No, that ruling was almost exactly the opposite. The FEC tried to argue, based on the "electioneering communication" provisions of the McCain-Feingold act, that expression of opinions that might benefit a candidate was equivalent to a monetary donation to that candidate, so their authority to regulate campaign donations included the power to suppress the publication of certain political speech.
Basically, they were arguing that "speech is money". The court ruled against that, and reaffirmed that speech in itself is always protected by the first amendment, regardless of who may benefit from it or what resources were allocated to facilitating it.
The disconnect between academia and private is real and often bizarre.
I have a good friend that's a recruiter for a top 20 flagship research university in the US. Her line is always, "We're education. We don't do things like ghost jobs and ghostings." She'll then often tell stories where she and her colleagues do the exact same thing you hear in the private sector.
Recently she asked me if I thought it was ok to go ahead and fly a candidate out for an interview knowing the funding had just been cut. Her boss (in recruiting) wanted to anyway in case the funding was restored. Luckily the hiring managers refused to go ahead.
honestly these people should be called out so maybe shame stops them from doing such shenanigans.
some universities just fly candidates to show to the dean as proof that they're working towards the school's AI initiatives. last year a school that flew me made a huge deal about how serious they were about AI and all the infrastructure they were willing to purchase for the 60 new faculty they were hiring across the entire school who do AI work.
they ended up hiring a psychology major who does nothing AI related.
This is going to be very hard to enforce on a Federal level, let alone pass.
Companies are going to play shell games with the titles, responsibilities, and org structure just enough. There might also be 1st Amendment issues, too. The required reporting numbers will be hollow. The end result will be that it will be on the books, but the government won't have any enforceable actions for years.
And when you do see action, it will drag on for years. The feds go after big fish like Microsoft, which will drag it out. Meanwhile, thousands of your Series B-sized companies that are the biggest culprits, will fly under the radar.
I think you're going to see a few states do pass laws like this. The enforcement question will still be there, but it will be on a smaller scale. Results will be varied. Meanwhile, we need to keep naming and shaming companies and recruiters who do this.
This is not a minor annoyance, this consumes time and resources both for candidates at scale and diminishes the integrity of data from a labor economics perspective ("open jobs"). It is arguably fraud and should be prosecuted as such (and I'm fairly confident this case can be made to an electorate who isn't going to shrug off even more corporate malfeasance in a softening labor market).
If you create regulation you can't effectively enforce it can actually make things worse. This is why you can buy fentanyl on every corner, but now the people supplying it have small nation-state tier armies of guys in hiluxes with machine guns and truck mounted .50 cal anti-armor guns.
Not saying that will happen with ghost jobs, but it's not a given things will improve.
I have absolutely no idea why you think this regulation would be any harder to implement than any other regulation other than a hand-wavy brief first sentence in your first comment. I have no idea what sort of juggling of job titles you're predicting that will deceive anyone for more than 10 seconds. I have no idea what 1st amendment issue you see in advertising for an employment contract that isn't backed by employment; if you advertise asthma medicine that doesn't have any effect on asthma, people understand that it's fraud.
Also, it seems that you're making a parallel case that it makes no difference to the fentanyl market that there is a law against fentanyl, which makes me think that you apply the Law of Averages to every change that you hear anyone suggest.
e.g. if you make a law against fentanyl, some people will stop selling fentanyl, while other people will be more attracted to selling an illegal drug, therefore a law against fentanyl will have no effect on fentanyl use or sales.
I haven't argued a single thing in the straw man you've attacked.
I haven't even speculated whether regulation against ghost jobs would be effective. The thing about the 1A and law of averages is totally out of left field and seem like you're taking up issues with some other comment.
In theory, they can be done at the state level. I know its not perefect, but because of a few states jobs laws, I almost always see salary ranges and averages now on job postings.
The proposal I think is simply to force listings to have more details like hire and start date, if it's for a backfill, if it gives priority to internal hires, etc.
So the enforcement I think would be if you post listings without those details, you get fined.
How you'd prove if people added false details I don't know, but I think the idea is at least by giving more info on the listing it might deter some ghost listings or enable the applicant to determine if the listing seems legit.
The easy way to enforce this would be to leave it individuals. Applied to a job and heard nothing back? Sue. You'd have to pretty tightly define the law, such that it could be simply applied, but I could imagine all sorts of concrete rules which would significantly improve the status quo. Something like "Public job postings may be up for no more than 60 days for a given position, interview process must last no more than 30 days beyond that. By the end of the subsequent 90 day window, the company must either hire at least one applicant and let the others know they didn't make the cut, or demonstrate that they received zero acceptable applicants by providing concrete reasons for rejection to all applicants.
It's a "shit or get off the pot" type deal: the easiest solution to the problem is to just find an acceptable applicant and hire them.
No, the easiest solution is to avoid doing anything that would qualify as a “public job posting” until you’re absolutely out of other options, which is probably worse than the status quo.
This. The unintended side effect is worse and I feel like the only winners would be the lawyers in the middle.
There are many ways for a company to justify leaving a posting up if sued:
- candidate’s resume did not meet bar so company did not interview
- candidate could not be scheduled
- candidate was interviewed but did not pass
- offer was given to competing candidate but competitor rejected so company couldn’t fill position and still had to leave posting up
Companies would then need to keep super detailed records on job postings which is overhead, and then many would just choose to not publicly post to avoid the hassle
I don’t know if you’re US-based or not but in the US, government work has the stigma of attracting the bottom of the barrel. It is nearly impossible to get fired for performance reasons. Combine low pay and high job security, and you’re not going to attract the most innovative, motivated, or competent people.
