity!
With LLMs, this same exact scenario is playing out in other realms. Look at writing and publishing. Sure you’re on top of the world before everyone else catches up, but when they do, there’s now just a boilerplate of exponentially expanding bullshit and counter-bullshit that everyone has to circumvent to do anything.
This has already happened long ago with Google search results. The first tier of results is won by reasonably well-funded entities that provide a legitimate service, and have the means to optimize the signals feeding the search rankings, putting them higher than the next tier.
The second tier of search results tends to be dominated by imitators that don't really add anything of value (SEO spam, blog posts that tell you how to write a for loop in Ruby despite knowing full well that the reader already had no problem finding that information, etc.)
Then finally at the bottom are the little guys who try their best, but haven't learned yet that it's a waste of time to try to self-publish any content because there's too much actual spam masquerading as content, and Google can't tell the difference.
The search results effectively became a list of content approved by a single publisher (even if automated) rather than a melting pot of freely-expressed ideas.
I sincerely hope that we can prevent the similar nullification of the software developer's career accomplishments as carrying any weight, but I am starting to have doubts. If it even goes as far as the erosion of incentives to accomplish things, then we may actually end up needing that AI to do the work for us, as there will be few people left who give a shit.
I have found copilot autocomplete to be somewhat useful for small blocks of code.
Coca-Cola and Toys R Us have found them useful for making terrible commercials cheaper than making terrible commercials by hand and way cheaper than making good commercials that actually improve their brand image. Seems weird they’d do that for immensely expensive holiday television spots rather than throwaway 5 second YouTube spots or something but hey — I’m clearly not a corporate genius.
But this chaos fits Big Tech's claim that there are not enough American workers, so they can then turn around and onshore H1Bs from the hiring manager's hometown back in the old country.
Do you work in tech? Have you ever seen any pressure to create LLM-driven chaos with the goal of increasing support for encouraging immigration in future years?
It’s too elaborate of a Rube Goldberg strategy to take very seriously. Companies struggle to achieve simple, clear, short-term goals in tight-knit, well-aligned teams. Ain’t nobody got the skill to pull off that level of conspiracy.
What I mean is unless your ideal is autarky or USSR under Joseph Stalin, it is hypocritical or ingenuous to expect having a market where you can sell goods and services worldwide but not allowing workers applying and getting jobs worldwide for same companies. That is called free market.
So if you happen to think you are missing jobs because they are given to people living in another country, you also have the choice to play by the same rules, relocate there and apply for the same job. Or ask for a lower salary where you already are to be competitive. This is fair competition.
Lol wat. 'Free market' is a spherical cow in a vacuum. Its an abstraction that people like to make to reduce complex reality to something small and comfortable. In reality, the world is not driven only (or even mostly) by market forces. All players in modern economies are subsidized by and beholden to governance by nation states. That wildly warps what actually happens outside the textbook.
In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority.
if you think america is “free market” I have some Enron stock to sell to you :)
> Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to.
Good luck.
The applicants doing fake job applications do not care about your laws at all. Many might be in foreign countries. They might plan on applying with stolen identities.
Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?
> Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?
I missed the part where I included that or any strategy on how it would be used as a deterrent. Clearly that's not how it is done as you pointed out, but you make it seem as if laws have no value at all, which is a rather naive take. Fraud is already illegal FYI.
I don't have a solution, other than to make a call to the people who are elected to find those solutions, if they are able to. If they can't or won't, then it is a good thing that phone call was free anyway.
Absolutely correct, just making laws themselves have little effect over anything.
Enforcement is the key. For most laws that step is an afterthought. But there are creative ways to do it.
- It can be a side effect to keep your unemployment insurance which is conditional upon proving you are sending applications at a given pace. I'd probably need to apply to random jobs if I qualified for it because there isn't a role opening in my niche weekly to fullfil the criteria here. I never had to because I was ineligible for other reasons every time I was unemployed and could have used support but that's a whole other can of worms)
- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.
> At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity,
I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with the person and would want to work with them. If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway and everybody joining your company can expect colleagues selected by this sub-par process.
> If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway
This is pretty unfair and seems like victim-blaming when we have companies spending billions of dollars to create these programs with the specific intent of trying to pass the Turing test.
There’s a bit of an echo chamber on HN where people convince each other that all LLM-generated text is easy to identify, riddled with errors, and “obviously” inferior to all real-human writing. Because some LLM writing fits those criteria and is easily identified, these folks are convinced they can identify all LLM writing and anyone who can’t must be a dunce.
I didn't claim anything about identifying writing. That's a strawman. I'm talking about humans talking to each other. Even if it's in a zoom call. Any interview process that doesn't include that is broken, and that's my claim. Echo chamber or not.
Apologies for misunderstanding you, then. Agreed that human to human is critical, especially for identifying culture fit (not homogeneity of course, just interaction styles like openness, etc).
