New grads: “why am I not getting hired?”, also new grads:
Posted by getpodapp@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 239 comments
They're already in a bad market, getting hired coming off the Covid hiring boom. I'm seeing many new grads getting demoralised with the job market, while also putting zero effort into applications.
Don't get me wrong I'm not making fun of this guy, it seems everybody is doing the same thing.
I wonder how long before it clicks that you need to put a bit of effort into applications?
omayossss@reddit
People on this sub are really insufferable. You don't even know why you're anti AI, I'm not even sure half of you understand what it is to begin with. The funny thing, this is happening simultaneously across many communities, visit a writer's subreddit, pretentious "experienced" ones there make the same claims are those on this sub and other subs. Maybe it has to do with ego, it reminds me of that scene in "Better call Saul", where his brother got so mad at him for taking a shortcut and becoming a lawyer through an online university.
SignoreBanana@reddit
It must be difficult and frustrating to see a path to easy riches but no one will buy your scheme.
As someone who's been in this industry for 13 years now, I can tell you the brand of quality we see coming into the industry now is several orders of magnitude worse than the worst candidates we used to have back then. I used to interview new grads and entry levels who were more than technically adept and just had to work out the industry chops to be principals or better.
Nowadays some of my interviews are folks trying to cheat the interview and the rest perform inscrutably. Software isn't AI slop you can just "fuck with" til you get it right. It is precision. That is what engineering is. All engineering is precision and software is no different, and it's never been more clear than it is now with LLMs.
omayossss@reddit
First half of your comment: I can't help but think it's a generational thing, "Back in my day, x thing and y thing we're better! These youngsters are lazy". I would say new grads today are far more compentent than a decade ago, since they are expected to be "full stack". I agree with the second part. There is tremendous value in using LLMs but you have to know how to extract that value. I saw a post yesterday of some guy saying there is absolutely no use in AI. I'm not saying there is SOME value, but tremendous one!
khooke@reddit
'Back in the day' all development was full stack. This term and the distinction between front end and backend development is a recent induatry change
stevefuzz@reddit
Lol no it's not. Full stack just meant you could do both, not that nobody did one or the other.
SignoreBanana@reddit
Buddy, everyone has always been expected to be full stack. This isn't new. Fuck, do you think back in the 70s and 80s, they were like "nah, I don't touch assembly, I just work on the UI". Now more than ever we have focused disciplines more than full stack positions.
stevefuzz@reddit
I started coding professionally around 2000. There have always been front end teams and back end teams. Being full stack was basically an upgrade. I'm just speaking through experience not really giving an opinion.
khooke@reddit
The distinction came around that time when web dev started to pick up. Developing client/server systems in the 90s there was just a developer role and you typically developed end to end. Before that the client was more likely a serial terminal, 3270 or 5250 terminal, even if running as terminal software on your pc, and there wasn’t a concept of a ‘front end’ - as a CICS/COBOL dev everything was on the backend (mainframe).
The term ‘frontend’ at that time was used to describe a frontend processor, which was a fridge/freezer size box that offloaded the communication processing between the terminals and the mainframe.
stevefuzz@reddit
I'm aware, but you said recent. 50 to 35 years ago is ancient. I mean no offense. It's just that having separation of concern between front and back end teams is standard, and, I wouldn't really consider that recent... However, I would say it started when OS and window managers became popular.
khooke@reddit
Lol, I need to re-assess my idea of 'recent' 🤣
stevefuzz@reddit
I'm aware, you said recent. 35 years ago is ancient. I mean no offense. It's just having separation of concern between front and back end teams is standard, and, I wouldn't really consider that recent... However, I would say it started when OS and window managers became popular.
isurujn@reddit
Ironic that you bring up Better Call Saul because Jimmy was a grade-A scam artist.
omayossss@reddit
Here come the delicious down votes!
-Staub-@reddit
Oh wow you're such a martyr. You're soooo brave. How can you withstand such a fate 🥺 Lmao
omayossss@reddit
Haha, it still happened though, Reddit's answer to disagreements are down votes that hide one's opinion. Worst strategy in my view
Repulsive_Constant90@reddit
Vibe coder entered the chat.
Stinky_Fly@reddit
If companies are pushing internally to use AI, and then someone not employed actually does use AI for projects and stuff then its a problem? Not trying to have an argument, just trying to understand how to navigate the situation (am unemployed myself)
Repulsive_Constant90@reddit
company pushing to use AI is quite a "bold" statement. If the "guy" who know what they are doing, they wont "push" anyone to use AI. Most of the time there are random C-executive who know nothing about AI and think or heard from X that "AI can boost productivity". Any engineers by trade will know that AI is dumb. Furthermore, it will make people who are using it "dumb". Simple analogy, AI make you stop thinking.
kokorean-mafia@reddit
Why do you think compiling cover letters, resumes and mindlessly applying to hundreds of job postings (AI or not) is not even a “bit of effort”?
SignoreBanana@reddit
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
blg002@reddit
That’s not the definition of insanity
Perezident14@reddit
It’s a famous quote by Albert Einstein.
blg002@reddit
It’s a famous quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein.
FIFY
Perezident14@reddit
Sure, just clarifying though. Sounds like you’re just pedantic though.
BeerInMyButt@reddit
It’s a quote that a certain type of person is eager to believe Einstein said even though he didn’t.
MagicalPizza21@reddit
Practicing a skill is insanity then.
SignoreBanana@reddit
It is if you're not adjusting the practice to grow the skill
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
Not really: practicing something doesn't expect a different result.
When you do something while not taking the time to think why what you are doing is not working, that is insanity. Practicing something is working, and it is achieving the expected result: making you better at that skill.
MagicalPizza21@reddit
It quite literally does. The entire point of practicing a skill is to be better at it. For music in particular, you might play a certain troublesome passage at a slower tempo over and over again (insanity!) until you've mastered it. Then you move up to a faster tempo and do it again.
And a common method of practicing is to do the difficult thing over and over until it's less difficult.
So someone can expect a different result after practicing more compared to before practicing, right?
The quote, if real (there are conflicting reports), is wrong on two fronts: * That's not the definition; at best it's an example * It completely neglects the idea of state change; doing an action might change you or your environment in such a way that doing the same action again would yield a very different result
ShoePillow@reddit
My take is that while practicing, we aren't doing the same thing again and again. We put in slight variations and optimise for better results.
For music, if you play the same piece in the same way with no changes multiple times, don't expect any different results.
yukiakira269@reddit
Not really.
For practicing, if you're getting better at every iteration, it means that you are doing something "different", and not "the same thing".
Music, for example, you're not doing the same thing over and over again, because for every mistake you avoid, it's doing something "different", hence, achieving a "different result", and not "insanity".
Now, on the contrary, if you're just sitting at the piano, making the same mistakes over, over, and over again without even thinking of adjusting your playing in the slightest, hoping that you would somehow magically get it right, then that is "insanity".
79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit
Practicing a skill is continuous improvement. You are supposed to mix things up and use those critical thinking skills
TangerineSorry8463@reddit
Leetcode fans in shambles
getpodapp@reddit (OP)
Because one glance by hr and they’re throwing it away because it’s filled with em-dashes
HugeSide@reddit
Not a single HR person has looked at a resume since ChatGPT came out
shared_ptr@reddit
I look at applications every day and I immediately skip past the ones where AI produced the “why do you want to work here” part of the application.
