The job market is broken. Half these companies flex their own egos in the interviews/hiring, make you jump through so many hoops with ridiculous tests detached from the reality of your day to day work. Then if you actually pass and start the job, the standard and quality of work is mediocre at best and you realise what a shit show it actually is.
There's no real job market left, its become so distorted from financial engineering that its basically all collapsing without anyone seeing the objective reality until its too late.
> Then if you actually pass and start the job, the standard and quality of work is mediocre at best and you realize what a shit show it actually is.
This is what happens when costs exceed pay, and there being no choices in a non-market. The most competent have options and will withdraw when costs exceed pay. They value their minds and sanity more than the work which isn't available.
This is why within two years of adverse disruption in industry most workers gets severe brain drain. You normally have intelligent and competent people on a team bringing everyone around them up, but when they leave, you basically get what you see with government work where it gravitates to negative production value because anyone working too much is making everyone else look bad.
A lot of this was predicted back in the 1930s by economists.
i would not be surprised if that was the case for a lot of them
That’s how it was with my current company. The description from the recruiter had me questioning if I even wanted to talk to this company because they wanted me 2 to 3 days-per-week in an office 3 hours away.
I spoke to the SVP of engineering and it was immediately clear that we got along really well and had similar values and priorities. He told me that they would knock the in-office requirement down to once per week because I seemed like such a good fit. They moved from a definite-no to a maybe.
I spoke to a lead engineer and he was one of the smartest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. He really impressed me with his answers to my questions. I spoke to the senior director of engineering and once again, really good connection. Impressive guy who cared about the same things that I do. They moved from a maybe to kinda-exciting.
I spoke to the CEO, and I have to be honest; I’ve had some bad run-ins with executives. I find a lot of them to be terrifyingly clueless. This guy really got it, though. I think he understands exactly how to make this company successful. They had officially become exciting.
They made a great offer that was an upgrade on both title and pay, thus becaming the most exciting out of the bunch.
After visiting the office twice they told me that my commute was insane, and I should only come in once per month. With that, my only real concern with the company basically became moot.
I’m building some really exciting stuff and the entire company is constantly freaking out about my work. I love what I’m doing. I can’t imagine any of the other companies would have been this much fun.
And to think, when the recruiter told me about them, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to talk to them!
Keep an open mind and get to know the company before you decide who is or isn’t exciting.
For C, I figure by the time you've written 50 proper and sincere cover letters you can do them in under an hour. What could you be doing that takes a very long time and still counts as a cover letter?
Absolutely NOT my experience!!! In my case, being able to put "sideprojects" on the tabe, which were somehow adjacent to the role, it always made huge plus.
Currently I'm interviewing for a role for which they rejected a second interview after the first one, when i showed them something i've developed during my recent sabbatical - instead they asked just for completing a 2-slide-ppt and will hire me without having ever met (the corp office is 3 miles away from me)
It's something that can help you get a job, but it's not "how do I get better at writing a resume?"
There's unlimited time you can put into side projects. But that's very different from figuring out what you did wrong when applying and trying to fix it.
And the time you put into side projects isn't based on how many job applications you're filling out.
Of course when the market gets rough, now they want both.
With C, I think it always helps to demonstrate some knowledge of what the company gets up to so if your application does get a second glance then it seems like you actually care about the company, and that does take time.
If a resume can't convince them to hire you, what made you think a cover letter can? Also, no recruiter spends over a few seconds glancing at your resume? So, throw another doc at them?
Quite a lot of professional networks died in the great layoffs due to AI. Right now about 70% of my professional network is still out of work, and many of them start at a decade of experience in principal engineer/SRE/SA roles. There's a 1200:1 ratio for applications to cold call interviews, and ghost jobs have made finding legitimate roles to apply to impossible (above the shannon limit for noisy channels).
When there is no work in a specialized area, you go where the work is to put food on the table whatever work that may be. There isn't a lot of work elsewhere either, and many places discriminate against those who are overqualified to the point where they aren't really hiring those people despite them being more productive than some of the younger people they hire instead.
On the bright side, you have some fast food positions making more than some of the IT jobs available in this area (MSP) right now. CCNA cert with experience seem to be running about 42-50k now depending on the area you are working in.There's also been ~25% inflation in aggregate over the last 5 years so your effectively making 31.5-37k gross in purchasing power today at those rates. Computer Science degrees have one of the highest unemployment, and underemployment of most degrees except aerospace engineering.
This is just a preview of what is happening to all white-collar work. AI makes the environment outdated before you can do anything, and thinking its just the same environment as 10-20 years ago is a mistake.
B) Most jobs don't even respond back. Most that respond back just give a generic rejection.There nothing to reflect on. I have a pretty good resume in my industry but had a much harder time then as a new grad in 2017. The only reflection is that the market right now is rough.
C) cover letters came up in 3 of m roles I got hired for. They all said they never read them. Granted, one was a referral but I'm not very confident cover letters are being read, let alone is the factor determining job prospects.
Oddly, once, I had a series of applications from different people with the exact same cover letter. I had to triple take to realize that I wasn't looking at the same person multiple times.
The other two werre 5-6 stages of interviews, so the resume was the screen while the cultural parts of the interview werre built into all the people I had to talk to. I even distinctly remember the last part of one interview was the a director who came in, and as a twist, he asked no questions. It was all about me asking about him, the project the company, etc.
I'm sure by the end they had a good feel of who I was and if I'd mesh, so there wasn't a need to read what I wrote. It's interesting, but exhausting. I would much prefer a 2-3 stage process and crafting a proper cover letter if I had the choice.
If 2025, would have been my own graduation year, I would have had a bad taste in my mouth believing that LLMs can do everything I spend 4 years in college for. Not knowing that writing code is only a small part of the job (as I lack the experience).
Even those students are sfruggling: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-degrees-job-berkeley-pr...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2025/01/15/when-h...
I do think the market will eventually bounce back. But it's a bloodbath out there right now.
When I was looking for a job out of college in 1986, I hated not hearing from companies. That I was the only one of three staff who thought follow-up was important still bothers me to this day.
The market today is completely different, in the worst way possible.
stevage•7mo ago
I remember when I applied for my first professional job in 2004. I didn't even want the job, I applied out of obligation to get unemployment benefits for another two weeks. So I applied to a senior engineering role, as a grad, and somehow was given an interview. I didn't get the role, but they called me back to say someone else more junior had just quit and offered me her position.
Much easier times for new grads.
Side note: one of my colleagues there had a new baby. This week I learnt that baby has just had a baby.
actsasbuffoon•7mo ago