Clickbait title, but decent journalism.
That flouride quote is from one of the 5,000 rando attendees in one meeting. It was not uttered by who you’re supposed to think said it.
Not that it matters, because it might as well have been said by Oz or RFK Jr or Orange Julius.
“13 interviews with 11 different people for one job at one company and ultimately they went with another candidate”
That about sums up the best case scenario in this market. This report is grim, and doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all the other red flags and warning signs.
I have 20+ years experience in one of the most in demand jobs and in one of the hottest markets, who ticks all the boxes in all the qualifications for each of the hundreds of jobs I have applied for, who lives in one of the top regions for the industry, and (I have to at least acknowledge) whose demographic traits are the very stereotype of privilege… yet even I haven’t gotten so much as a callback in six months.
Economic uncertainty is one reason the job market is dead. The surge of both automated candidate screening bots and in automated job application spam bots creates artificial competition for jobs, compounding the real competition from sustained and accelerating unemployment rates. The widespread availability and use of LLMs has been devastating for resumes, cover letters and portfolios in particular, which are intrinsically conventional and derivative of the job posting to which they are attached, and thus optimal for LLMs to produce.
So on top of the general economic reasons and the supply/demand issues resulting from rapidly accelerating unemployment, LLMs have irrevocably and single-handedly destroyed what was left of traditional job seeking procedure, wisdom, and etiquette.
Every now and then this question comes up. It’s a timeless software engineering conundrum. Kind of like how med students might start to think they have all kinds of diseases and conditions because they’re learning all these symptoms.
Software engineers, especially new ones, tend to be heavily biased toward applying technical solutions to non-technical problems. Most never actually grow out of this.
I’ll advise what I advise every time someone approaches me or one of my peer groups with this very question:
Get yourself a notebook and a pen.
I’m dead serious, not trolling, and not some kind of technophobe zealot.
When it comes down to it, if you let go of what you think you need in a to-do list app, you’ll find that what you actually need is much simpler.
Notebooks are e2e encrypted. Self hosted. Offline. As ephemeral as you like. Indexable for search. Versatile. Take a picture of a page if you really want to. OCR it if you need to.
Pen and paper.
No, you’re not looking to understand. You’re looking to persuade.
“I’m not a [king]. I earned everything I got.”