Just can’t justify prioritising an application written by a machine over a genuine human message. If you’re using AI for your applications then it’s very likely this is happening to you, whether it’s a human like me doing the review or an AI system.
relevant_tangent@reddit
"Why do you want to work here" is the stupidest interview question ever. An AI answer is more than it deserves.
shared_ptr@reddit
I mean, it's not stupid for us, we care about why people are applying to the company.
You may find it stupid because you don't care, but you not caring would probably come across in how you would answer and we'd avoid hiring someone that doesn't match our culture. Which is the process working!
relevant_tangent@reddit
There are always exceptions. Maybe you're trying to cure malaria or end world hunger, in which case more power to you. But I'm afraid your culture is giving "we're looking for suckers to overwork and underpay".
shared_ptr@reddit
What culture do you look for, just out of interest? I’m not sure what type of company you would look for, if your position is that you don’t care about working at a place you’re excited about or that your colleagues are excited about?
relevant_tangent@reddit
Most of these, I would not expect to know when applying. It's your job as an interviewer to tell me and sell me.
shared_ptr@reddit
I think that’s a really fair list. I like it quite a lot actually!
I would add, personally, that you feel working at the company is a significant thing you would feel proud of and you want to work with the people on the team.
I do get why that would be secondary to what you’ve listed though. Again, different situations.
eat_those_lemons@reddit
One that recognized they are not curing cancer and that I'm here to collect a paycheck so I can do meaningful things with my life outside of work. Hopefully one that doesn't hate minorities
If you think your web app is special I've got news for you
HugeSide@reddit
I genuinely enjoy writing cover letters so I would never use an LLM to write them for me, but I can understand someone in a more desperate situation than mine resorting to it.
I do agree that it leaves a horrendous first impression, but from what I’ve heard from juniors trying to land their first job it’s unlikely to me that a significant portion of HR people are actually reading anything.
shared_ptr@reddit
Yeah I think you have two conflicting issues here: AI has increased volume of job applications so significantly that it’s made the quality of average application decrease massively.
The people doing the ‘shotgun approach’ of applying to 20 companies a day are both a response to and cause of the problem they’re facing, which is a flood of applications.
Sadly that strategy is likely to only get you a job if you manage to get lucky once on one of your many meh applications, but when you’ve done so little effort specifically for each job you apply to then the p(success) is really small.
Way better off doing 1 application a day but researching the company properly so you can make the application way more solid than sending tens of applications out, all AI generated.
khooke@reddit
This. Quality not quantity.
cicamicacica@reddit
What
kokorean-mafia@reddit
More often than not, your job application isn’t even looked at if you are a new grad. The job market is terrible at the moment, and it’s not uncommon for people to apply to hundreds of jobs just to land a single interview. To dismiss the stress and persistence this requires as not even a bit of effort is very dismissive.
meevis_kahuna@reddit
I agree. The whole thing is a crapshoot anyway, lots of job listings are fake, nepotism exists, etc. It's just a numbers game, why not use AI to get your foot in the door. Put your care into prompting AI and the output will be good enough.
I use AI for all my cover letters unless it's a job I really, really want. No one is spending more than 30 seconds reading it anyway.
Terrariant@reddit
It’s about the care you show doing the work, not the result of the work, that sets you apart from other candidates
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
The result is what ultimately matters.
Terrariant@reddit
I’m saying this as someone who has interviewed dozens of devs (I stopped because I dislike interviewing people)
Your results are the same results dozens of other people have. I am not concerned with what you do similar to other candidates, I am concerned with what sets you apart.
Anyone can deliver results, delivering results that are better than the rest is all about how you came to those results.
If you use AI, it tells me you didn’t care or put as much time in as the next candidate. I would much prefer to hire someone who hand-wrote their resume, it shows they took time and are invested in getting the job.
Anyone can use AI to do a thing in 10m, but the quality is really different than someone who spent half an hour hand-writing their application.
squirrelpickle@reddit
Assuming anyone from HR even bothers to look at your application, which honestly based on my experiences these last 2 years doesn’t seem to happen much.
And no, I wasn’t using ChatGPT for my applications, and I used the same resume model that got me hired at SAP and trivago.
79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit
You're assuming the company even has an HR department to begin with. Of the 3 companies I've worked at only 1 has had a traditional HR department.
Yamitz@reddit
You’re wasting your time if you’re submitting cover letters for engineering jobs.
oupablo@reddit
Also, what makes you think that AI isn't reviewing applications and cover letters? A cover letter is such a bygone era type of thing from when you were trying to stand out amongst the 10 other applicants. Now you're trying to stand out amongst the 1000 other applicants. Nobody is reading that cover letter.
Main-Eagle-26@reddit
While you complain about how hard leetcode and whiteboarding is, but don't actually practice it.
It is. So. Easy. To study and practice and get good at whiteboard interviewing. You can get ridiculously good jobs purely because you can manipulate the stupidity of the interview process even if you're not an experienced dev.
kokorean-mafia@reddit
I think your argument is misplaced. No one is complaining about leetcode or whiteboarding. It is currently very difficult to land interviews. That’s the point I am making.
matthra@reddit
Another AI bad post, with a dash of ageism for seasoning. No doubt destined for hundred of upvotes from senior devs whose discomfort with AI let AI live rent free in their heads.
FrontMacaroon3687@reddit
I just know your coworkers spend hours fixing your codes LOL
matthra@reddit
My code has a 100% test coverage and a 90% documentation coverage. How is yours?
FrontMacaroon3687@reddit
120%. Git gud 🤭
matthra@reddit
Troll all you like won't save you from the unemployment line.
FrontMacaroon3687@reddit
I work in AAA in Japan on a permanent contact (which is the safest contract you could get) You might get laid off yesterday LOL
fomq@reddit
no
SecretaryNo6911@reddit
Yes
yubario@reddit
I recommend using AI to make your resume ATS compliant. And also not to submit cover letters anymore, because now AI makes cover letters so easy and recruiters are going to assume anyone submitting a cover letter is likely AI.
Ironically they’re using AI tools to pick the perfect hire but then they get upset when people use AI to apply to the job.
notquitezeus@reddit
Try interviewing asshats who are attempting to fool you into thinking that they “know” whatever $LLM says. When you’re done being sad and angry, you may reconsider your position.
SableSnail@reddit
This happened before AI too though. People lying on their CV has been a thing ever since CVs existed.
notquitezeus@reddit
I mean DURING an interview. There is no good explanation for a candidate who fails basic conceptual questions about epipolar geometry suddenly becoming smart after you mention epipolar geometry
spoonraker@reddit
I had a guy recently that was obviously using some kind of AI cheating tool in a technical interview. Every time I'd ask him a question there would be this insanely long awkward pause and then suddenly he'd start saying his answer, but when he spoke it was incredibly fast and had zero natural sounding emphasis like you would when actually speaking to someone, plus his responses were very long and once he'd get going he couldn't stop until he finished. Then at the end he'd almost like surprised at himself and finally start talking in his natural cadence, sometimes even saying things like, "uh, yeah, that's how you'd say that yes".