Early in my career, I was warned that if I took a job with the state of California, I’d be stuck there for my whole career. I’d be unhirable in the private sector.
Not so much after DOGE fired entire departments for dubious reasons.
I don't know why anyone would work for the federal government now - pay still sucks, and job security has been demonstrated to no longer be guaranteed.
Recent events isn't going to change decades of stigma and reputation. People aren't saying, "Oh cool, they purged the low performers. I'll go work for the government!"
Case in point, the AMS. The Bambu system is so clean. It sits on top of the printer even if you don't have an enclosure. The Prusa system requires you to lay the spools out on runners on the table, taking up a ton of desk space.
I got into 3D printing a year ago and decided on the Bambu. I started with a P1P to see if I'd like it, got an AMS, got an enclosure in the span of about 9 months. Would I have saved money if I got all of that at once? Of course. But I didn't know if I'd like 3D printing. The P1P worked so well and so easily, it was a "gateway" and did suck me in.
The standalone camera market outside of SLRs is too small to make significant impact on Kodak's bottom line. There's also substantial hardware manufacturing investment that they can't afford to make. Maybe they partner with a manufacturer and license the name with a lot of software control, but at the end of the day, the hardware (and software) costs are going to shave off any substantial profit. High risk, low reward.
Kodak is a chemical company these days with modest profits. They need to double down on that. Cameras are not in their wheelhouse.
I was looking at CIPA stats[0] yesterday. This appears to be a Japanese trade association, so it covers a lot of the biggest names in photography - but not Kodak.
But the numbers surprised me much beyond what I thought I already knew. Interchangeable-lens cameras are down from 10.something million units in 2008, to 6.something million units in 2024. But fixed-lens (eg compact, point & shoot, etc) went from 106 million to 1.8 million over the same period.
Nokia survived the smartphone better than (non-interchangeable) cameras did.
I know you meant more "Interchangable Lens Camera" with what you were describing.
SLRs are almost dead. Canon has promised a few more lenses (or had), but all their efforts now are in mirrorless. Sony doesn't have a non-mirrorless offering. And I believe Nikon is the same as Canon.
> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals.
It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.
I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.
Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.
(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)
Yeah tech startups are great like that. Big tech companies are even better. With them, you don't have to wait for a successful exit, or even work there that long, to get your low seven figures. No one in America is working harder to restore the middle class than the tech industry. Even the person who cleans my house makes more than 50k. Meanwhile legacy enterprises and private equity are doing everything in their power to destroy it. This is a moral righteous struggle for the heart of America, which makes it such a shame that Lamego was found by the courts to have acted dishonorably, but we mustn't forget who's side we're on.
This is not limited to Canonical. This is happening across the board because it's a buyer's market for labor. The game is stacked against job applicants. A posting on LinkedIn will attract hundreds of applicants, and as recruiter friends tell me, they'll get dozens of qualified people that can do the job. Blame the internet, blame globalization, blame remote work.
At best companies act in good faith but are dysfunctional/incompetent to make this an efficient process. At worst, employers are exploiting the current labor situation to their advantage.
Will this ever change back? I don't think so unless you can eliminate the internet and AI systems.
Cold-applying to jobs on LinkedIn is a fool's game.
How do I know? I did it. A couple years ago, I wanted to make a move to full-time remote work. I liked the people that I worked with, but I spent over a decade there, management started going downhill, and I could tell the company was on a trajectory of slow death. I spent HOURS almost every day for six months applying to jobs on LinkedIn. I restricted myself to positions that I thought I was actually qualified for without stretching. I avoided consulting/MSP companies. I probably applied to well over a hundred positions.
How many responses did I get? Zero. Not a single one. Occasionally, a recruiter would ping me and say they had a job opening that was a perfect fit. Every single time, it ended up being a contract position.
I DID eventually find my current job on LinkedIn, but only because I recognized the company name as one that a friend of mine moved to 6 months earlier. I called him up, asked him how it was, and he provided a referral. It dawned on me after I accepted the offer that every SINGLE job I have ever had was either through a friend's referral or because I knew the manager beforehand. The old adage, "it's who you know," is still as relevant as ever.
Only job searching through sites like LinkedIn and Indeed are just a huge waste of time. They're going to get at the very least, hundreds of applicants. Thousands if you're advertising for remote. This is all a numbers game.
People will hate to admit this, but the best ways to counter this game is leveraging your network and ending remote work. The problem is the combination of LinkedIn/Indeed and the internet creates a national, much bigger labor supply than a national labor demand pool.
Everything you said about searching through job sites being a numbers game is true but there’s something else going on.
At least anecdotally myself and several others in my social circle have been getting referrals from others in said social circles, and then just not getting contacted. The people making the referrals also can’t get an answer out of their hr departments.
It really feels like there’s a silent hiring freeze or companies in general have gotten so excited by the buyers market for labor that they have gotten insanely picky
>> This is happening across the board because it's a buyer's market for labor.
In my region in the Midwest, we have several well known companies that have been doing this for a very long time. They basically promote the same insane hiring process and then compare their companies hiring process to getting admitted to Harvard - they actually say they're hiring standards are more stringent than Harvard's.
The other funny thing is these same companies who hold themselves out as "elite" pay 30-40% less than market rate. So in essence, you go through some insane hiring process, jumping through all the hoops, and you're still going to end up in a job that pays 30% less than every other company doing two or three interviews before hiring someone.
Will this ever change back? Probably when market dynamics change back in the favor of developers, which could be a very long time. I wholeheartedly believe the "gold rush" of the tech industry has ended. Gone are the days where you had 4-5 different companies vying for your talent year after year after year. The whole industry feels like its contracting.
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