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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about fake jobs, but as a ML Engineer looking, my experience has been appalling, despite all the AI/ML hype. I'm tempted to write a blog post about it, but the highlights are:

* More than half of recruiters ghosted me at different stages of the process.

* Many companies are unreasonably strict with their requirements, asking for x years of experience in their exact tech stack as a deal breaker.

* Pay is much lower than my current company even for more senior roles.

* Some positions are just ridiculous. One of them asked for a ML Engineer with experience in React to maintain a website. Another was completely unable to answer what their business do or what the responsibilities of the role are.

Overall a far cry of the narrative of ML Engineers fending off recruiters who throw wads of cash trying to recruit them.

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My biggest complaints about trying to find a job today are:

* Recruiters ghosting/not following up.

* Companies post dozens of job openings, I apply, nobody follows up (even with a rejection) but keeps posting new positions (looking at you Aha!)

The pay issue hasn’t come up except twice. One company wanted a senior engineer, but only wanted to pay 60k/year tops and you would be on call.

Another company wanted a “volunteer”.

There are other issues for sure. For some companies I do suspect age discrimination, especially with startups.

The non responses are really demoralizing. I can take a form rejection letter. You can even lie to me and say the position is closed. Just do not leave me hanging with some scrap of hope.

There's a startup in the latest HN "Who's Hiring" that flat-out asked for recent grads (past 2 years) or not-yet grads.

Ageism is probably the last frontier of job discrimination.

You don't want experienced people who won't work loads of pointless overtime for free after all…

Aha! advertises as far as New Zealand and I also never heard back when I applied. The excuse they supply (at least they do that much…) is that they receive too many applications to respond to everyone. But then why advertise all over the world? A scummy tactic when I think about it.

That’s been my experience too, and it sucks. Looking for a job now is hellish compared to 10 years ago and I kind of don’t know what to do about it. I feel like more in-person connections would be useful, but god I don’t want to start going to meetups and networking and informational interviews again.

It's brutal on the hiring side too, FWIW. I'm getting lots of "cover letters" that are written to other orgs, e.g. Hugging Face.

After addressing the companies correctly and compiling latex CV for the specific posting, the smartypants will still find repulsive three months of a gap here and there and few failed trial periods... so here it is - "Dear McCompanyFace, ....".

"Yeah, Karen, I took 3 months, cuz I would like to enjoy life while I can and not have to wait til I'm 90 and frail and dying before I get time to myself. I'm responsible enough with my money I can do so, I see that as a benefit, but you do you. See ya, hope you find a more satisfying job that can see hope and potential in people and liberated desires instead of being chained to that desk and wanting others to suffer just as much as you."

Oh yeah, I hate that. I know a guy who is a network engineer. He got burned out by the workload at his old company, quit, and took 6 months to hike the entire Appalachian Trail because old company wouldn't let him take that long of a break. So after finishing up and taking a maybe two week vacation to recuperate from the hike, he starts applying for jobs again and whaddaya know: "We see here that there's a 7 month gap here, have you been on the market that long [gasp!] or did you have another role after that?"

As an interviewer or hiring manager why wouldn't you ask about it?

When you have 168 resumes to skim through, you can “afford” to just pass on this application and choose some others to interview that would be less offensive to office sensibilities. The impact of accepting so many false negatives is difficult to quantify because you don’t know which ones would have truly been good fit.

I suspect that among the hundreds of discarded resumes for a particular role was a candidate who actually believes in the company, would have been fully engaged with the work, and made a serious positive impact on the company’s success.

Because it’s none of their business. An interview is there to evaluate a candidate’s suitability for a role, not to dig into their personal life. What they did at work is relevant, what they did when not working is private. You wouldn’t ask what someone did on a Saturday night.

Maybe they were sick, maybe they were pregnant, maybe they were looking after a dying relative, maybe they were backpacking across South America, maybe they were sitting at home watching every episode of Star Trek, what people do in their own time is a private matter.

One has to be at least in their 30s and absorb at least one failure in life to understand this.

That is correct, which is why the hiring atmosphere reeks of ageism. There's a lot of people in this industry that are over 40, healthy, of sound mind, and have a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience that are being overlooked because they're supposedly "not agile enough" or whatever.

I do not understand the point you're trying to make here.

One can do best sending the right signals - custom motivation letter, custom CV, but some interns or overzealous puritans will dig out other non-negotiable red flags. Thus, the tiny probabilities of success make it not worth to address the CV and letter correctly.

Translation: It's not worth it to write a cover letter or optimize your resumé for a particular job, because you won't make it through the screening process anyway.

Cover letters are a scourge on society anyway.

> asking for x years of experience in their exact tech stack

That's not new, though - that's been going on as long as I've been in this business (early 90's). Most people suspect it's an end-run around H1B requirements: they already have a candidate in mind they want to hire, but they have to demonstrate to the government that they "can't find" a U.S. citizen who has the skillset they need.

Welcome to the real world

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