The best part was when one of his "thinking" pauses was so incredibly long I actually broke the silence to say "feel free to think out loud it might help if you get stuck" but I accidentally said that right as he started speaking his response, but then about 5 seconds later in the middle of his sentence he literally said out loud "yes if you get stuck it might help to think out loud" and then seamlessly went right back into the sentence where he was talking about some technical concept.
After a few minutes of this painfully obvious cheating I actually opened ChatGPT myself and asked it to come up with a realistic sounding but absolutely fake bit of technical nonsense so I could test if he was cheating, and sure enough after "thinking" about it for a second the candidate happily explained how he would incorporate the principles of magneto reluctance using sinusoidal reticulating lunar phase shaft capacitance in his design for Instagram or whatever. It was hard not to laugh just from asking the question.
liquidpele@reddit
I'm surprised your company allows you to do that, we have to finish the whole thing and take it seriously, which makes it suuuuuuuuuck. I've had literally zero external candidates this entire YEAR that were up to snuff, but then again our genius leaders are still having us to remote interviews so of course they're only getting cheats.
spoonraker@reddit
I'm the founding engineer at a startup so I don't really have anyone telling me the right way to interview hah. I guess that helps.
liquidpele@reddit
Oh that’s fun, hope you have good stock options and make retirement money :)
shared_ptr@reddit
Total opposite advice as someone who screens tens of candidates a day: cover letter is the part of the application I pay attention to the most.
Write it yourself, don’t use AI, immediately gets you to top 5% of the applications. I don’t think I’ve ever not passed a candidate into the process who wrote a compelling cover letter.
oupablo@reddit
As someone that has written dozens of cover letters and never had an interview at a place that I wrote one for, I think you might the exception rather than the rule.
shared_ptr@reddit
I expect we will be! We aim to hire exceptional engineers and pay toward the top of market for our area, and as a result we hire differently than others.
It matters lots to us that people really want to work at the company rather than it just being a job, for example. So the personal message you can give in the small box we provide that asks “why do you want to work at incident.io?” is a big differentiator when it comes to our candidates.
In other differences, we also care much less about the university you come from, and positively rate career switchers. So your mileage may vary but it rarely harms you to provide a human authored message explaining why you’re excited for the role, and only needs to be two paragraphs.
MinimumArmadillo2394@reddit
How do you even write cover letters anymore?
I'm expected to write a tailored resume for each job, fine.
I'm expected to put in my resume, then put the same info on the resume into the ATS. Fine.
I'm expected to fill out demographic surveys for every application, some of them have it required twice, fine.
But a cover letter is the #1 thing that slows down my ability to apply. Having to write a different one per the job is absolutely insane.
The whole "Why do you want to work here" question is equally insane, at this point as well.
At some point, I run out of companies to apply to that I've heard of. At some point I have to start applying to places I haven't heard of. So why do you ask "Why do you want to work at incident.io?" when the real, most honest answer, is and always will be "Because you have a job, and I need a job"?
shared_ptr@reddit
We put a huge amount of content out that explains the work we’re doing and how we work. There’s loads you can learn in just 5m looking at our blog.
We don’t ask for a cover letter btw, we just ask for a message that explains why you applied to us specifically. Everyone in our team picked us intentionally for certain things that they liked, and it’s useful for us to know what that is in our candidates.
If you can’t answer that then the job is probably a bad fit for you and it saves us both time not going through the process!
liquidpele@reddit
lmao, this person thinks they can tell the difference between hand written an AI.
No-Cardiologist9621@reddit
That's weird because I've never had a cover letter be mentioned once ever in my entire career. I've always felt like they were never read by anyone.
Perezident14@reddit
I agree with you. My last 2 positions were in part to my cover letter. I write them sparingly and personalize it. I’m still able to get interviews without cover letters, but they definitely gave me a boost. It’s definitely something you have to gauge on if it seems worth it though.
Funny enough, I’ve noticed I’m able to add more personality to my cover letters than I used to (so it doesn’t get mistaken for AI).
RandomlyMethodical@reddit
The irony at my company is even deeper than that. Management is pushing us hard to use AI to be more efficient, but they’re using AI in the hiring process to filter out people using AI in the application process.
oupablo@reddit
And will be furious if someone uses AI in a coding challenge. Then day one of the job will be yelled at if they don't use AI for all their coding.
A few of the engineers where I work have been arguing to make the use of AI in coding interviews acceptable as long as it's transparent since we are being pushed hard to use AI for everything on the job. Basically the idea is, use the tool you want during the interview with the expectation that you better be able to explain what it outputs.
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
"kicking the ladder" much?
lubutu@reddit
It's sort of like a three-legged arms race.
Princess_Azula_@reddit
And everyone is tripping over because their new leg sticks out awkwardly, but were told "3 legs are better at going faster than 2", when the third leg is only good at kicking things and does everything else poorly. Your boss says that we already paid for the 3rd leg subscription service, so now you're stuck with it. Half the interviewees only use their third leg to move and can't use their own legs and flail around thinking their movement without any effort is getting them places, while you use your third leg to kick trash into the trashcan from your desk. You could just pick up the trash and move it to the trashcan, but that would take longer. The third leg misses half the time so you need to walk across the room to pick up the trash to put it in the can; even longer than if you did it yourself. Your CEO becomes a 3rd leg whisperer, and drinks 3rd leg kool-aid and wants to fire 20% of their staff because AI will make everyone more productive and now you have to kick even more things due to the stress of not having the time to do things the right way so all your work has dents in it. Your legs atrophy from not using them in months. The 3rd leg apocalypse comes with legs attached to drones, killing half the population. Unfortunately your workplace survives and you have to work through aremegedon. Everyone now has a third leg, and they only use it exclusively. A new hire comes in to work. They have 10 third legs attached to them. You're numb to living at this point. "Welcome to the team.", you say. Their face is soullessly smiling over a generic office background. Theu haven't blinked since you've met. They say "Me (new programmer, first day, super eager): "Thanks so much! I’m really excited to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this! Where should I start? Is there a repo I should clone, or someone I should shadow today?"
(internally panicking a little but smiling hard) "Also, uh, do you all use tabs or spaces?""
You die a little more on the inside.
Perezident14@reddit
My spouse is in recruiting and I’ve hired for dev positions fairly recently too. Way you said is most definitely false.
Use AI to help, sure. Don’t use AI to completely write your resume and cover letter. It is very, very obvious when AI has completely written something. Cover letters can be great too, but I would do them sparingly and customize them to a specific job (it’s what helped me land my last 2 positions, but I was still able to get interviews at other places without one).
I’m very familiar with a handful of ATS and my most recent hiring was actually without an ATS.
SlightAddress@reddit
What ai do you use to make it ats compliant?
tikhonjelvis@reddit
It's sort of silly that cover letters were basically a proof-of-work token rather than something anybody read for the content, but probably also true. Hiring has been broken for far longer than we've had LLMs.
Relevant_Arachnid464@reddit
Beating the filters means dodging the big pile and getting a warm intro fast. I stopped mass-applying and moved to hunting smaller, hidden roles: cold DM-ing hiring managers on LinkedIn, jumping into niche Slack groups, and grabbing coffee with ex-coworkers. Huntr keeps my leads organized, Apollo scrapes emails so I can drop a short, tailored note, and JobMate fires off the boring ATS forms in the background while I network. When I do apply directly, I add one line in the cover letter that mirrors the posting’s core metric-gets past a lot of keyword gates. Beating the filters means dodging the big pile and getting a warm intro fast.
skwyckl@reddit
Please, don't start thinking all new grads are like this. Lots of the applications we get at our shop do everything old school, with letter of recommendation, CV, portfolio, all organized neatly, email on the work we do (meaning they probably went at least through our site), and so on.
getpodapp@reddit (OP)
Obviously this is a generalisation, though I’ve came across it many times
pinkbutterfly22@reddit
I hope you don’t use any AI in your hiring process?