I do think people cheat video interviews with LLM help, but in-person should always be required anyway, even if it’s via proxy (“meet with a colleague from our Madrid office”).
How widespread is LLM cheating during video interviews these days? Honest question.. How do people even do it? Let an LLM app listen in and suggest avenues of discussion and lists a bunch of facts on the side to spice things up?
Even if that's the case, isn't it just a matter of conversing in a way that the LLM can't easily follow?
An interviewer is a "victim"? Maybe they should just, you know, speak to their interviewees. At least in 2024 that's hardly faked by an LLM. Therefore, if you are fooled, you cheaped out, and you are hardly a victim.
You’re absolutely right to ask for a recheck! Let’s count carefully:
• R in Razzleberry:
• 1st R: In “Razzle”
• 2nd R: In “Razzle”
• 3rd R: In “berry”
• 4th R: In “berry”
Total: 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”
No changes—still 4 Rs! Let me know if I can clarify further.
>Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in.
Wouldn't you notice a lag between your question and the candidate's answer if the candidate had to type your question into chatGPT?Or does the candidate use some software/tool with transmits your question to chatGPT directly?
I left LinkedIn years ago, because everyone and their dog was copying my entire profile.
I was happy for that info to go to potential employers, but not to random company and its canine friend.
Then MS bought LI and I was so glad I'd left years ago already.
I've seen one of two places have mandatory URL fields for LinkedIn profiles.
One of the impressions I've been getting is that if you do not fit exactly into an recruitment agencies process, you're DoA, and I have begun to suspect the only work they do is look at LinkedIn.
Well LinkedIn does a lot of stuff around making sure the accounts are for real people. Kind of helps with many of the issues people are complaining about. I mean they can improve it, but they do some level of effort.
Having an established LinkedIn profile with their simple identity verification tool is such a trivial amount of effort for de-risking your job search that it’s hard to justify boycotting LinkedIn at this point.
If an application looks suspicious for some reason, I’ll look for their LinkedIn profile as the second step. If I can’t find one or if the profile is also questionable, I move on. LinkedIn is far from perfect, but it’s at least some signal in a world where the noise level is rising fast.
LinkedIn locked my account for no reason awhile ago and apparently want me to send a photo of my ID to some sketchy “verification” third party. No thanks.
I’m glad it’s a trivial amount of effort for you, I guess.
Well, that's some handy information. I had no idea any employer would care one whit about my LinkedIn, or that a personal hobby section was considered anything but totally superfluous and irrelevant.
I suppose I am supposed to actually fill out my LinkedIn too?
I haven’t been job hunting since around 2002, so I’m completely out of the loop. Why are people submitting fake resumes? Are they hoping to get hired despite having no skills beyond using ChatGPT? But, what happens after that? They don’t have the skills to do the job, so what was the point of getting hired?
A growing scam involves people applying to remote jobs under fake or stolen identities. The work is then done by someone else or an agency that assumes the identity and collects the pay. They know it won’t last long so they try to target companies that look like someone could become another generic name on a spreadsheet for a year or two.
There’s also a rise of “overemployed” people who farm out second and third jobs. Again, they don’t care about anything other than collecting paychecks for a while until they go through the long onboarding, ramp-up, and PIP process, by which time they may have collected $100K for doing barely any work. They use fake backgrounds and resumes as a way to avoid their primary employer getting notified and as a sort of filter for companies who aren’t looking closely at the details. If you can trick them with a fake application, you’ll probably be able to trick them in the interview and then trick them into paying you for a long time too.
It is mind-blowing that this happens but I suppose totally logical too. Scammers are out to extract money from people and companies by any method possible, so in the world of remote-only work, it's just another extraction angle for them I suppose.
You can often work days to years before people catch on that you are (a) unqualified, (b) underqualified, (c) not legally allowed to work in a particular jursdiction, (d) overemployed, (e) leaking company secrets to ChatGPT, ....
On top of that, you have a number of people who are just trying to get hired and perhaps are skilled, but the market is so shitty (in part because of the AI resume slop) that they're resorting to various services to lessen the workload of shotgun resume posting. If you pay a person to send out resumes, you get email notifications that the resumes were submitted, and that person was just asking an LLM to spit out a resume, you'll be hard-pressed to figure out that the resumes are fake (and so on for a variety of other similar reasons, where spray-and-pray resumes are sent out in moderate good-faith but the resumes are BS).
I can only think of a multiple-salary for onboarding period scam, where they llm all their job and get fired everywhere after a month with a couple years worth of money. You can’t really fire a hired guy without paying them at least once in US, can you?
You (almost always) have to pay them for any work they actually did. If you catch a North Korean citizen day 1 of onboarding, you're obligated to kick them out immediately, and you might have to pay them for the few hours they were there. If you catch them before they start, you (usually) don't have to pay them.
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