Imagine you need to apply to 400 jobs to get 10 interviews to get 1 offer. On top of that you work full time or have other responsibilities.
Do you think we have time to write a custom, hand written letters for each one of these about how your place of slavery is so unique and better than the other 399 places of slavery I have applied to? Letters that may very likely not even be read?
Businesses don’t even bother to send a rejection email anymore, but they expect the most.
Additional_Mode8211@reddit
Lots to improve at corps, but ‘slavery’ is reaching that word quite a bit past the actual meaning.
Play the game. Bring home your paycheck. Live your life. Hopefully we can even improve the state of the world a bit too. Much more than actual slaves got to do.
eat_those_lemons@reddit
I see we are not familiar with the arguments against wage slavery, even from people like the confederacy
Additional_Mode8211@reddit
I’m quite aware of the divergence in the 80’s with the pay gap and quality of life gap with money being funneled to the top. To the point that people are trapped in a similar manner with poverty.
With that said, experienced devs are not anywhere near that category.
eat_those_lemons@reddit
Fair that devs are not at that level, I read your comment as applying to everyone not just devs, we have definitely been lucky as far as capitalism goes
Which-World-6533@reddit
If you're an experienced Dev applying to 40 jobs to get 1 interview something is fundamentally wrong.
You need to be looking at what is going on there.
Internal_Struggles@reddit
I mean this is obviously about new grads. The NOT very experienced devs...
ShoePillow@reddit
Yeah, the post doesn't really belong here. Looks the name of the sub.
DatBoi_BP@reddit
Oh tbh I just assumed the point in posting it here was for experienced devs to facepalm while looking at new devs. Idk. It's been years since I joined this sub, haven't seen a post hit my feed in a while
Massive-Question-550@reddit
the extra effort should be put into nepotism where it actually matters.
No_Engineer6255@reddit
What is the extra effort when your CV gets dogpiled under 200 other?
Boomer mentality
ShoePillow@reddit
So then should they just keep sending their cvs without getting any response? What's your proposal here?
No_Engineer6255@reddit
Try nepotism with your money hungry recruiters that go for the easiest and lowest ball offer to sell people and DM-ing random people in Linkedin , and yes nowadays its a lottery, if you dont see it welcome in 2025 , I got my jobs through sheer luck and insane application numbers TAILORED , hundreds of them when I was a new grad but when they put the job app, I call them personally to notify them about my CV and build rapport so they remember and they tell you that in 3 hours they pulled the job app down because they got 200 applicants you can't do shit.
I personally built my career and I stay targeted and jump between tiered companies from 10-s to 10000+ employee numbers but its all down to luck and how fast you are and how you built out your linkedin account etc.
You can't tell me tailoring works when you are racing with the same candidates , what should extra effort be at this point , should I Luigi their CEO so they pay attention to me as a new grad ?
At this point the companies and my seniority pulls me into interview territory when I apply , but I harshly remember and will never forget what I had to do when I had none of that and that was hundreds of applications to jobs and tailoring my CV and praying , I even applied the tactic to apply on Wednesday and Monday Mornings when recruiters shift through their applications so I dont end up in the leftover pool between Monday/Wednesday / Thursday Monday.
But we can easily test it , build out a new grad resume , show me your tactics of nepotism and networking as a new grad and we will see how long you get , put your money where your mouth is.
Stupid arguments like yours shows me that you never applied cold in this market when you have no other choice and you are just talking shit.
ShoePillow@reddit
How do I 'try nepotism' with people I don't know?
Mate, it looks like you are responding to something I didn't write.
My takeaway is that your proposal is to keep sending applications
No_Engineer6255@reddit
Read it again
sd2528@reddit
Write code. Compile code. Code has compile error. Keep compiling over and over until the error goes away.
danielrheath@reddit
I mean, you aren't wrong, but "should've chosen better parents" isn't super actionable.
remy_porter@reddit
Not with that attitude it isn’t.
timonix@reddit
And people wonder what Greek life at uni really is for.. It's nepotism lite that can be bought with time and beer.
bilbo_was_right@reddit
No one wonders, we all know
eightbyeight@reddit
If you believe in reincarnation then sure it is. /s in case it isn’t obvious
Sulleyy@reddit
If there are 2 million applicants and 1 million jobs, 1 million people aren't getting jobs. The bottom half can try harder, but that doesn't fix the actual problem at all. It just means a different person will be in here making the same post and you'll give the same advice over and over.
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
If they're doing all they can already, where exactly would you expect the "extra effort" to go?
SignoreBanana@reddit
We have a bunch of new co-ops and none of them are what I'd call brilliant.
We hired a couple of new engineers who are so-so at best.
If someone isn't getting hired, it's because they suck, not because of the job market.
PuzzleheadedKey4854@reddit
Tell me why I've never had issues with programming problems but always getting a job.
The job market for tech is unbelievably broken. I'm leaving it ASAP. Job security was the reason why I got into it in the first place!
skwyckl@reddit
Bullshit, alone due to job availability. Germany has 1/10 of the developer jobs they had when I started out 10+ years ago, all those jobs are now in Eastern Europe, has absolutely fuck all to do with skillsets if there isn't even a job to start with.
Straight-Ad-8266@reddit
The larger problem with AI is that the idiot business people are losing confidence in juniors because the vast majority are using AI. Those same business people are usually the ones in charge of sorting through resumes. It’s also the same people who discard resumes for other illegitimate reasons.. as I’m sure most of us have danced around at some point in time.
My humble prediction is that this will in the short term create an over saturation of juniors (mixed with vibe coders of course), and in the next 10 years create a scarcity of seniors. Every senior was once a junior. Interrupting that pipeline is a really destructive thing.
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
I think we can overcome this decently. People using AI to vibe code will get fed up when expected to perform outside of the AI’s capabilities. though, if you sit down and work with an AI to build something you’re absolutely in love with and passionate about…even with zero code experience…you learn basic fundamentals regardless. You have to learn them just to prompt the model correctly.
Without basic terminology and understanding of how for loops and indentation and syntax work…I would be doomed, even with full access to Opus 4 and o3. AI is creating juniors. I have it web search for relevant courses and academic papers for me all the time. You really, REALLY can’t outsource your own thinking to it, but you can outsource a cute little relationship to it and be happy and learn stuff with it!
oupablo@reddit
It's only creating juniors if any of what the AI is outputting is committed to memory. Otherwise it's optimizing for someone that can prompt the AI to get the desired output from the code rather than the desired code as output. Whether that distinction matters long term, we'll have to wait and see. It may be the case that knowing how the code works doesn't matter as all and the better engineer is the one that has the best ways of prompting the AI to get the desired result. Similar to how some people were better than others at googling things in the early days
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
To prompt it you must have sophisticated knowledge of not only code but the exact problem you are trying to solve. Intimate human knowledge. Things the model itself cannot create as input for itself. The reason why we need a human-in-the-middle when generating synthetic data and post-training on it afterwards.
We will get better at understanding the world, doing the things we are passionate about, and building AI in general so long as we continue existing essentially. If you stop learning and committing to memory, you’re basically dead lol so….just gotta keep living is what I took from your statement.
Straight-Ad-8266@reddit
The problem is the ease of access. 90% of the time you can install the plugin in Vscode or IJ, and can be extremely general with the prompt. “Make L200 do x”, and it will auto complete it.
I’m not necessarily saying that some of these people don’t have any knowledge on the topic, but the scary part is that these people will never truly learn beyond a strong reliance on AI. In other words, they’ll be forever juniors.
As far as recursive training//human driven source data goes- I think AI will eventually collapse, since there’s not an easy way (programmatically) to differentiate what is AI generated on the internet. The models will eventually water themselves down to the point of being useless, then the juniors who relied on it when the potency was greater will struggle.
oupablo@reddit
Well there are studies to indicate otherwise
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/PTeMNnWPiV
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
Are these studies done on people who are using the technology appropriately or on customers who are paying to use it the way the corporations want them to?
germansnowman@reddit
~~learn~~ teach them
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
🤔 it’s more hands-on than that. I will make suggestions that it implements which won’t work and then I have to realize my idea or my suggestion was just stupid after researching either with it or looking on stackoverflow.
Most of the learning is from other humans, Claude is just another layer to add to the internet and to my day-to-day interactions, something significantly less capable than me with severe limitations/constraints that I simply love working with and being around.
germansnowman@reddit
Sorry, my bad – I had somehow assumed you spoke about teaching juniors something, but now realize the “them” referred to the “fundamentals”. I shouldn’t comment before I am fully awake :) Apologies again.
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
I am a junior and it has erm…”taught” me…if by teach you mean generate tens of thousands of lines of code, 40-50% of which doesn’t work and had to be debugged.
germansnowman@reddit
Tell me about it! I just cancelled my Copilot Pro subscription, I found it more of a nuisance than a help. I still ask ChatGPT occasionally for explanations, but again I often get disappointed by its hallucinations. Maybe I should try Claude. However, I work with legacy applications whose languages are not so popular, so LLMs are not too useful.
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
Deep research and web search greatened the model’s accuracy and real-world capabilities by about 40-60% compared to how accurate it was before these tools were trained into it.
Allowing the model to see real-world implementations of the solutions you want to build helps a lot because then the boilerplate won’t be hallucinated and then you can actually just jump right into innovating on features you really care about.
Still have to understand the boilerplate line-by-line as well as core features but it pushes me to where I want to be, if that makes sense.
germansnowman@reddit
Sorry, my comment was purely on the grammar. You cannot “learn someone something”, you can only teach them or they can learn it. That was all :)
germansnowman@reddit
I definitely see the problem, but it’s basically another version of the pork cycle.
cahrg@reddit
Exactly my thoughts after trying to develop something with AI. Yes I have the experience to babysit an AI, but how a junior will get it if they vibe code only.
Yourdataisunclean@reddit
Yeah we need an answer for this issue at scale. Personally as a Data Scientist I'm investing time in going through each area and doing stuff myself for practice. Especially if I'm using AI intensely for projects at work. I forsee a future where we basically have "ReBoot Camp" rehab courses that teach people basics, make them practice, and teach how not to overly rely on AI and go soft. I hate it too, but in the timeline where AI is kinda good but takes decades to go full AGI and replace people. Cottage industries like this will be a thing for sure.
Straight-Ad-8266@reddit
I make an effort to not use AI if it’s something I should know how to do. I’ll revert to surfing stack overflow, or reading docs to figure stuff out.
At the end of the day it is what it is.. I’ve always been a pessimist. Maybe it won’t turn out that way. On the bright side at least those of us who know what we’re doing will be in relatively hight demand.
samsounder@reddit
I recently hired a newly minted CS graduate.
My favorite guy who didn’t get hired was someone who told me 9am was too early for an interview.
Interviewed about 40 candidates, but I did find a good one eventually. He’s going grear
GrandaddyIsWorking@reddit
That seems like a ton of interviews for a junior position
samsounder@reddit
It was, but it was required to find what I was looking for.
oceandocent@reddit
As an interviewer, I always tell our recruiter that 9am is too early for me to run an interview . I’m not at my sharpest or happiest in the morning, and I want to be present and give someone a fair interview.
liquidpele@reddit
Same, but mostly because I'll forget I had the interview and miss it since I sometimes don't check my calendar first thing in the morning. Nothing gives you a heart attack like an auto-dialed interview suddenly pop up that you weren't expecting or prepared for.
getpodapp@reddit (OP)
9am hahaha
79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit
Can't wait to tell them about our 8AM stand-ups and a out how both team leads start before 6 to be available to our East Asian team.
HoratioWallpaper@reddit
That sounds like a toxic environment.
DatBoi_BP@reddit
Does it? It sounds kinda fine to me. 8 am meetings suck, but if it's still an 8 hour workday that therefore ends at 4, all is well. Besides, the meetings aren't daily, so I imagine you can wfh most of the time
No-Cardiologist9621@reddit
It's kind of normal when you work on a multi-national team. Someone's gonna be at the meeting a little early in their timezone and someone's gonna be there a little late in their timezone.
Ibuprofen-Headgear@reddit
I’ll start at 6, but I’m leaving at 2-3
79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit
Life is a toxic environment when it's more than just you in it.
isurujn@reddit
Unless that person is doing a graveyard shift at a job, that's the stupidest excuse to give, especially in a job market like this.
notquitezeus@reddit
I interview a lot of folks. The people who can’t think for themselves stick out like a sore thumb. I recently read something (cannot cite a source sadly) that claimed hiring managers take about 30 seconds to decide if a resume was written by a person or an AI and then throw away the AI generated resumes. Confirmation bias? Maybe.
Iampoorghini@reddit
I’m using the same resume template and format before ChatGPT came out, but used AI to polish some wordings and bullet points on my updated version. Would this be considered an AI generated resume? How can you tell if it’s AI generated?
petrol_gas@reddit
They can’t. But people think they can. That’s what u/notquitezeus was saying.
If it even sniffs of AI (according to some dude in the hiring stack) you’re out.
Oh you just write like that? Oof.
And btw let’s not forget the folks who think AI sounds good and will look for it specifically.
And it’s quite possible both are in the same hiring stack.
eat_those_lemons@reddit
Was in another thread where some was accusing op of being Ai and they responded "uhhh no? I just go to law school"
Is a catch 22 if you have spelling mistakes you look human but unprofessional :/
LexyconG@reddit
Cap.
This is textbook survivorship bias. They only "catch" the trash ones where someone copy-pasted their job description into ChatGPT and called it a day. Meanwhile everyone who used AI to polish their resume is getting interviews and they have no clue.
It's like saying "I can always tell when someone's had plastic surgery", nah, you only notice the bad ones. Also wtf even counts as "AI-generated"? If I use Grammarly? If I ask ChatGPT for better action verbs?
Euphoric-Neon-2054@reddit
There’s a very annoying disconnect between ‘AI is everything now, centralise it in your workflow or get left behind’ and ‘Using AI for job applications is naive and why you aren’t being hired’.
Like I obviously understand the premise of not just hammering empty AI shit at applications but it’s all just representative of the same shit: AI should only benefit capital. It’s ridiculous.
eat_those_lemons@reddit
You've put into words one of my frustrations at the ai thing, yes it's so frustrating how it is expected capital will gain massively from Ai but common people? Maybe they'll get bread
beclops@reddit
I’m on the hiring team at my company and we’ll throw out an application if we even get a whiff of AI in their take home test
elkazz@reddit
Every CEO is telling their staff to use AI to be more productive, so they should be getting bonus points for this.
liquidpele@reddit
Every CEO says whatever bullshit makes the moron investors think the company is taking advantage of whatever dark art magic morons think is going to turn lead to gold.
Longjumping-End-3017@reddit
If you tailored every resume and cover letter for 150 applications without a single response, I imagine you too would start looking for ways to streamline the process for the next 150.. and the next.. and the next..
Most new grads are taking closer to 1000 applications before landing a job, their "lack of trying" is probably just burnout from a grueling job search.
ExperiencedDevs-ModTeam@reddit
Rule 9: No Low Effort Posts, Excessive Venting, or Bragging.
Using this subreddit to crowd source answers to something that isn't really contributing to the spirit of this subreddit is forbidden at moderator's discretion. This includes posts that are mostly focused around venting or bragging; both of these types of posts are difficult to moderate and don't contribute much to the subreddit.
P4it@reddit
How dare a fresh college grad use a technology to replace the boring work he was not trained for? There are hundreds of things to blame for, and not manually writing cover letters for 20 companies a day shouldn't be one of them.
Accomplished_Bag4838@reddit
And why should a company hire that person rather than use extra tokens for that new technology?
You’re being asked to show what value you can contribute and before you begin you’ve suggested it’s just a slow ChatGPT wrapper that requires health insurance.
P4it@reddit
They shouldn't, and evidently they are not. If my work is replaceable by those tokens, then I am definitely being replaced either today or tomorrow.
Ethically, you’re right; I get that. But isn’t it also kind of unfair for companies to expect a carefully written cover letter when most of the process is automated anyway? I mean, if my resume, pre-recorded video responses, and cover letter are just going to be filtered through AI, and only a tiny percentage (like 2–3%) even get seen by a real person, and the rest will get a generic cold rejection template, it feels like a bit of a one-sided expectation, doesn’t it?
Relevant_Arachnid464@reddit
The trick is accepting that both sides automate, then spending your human time where algorithms suck: context and relationships. I batch-fire apps with LinkedIn Easy Apply, drop in a 30-second Loom explaining one win that matches the JD, and DM a team-member on Slack communities or alumni groups, the same day-hit rate jumps from ghosted to at least an intro call. For tweaks, Resume.io swaps keywords fast; Hunter grabs the right email; APIWrapper.ai keeps a spreadsheet synced so I know which stories I already pitched. Put the effort into three tailored touches, not thirty copy-pasted letters, and hiring managers will read you.
theevilsharpie@reddit
Unless it's explicitly stated as a requirement during the application process, a cover letter is generally unnecessary. If you're resorting to having ChatGPT generate some slop, better just to not bother.
Evinceo@reddit
A college grad has been trained to write.
P4it@reddit
A CS grad is trained to distill the redundant tasks. Additionally, keep in mind that English is not the primary language spoken everywhere.
pandasashu@reddit
There is nothing wrong using AI to apply. In fact I think anybody who isn’t is shooting themselves in the foot. All companies use ai to filter so doesn’t matter now. You do need to make sure you use it effectively of course.
Now using AI to deep fake virtual interviews….
crecentfresh@reddit
It really isn’t their fault that hiring is completely broken. I’ve hand written dozens maybe hundreds of cover letters and tailored, by hand, applications to job descriptions and have gotten maybe 5 responses and like 2 interviews. I have no idea what works other than my friends getting me jobs. I’m 4YOE with experience at small and large shops for reference. Im currently picking up contracts by word of mouth because the crickets are so demoralizing I needed a break.
Relevant_Arachnid464@reddit
Job search feels like unpaid overtime, so any edge that cuts grunt work matters. I quit carpet-bombing listings and picked ten companies a week, spending one hour per target finding a real contact on LinkedIn, writing a three-line intro linking my side project to their pain, and dropping it, with the app-hit rate jumping to one call per ten sends. Huntr tracks follow-ups, Grammarly catches tone slips, and JobMate quietly fires off the boilerplate apps in the background so I can focus on human outreach. Job search feels like unpaid overtime, so trim the busywork and aim effort where humans still notice.
paukl1@reddit
Really enjoying watching everyone willing to call themselves “anti-AI” fast tracking directly to just vomiting boomer garbage
Reddit_is_fascist69@reddit
Gotta go old school and get a referral. Really helps if you already have experience working with other software engineers who can refer you to their firm.
Fresh grads just need to get that experience and build those relationships.
/s
CampfireHeadphase@reddit
The way the guy writes he might be better off using AI, though. But yes, to me, reading AI-written applications that typically just restate the job description from the applicant's view, immediately disqualifies the candidate.
BEagle1984-@reddit
What do you expect? Genuine question because I read the presentation letters as well but I often couldn’t care less. I appreciate they taking the time to write one but I only care about the actual résumé as deciding factor.
oupablo@reddit
That's been my experience as well. I can get a feel for your skill level and a sense of your communication skills from the resume alone. Then we can really assess them on an interview. Although, I think team fit, eagerness to learn, and ability to learn are more important than existing skills for most positions anyway. It's only hiring at the higher levels that you really need to prove that someone has a really strong knowledge base before they start the job.
CampfireHeadphase@reddit
I'm fine with either no presentation letter or a short, customized one that is able to convey genuine interest ("as I was curious to understand how commodity markets work, I read books XYZ, built a simulator... and finally decided to switch domains and apply at your quant shop.")
redmomba@reddit
We've been interviewing for a senior developer position for about 2 months now, and we've been noting that resumes give much less of a personal feel lately. All of them feel very similar in content. Feels like the use of AI for resumes/interviewing is not only an issue for new grads.
derleek@reddit
This is actually probably just a bot. If your name is NounAdjective-5754 you aren't passing the sniff test.
muntaxitome@reddit
I helped a friend get a job. We did kind of half AI/half human cover letters. AI ones got more callbacks. That's not a scientific research but it did open my eyes a bit. The AI texts were with a guided prompt and checked for tone, contents, correctness, etc though.
Honestly after this experience I'm not so sure I (or a hiring manager) could tell if a cover letter was AI written or not if it was done with any skill level.
WorldlyShoulder6978@reddit
That's a new grad from India, you can tell because theirs is the only education system that teaches their children to punctuate their sentences so haphazardly. Their job market really does require an AI shotgun approach because it's 100x worse than anything in the western world.
papillon-and-on@reddit
It seems like mostly all of the punctuation has a space before it. I wasn't aware this was common in India.
I've been accused of being a Boomer (not that there's anything wrong with that) because I would type two spaces after a period, like this. But before the internet, that's just how it was done.
I'm Gen-x. The generation before us would indent the first word of every paragraph. I think the generation before them wrote on papyrus lol.
It's funny how typographical style changes so quickly and can identify someone.
trcrtps@reddit
I was actually taught this in school and I'm in my 30s. Def not common convention anymore, though, haven't thought about that in years. Really thought that was MLA standard but it is not.
SanityAsymptote@reddit
Back in the 90s web, there was a running joke that you could tell who the English majors were because their HTML would be full of to keep their precious post-period spaces in tact, lol.
Ibuprofen-Headgear@reddit
Mid 30s. I remember learning 2-spaces-after-period, then also remember it changing at some point (late HS maybe? Or early college?). Also indent paragraphs, but only in academic or formal writing, not Reddit or a 1-3 paragraph email.
Toasted_FlapJacks@reddit
Is this not common in essay writing, or are you actually referring to indenting the first word alone and not the first line of every paragraph?
germansnowman@reddit
French also uses spaces before/around some punctuation (mainly question and exclamation marks, colon, quotation marks), but definitely not comma.
eatlobster@reddit
The "impression" they're leaving is that they're lazy, entitled pricks.
NON_EXIST_ENT_@reddit
honestly have some shame, this is a new grad who's naiive and a bit entitled and you're a grown adult calling them a prick? what a great example to set. this post reflects worse on the people in this sub than it does this grad.
eatlobster@reddit
You seem to be forgetting that fresh grads are grown adults and shouldn't be treated like infants. Meh, I wouldn't have done that then, as I wouldn't do it now. I don't like disingenuous corner-cutting. If I find out that people are using an LLM to communicate with me, my correspondence will swiftly stop. You do you though.
NON_EXIST_ENT_@reddit
Yeah but you're not treating them like an adult you're insulting them and this sub's dogpiling on someone. I'm not saying they're free from criticism, but don't be a dick about it! I wouldn't hire this person either, but tell em why you feel that way in the thread and keep it moving. Set the tone man
jmitch651@reddit
Lazy new grads are mad they have to actually compete for jobs & can't just coast like they did though under grad.
tr14l@reddit
Not a new dev, but...
They don't really have a great choice. Applications are becoming an arms race of automation. Every job post gets 1500 applicants. My recruiter spends hours filtering stuff every day AFTER he uses auto filters for yoe, salary, tech, etc. So, naturally, he starts using LLMs. The vast majority get rejected without human ever seeing a single pixel of their resume.
Blasting AI applications probably isn't the answer, I know. But spending hours on an application that's going in the trash milliseconds after you click the button definitely isn't the answer either.
Job markets are broken right now.
LowDue1583@reddit
6666⅝46Touch and hold a clip to pin it. Unpinned clips will be deleted after 1 hour.4,xxgtcffg
FrontMacaroon3687@reddit
To be very honest. If recruiters are using AI for everything, they shouldn’t be surprised applicants play the same shitty game.
Idea-Aggressive@reddit
Attention here, for years people curate effort and companies ignore or even ghost after abusing candidate’s time! Those take home tests you have never provided feedback to, or delegated to HR who has never replied back? Sooner or later it’ll come to hunt you down.
Living comfortably from your high horse and exposing kids like that who are struggling to make a living, paying thousands for mouldy rooms in shared spaces with another 5…
I know juniors applying for 1.4k thousand jobs; attending dozens of 4 or 5 stage interviews; being requested to do take home challenges which in some cases don’t even get feedback! Who’s fault is it?
I also had to confront team members of product design team taking advantage of people’s creativity and creative thinking to solve problems. Candidates unknowingly working for free!
WTF?
Relevant_Arachnid464@reddit
The game’s rigged, so play smarter, not harder. I stopped blasting 300 copy-pasted apps and cut to 40 solid ones by using Huntr to track roles, a simple template in Google Docs, and a 15-minute tweak per resume. Grabbing a weekly coffee chat with someone inside the company did more than any cover letter. If you still need volume, Simplify Jobs auto-fills forms fast, and JobMate can shotgun the boring ones while you focus on networking. Ghosting still sucks, but trimming the list and adding human touch has landed me more calls than those 400 Hail Marys. The game’s rigged, so play smarter, not harder.
lonelybeggar333@reddit
Meanwhile, my HR department is saying that if they're not using AI to 'boost their productivity', they're not fit for work.
DstnB3@reddit
I might be an outlier here but I really don't see using AI as a negative when I'm hiring. They're using the latest tools to be efficient? Ok great! I really don't care if it's in AI writing style as much as the content.
theevilsharpie@reddit
I can only assume you don't hire often (or at all).
There's nothing inherently wrong with using AI as a tool to prepare a submission to a job application, anymore than it matters what text editor you use to draft the content (although if you submit your resume as a doc/docx, I will probably judge you a bit). When used correctly, the use of AI (or any other preparation tool) is completely transparent.
The issue hiring managers have with AI is not those who use it as a tool, but those who use it as a replacement for expertise. When used in that way, AI enables "fake it 'till you make it" at an industrial scale, to the point where it effectively acts as a denial of service on the interview process. It's frustrating, because these candidates will inevitably crash out during the actual in-person interview, wasting the time of everyone involved. And when this begins happening repeatedly, you quickly looks for the "tells" you can that allows you to drop these candidates early.
Currently, AI writing has a style that's easy to spot, partly because the tools themselves produce formulaic content that is readily identifiable when you see it enough, and partly because people who resort to this tactic typically don't bother putting in the effort of re-writing the AI output in their own voice. (Also, those who happen to reach the phone screening stage try to use AI there, and it's incredibly obvious when they do.) As these tools continue to develop, it may not be so easy to spot them in the future.
This is also having a broader effect on our recruiting practices. While I can't speak for other departments in my company, the Engineering department has already reached the point where we don't even bother trying to hire juniors anymore, and I doubt we're alone in that.
DstnB3@reddit
Lying on your resume has been around for much longer than AI, and it's more important than ever to have a good interview process that can weed out these candidates early. If the recruiter or my phone screen responses over voice still sound like they're reading off AI then that's a problem. I'm not going to penalize people for taking advantage of the latest technology in appropriate places.
driftingphotog@reddit
As an HM... we can tell.
NoleMercy05@reddit
We can tell most of your job postings are for non existant jobs to make your company look like it's growing and they are also written by AI
P4it@reddit
But do you disregard the applications written by the AI? The most cooked programmers I know use AI to write cover letters just because it's not the most fun job for an average programmer.
ikefalcon@reddit
You’re not going to get rejected because your application was written by an LLM. You’re going to get rejected because your LLM-written application is shitty and you haven’t learned how to make it not shitty because you’re incapable of doing anything without a LLM.
P4it@reddit
True that. Garbage in, garbage out.
driftingphotog@reddit
Given how much of our job involves communicating technical and complex topics to others, yes.
But only because something obviously written by AI is generally something poorly written. Smart engineers are using AI as a tool, reviewing the output, and making sure it fits their needs.
It is VERY easy for me to see when someone is using it to do the whole thing.
P4it@reddit
Got your point, but that helps explain how you can spot poor writing, whether it’s from a human or just the result of a weak prompt and poor QC. But I was referring more to the other group you mentioned, the candidates whose resumes seem just as polished as the ones you were used to seeing before AI, but now somehow line up perfectly with the job description.
The whole point of AI-generated resumes is to beat the ATS and make the resume look like an ideal match for the job. So what goes through your mind when you see one of those quality resumes, the ones that “coincidentally” check every single box and don't easily give away the AI-ness?
CuteHoor@reddit
The most "cooked" programmers I know aren't writing cover letters at all, because their experience speaks for itself.
poincares_cook@reddit
And network.
shared_ptr@reddit
Yeah, don’t ‘discard’ but the applications that are AI’d just enter the huge soup of other AI applications which fall to the bottom of the pile.
I don’t have the same experience as you around really good engineers. Most of the top candidates we interview have been in our shoes and use similar parts of the application for signal as we do, so know not to AI generate the parts that are most useful to communicate who you are.
Just in practical terms we can’t possibly interview every AI application we get because there is physically too many, so the human ones get priority.
CallousBastard@reddit
Would be nice if employers put some extra effort into their hiring process, instead of using AI to auto-reject the bulk of applications based on dubious criteria, then subjecting the remaining applicants to pointless leetcode exercises that have zero relevancy to the actual job.
79215185-1feb-44c6@reddit
Ran into a contractor who did this for slack responses. Was also young and not a native speaker. He did not last a month
Isopaha@reddit
AI written cover letters tell me that the applicant struggles to write and summarize information in a clear and concise way. If writing a short letter where you introduce yourself and communicate what piqued your interest in the position and what your strengths are is too big of a task to overcome, then I’m afraid the async communication culture our company has might be too hard for you to succeed in.
I’ve worked with a ton of people who really struggle to write even a few coherent sentences together. The least I can do when hiring new talent is to make sure they actually can communicate through written form.
Relevant_Arachnid464@reddit
Hustling smart beats shot-gunning 300 generic apps. I pick ten roles, tailor my resume with Canva’s ATS-friendly template, log every follow-up in Huntr, then spend the saved hours DM’ing alumni for referrals; that combo landed interviews way faster. Trello boards or Huntr track progress; JobMate quietly auto-fills the grunt-work apps when I’m busy, letting me focus on networking. Smart effort, not brute force, wins.
Not_your_guy_buddy42@reddit
Bah, the best comment from that thread was "I'm gonna stop applying with AI when HR stop using AI to process my resume" or somesuch
thedeuceisloose@reddit
In this thread: people who really need to assess wether the destruction of the junior levels is a good idea.
Seeming consensus in this thread? Perfectly fine
Gerdih@reddit
Oh fuck off. Give them a break, when I was a grad I wrote dozens and dozens of cover letters myself. They never gave me an edge when getting a job.
Reality_Waste@reddit
Yeah, like the effort of writting and email would magically give u a job when nobody reads anything anymore
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
I get his intentions - letting ChatGPT do the majority of work while tweaking it to make it have the "human touch".
But being a new grad, will he be able to tell if the other side will perceive the content as still "AI generated" or written by a human?
I'd think the former.
NON_EXIST_ENT_@reddit
this guy was a bit off but as he is a new grab it feels really toxic to screenshot and dunk on him as a sub? being naive isn't a crime.
No_Negotiation_4705@reddit
I think it is good they are using AI for there task. Doing this they will get to learn how to use AI properly and correctly. As in near future most of the companies will use AI and expect every employee to know how to use it.
wakamamaboi@reddit
dont worry. once you get the job, the company expect you to use their ai
Purple-Cap4457@reddit
So everyone is bullshiting about ai, but only new grads are not supposed to use it. Why would a young man put any effort into process that gives him 0.000% chance of success? "Hard work pays of" is dead philosophy mr boomer. This new generation is literally destined to die of hunger
gHx4@reddit
I handwrite my cover letters and take some time to tailor my resumes to positions. The junior and early intermediate market is very saturated where I live, to the point that response rates are generally lower than 5% unless you have a good referal or have been scouted (such as at job fairs).
Handwriting and taking the time to tailor resumes noticeably improves response rates, but I can understand why some people start taking shortcuts when their effective response rates, even with thorough strategies, are capped below 10%. Some people feel saving 2 hours to shotgun 50 applications at 0.5% response rates each is better than spending them on two applications at 5% response rates. But the places that tolerate shotgunned applications do not tend to be the greatest employers.
I think the industry's saturated enough that many aspiring devs will need to work part or full time in non-tech roles to afford the time commitment of seeking tech roles.
Wonderful_Device312@reddit
Zero effort? Even if they're using AI to help them write emails and cover letters, it's a shit ton of work and emotional toll to jump through the hoops required to apply for jobs now days.
I don't really even blame people that have fully automated it. The whole process is a mess and the way companies treat employees now days is even worse.
I'm on the experienced side of things. I graduated into a market where I got to see the opportunities and decent hiring practices on their way out. I got to see a few people that managed long careers at a company, got treated well, and managed to retire. But if I was graduating today? The only thing I'd be seeing is companies hiring and then firing people a few months later, wages going down, advancement opportunities vanishing, retirement and benefits plans being a myth (pensions were already a myth for me). Why should they treat employers any better than employers treat them?
ZunoJ@reddit
I do all this application letter writing with LLMs as well. Was never a problem so far. I work as a contractor, so I very often have to write to customers or potential customers. The difference is that I have actual experience to show off and they most likely know I have better stuff to do than writing emails. I guess the lesson is that you have to prove yourself without LLMs to earn the right to use them
ThlnBillyBoy@reddit
The job center I was at encouraged using AI just a heads up.
AlertString7493@reddit
AI generated email, portfolio with a todo app, Pokédex and Netflix clone.
Where is my 100k job? Why am I not hired! Market is dead! 😡
Helpful-Desk-8334@reddit
I wrote mine on my own lol, but I don’t really look for CS jobs, mostly physical labor since I spend too much time in front of a computer to begin with. I drive for Amazon and make 40-50k a year just as base pay.
https://github.com/Kquant03
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10aPho9XONm2UPcpUvTxWb8R5pF2mYaVu5JpXpKSRIbE/edit?usp=drivesdk
What do you think?
Stinky_Fly@reddit
Yeh its the applicants fault for using AI, when HR who does the job posting just fills it with every buzzword that is currently famous or going around and sometimes isn't even relevant to the role, no one has a problem with that.
SableSnail@reddit
I mean if I were applying right now as a fresh grad I’d consider it.
When I had to do that a decade ago I must have sent over a hundred applications and wasted so much time on cover statements and uploading things to their websites.
In the end I just had a cover statement template and copy and pasted the company names in which is considerably worse than what ChatGPT would do.
Nowadays that people are using AI to apply for jobs and more companies are doing dodgy stuff like ‘ghost jobs’ it must be even harder.
thepurpleproject@reddit
Indeed have a custom instruction on ChatGPT to only correct some mistakes and no rewrite and changing words and some other things. Now it works pretty good - otherwise it would write those Slack messages in such a gentleman tone. But it’s good for people having a hard time with natural language.
Abyss_Kraken@reddit
That will get them the job? Putting a bit of effort into an already broken application system??
Main-Eagle-26@reddit
I'm seeing a lot of the folks who whine here on Reddit:
- Don't practice whiteboarding and instead complain about how much they dislike it.
- Expect to get an interview for every application.
- Do zero networking.
Simply put, a lot of folks aren't treating finding a job like a job. It's hard. It's hard af and requires a ton of work to apply, do interview prep (DO SOME EVERY DAY).
You don't need to relax in the evenings or play video games in the evenings. Not until you have a job.
Ozymandias0023@reddit
Looking at this person's grammar, they might be better off letting an LLM do the writing
mxldevs@reddit
You guys are getting interviews?